446 THE PROGRESS OF MARITIME DISCOVERY. 
extension of a commercial intercourse which reached from 
Britain to the Indus, and from the Black Sea to the Senegal. 
They wove the finest linen, and knew how to dye it with the 
most splendid purple. They were unsurpassed in the workman- 
ship of metals, and possessed the secret of manufacturing white 
and coloured glass, which their caravans and ships exchanged 
for the produce of the north and of the south. By the invention 
of the alphabet, which with many other useful sciences and arts, 
they communicated to the Greeks and other nations with whom 
they traded, they no less contributed to the progress of mankind 
than by the humanising influence of commerce. 
Thus when we consider the services which these merchant- 
princes of antiquity rendered to their contemporaries, wherever 
their flag was seen or their caravans appeared, the annihilation 
of the maritime power of Tyre by Alexander (332 B.c.), and the 
destruction of Carthage by the Romans (146 B.c.), must strike 
us as events calamitous to the whole human race. Had the 
Carthaginians, so distinguished by their commercial spirit and 
ardour for discovery, triuraphed over the semi-barbarous Romans, 
who, then at least, had not yet learned to imitate the arts of 
plundered Greece, there is every probability that some Punic 
Columbus would have discovered America at least a thousand 
years sooner, and the world at this day be in possession of many 
secrets still unknown, and destined to contribute to the comforts 
or enjoyments of our descendants. 
In the times of Homer, when the Indian Ocean and the 
Atlantic had long been known to the Pheenicians, the geogra- 
phical knowledge of the Greeks was still circumscribed by the 
narrow limits of the Eastern Mediterranean and part of the 
Euxine, and many a century elapsed ere their ships ventured 
beyond the Straits of Gades. Colaeus of Samos (639 B.c.) is said 
to have been the first seafarer of Hellenic race who sailed forth 
into the Atlantic, compelled by adverse winds, and was able on 
his return from his involuntary voyage to tell his astonished 
countrymen of the wondrous rising and falling of the oceanic 
tides. It was seventy years later before the Phoceans of Mas- 
silia, the present Marseilles, ventured to follow the path he 
had traced out, and to visit the Atlantic port of Tartessus. 
The town of Massilia had the additional honour of reckoning 
among her sons the great traveller Pytheas, the Marco Polo of 
