148 THE PROGRESS OF MARITIME DISCOVERY. 
title of the maritime spirit of conquered Carthage? But even 
this military empire contributed something to the enlargement 
of maritime knowledge. Under the reign of Augustusa Roman 
fleet sailed round the promontory of Skagen, discovered about 
sixteen years after the birth of Christ the Island of Fionia or 
Funen, and is even supposed to have reached the entrance of the , 
Gulf of Finland. In the year 84 4.c. Julius Agricola, the 
conqueror of Britain, sailed for the first time round Scotland, and 
discovered the Orcadian Isles. 
In Pliny’s time the real magnitude of the earth was still so im- 
perfectly known that, according to the calculations of that great 
though rather over-credulous naturalist, Europe occupied the 
third part, Asia only the fourth, and Africa about the fifth of its 
whole extent. 
The geographer Ptolemy, who lived about the middle of 
the second century, under the reigns of Hadrian and Marcus 
Aurelius, describes the limits of the earth as far as they were 
known in his time. To the west, the coast of Africa had been 
explored as far as Cape Juby; and the Fortunate Islands or Hes- 
perides, the present Canaries, rose from the ocean as the last 
lands towards the setting sun. 
To the north discovery had reached as far as the Shetland 
Isles, and the promontory Perispa at the entrance of the Gulf of 
Finland; while on the east coast of Africa Cape Brava formed 
the ultimate boundary of the known world. Soon after 
Ptolemy’s time the whole coast of Malacca (Aurea Chersonesus) 
and the Siamese Sea, as far as the Cape of Cambogia (Wotiwm 
promontoriun), was explored, and the Romans even appear to 
have had some knowledge of the great islands of the Indian 
archipelago, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo. 
And yet, notwithstanding all this progress towards the East, it 
may well be asked whether the Phcenicians had not embraced a 
wider horizon than the Romans in the full zenith of their fortunes. 
Even though we reject the circumnavigation of Africa under 
Necho, and the discovery of America by Punic navigators, as not 
fully proved or fabulous, it is quite certain that they had explored 
the west coast of Africa to a much greater extent than the Romans, 
and extremely probable that they knew at least as much of the 
lands which bound the Indian Ocean. But, as from a narrow- 
