ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 75 
ried on a considerable trade with Britain. Their feet of 220 such vessels was 
overpowered and captured by a Koman fleet of 600 galleys. 
B. C. 54, Julius Cesar collected above 800 ships and landed a large force in 
Britain, subduing a great many kings, four of whom were in Kent. 
B. C. 48, the profusion of luxury introduced into Rome by the conquest of 
enervated kingdoms of Asia, had now made alarming progress. 
B. C. 25, ambassadors are said to have been sent by an Indian prince 
called Porus, from India to Rome, and; according to Florus, also from the 
Scythians, Sarmatians, and even the Seres, to court the friendship of Augus- 
tus, who was then in Spain. Those from India were nearly four years upon 
their journey. Augustus was called the father of the Roman imperial navy, 
of which Ravenna on the Adriatic was the principal eastern station, and 
Misenum in the gulf of Naples, the western. Pliny says, in his reign some 
Roman navigators explored the coast of the North Sea as far as Cimbri (the 
north end of Denmark). At this time the Britons used small vessels of which 
the keel and principal frame was made of light wood, the bottom and sides of 
a kind of basket work made of osiers, and the whole was covered with hides. 
The Arabians, who furnished the greatest and most reliable part of articles 
imported into the Mediterranean, appear to have been the only traders from 
the West, whose voyages in very early days extended to India. Im 1851, I 
met a small native Arabian vessel far from land in the Bay of Bengal, bound 
towards the Spice Islands of the Malay Archipelago—a notable relic of an- 
cient times. People of such commercial and nautical knowledge as the 
South Arabians, could not have experienced the semi-annual changes of the 
monsoon, without early availing themselves of the advantages they offered to 
their navigation. It would by no means be extravagant to suppose that they 
traded to Taprobané (Ceylon), or even to countries and islands far beyond 
it. As early as the days of Solomon (B. C. 1000), no such spices were known 
in Jerusalem as those presented by the Queen of Sheba; and later we learn in 
the days Ptolemy Philadelphus, B. C. 280, the Sabzeans, whose long expe- 
rience in the nature of the periodical winds called monsoons, of the seas and 
various ports of India, undersold the merchants of Egypt, who coasted 
the whole way to India in their own small vessels. Ptolemy sent Dionysius 
to India as Ambassador, with a view of establishing direct intercourse with 
that country. 
In the ‘‘Periplus* of the Erythrwan Sea,’’ oriental vessels then in use 
are thus described: madaratc, small vessels joined together by sewing; trap- 
paga and kotymba, long vessels used by fishermen and pilots; sangara, pirat- 
ical crafts like double canoes; and kolandiophonta, which vessels were of the 
largest size, with capacity to perform distant voyages, and were in the trade 
of Arabia, with the river Ganges, and countries beyond it. This work 
which, for approved accuracy of geographical, nautical and commercial in- 
formation, stands unrivalled by any production of antiquity, comprehends 
under the name of the Erythrean Sea, all the ocean between Africa and 
*The PERIPLUS (circumnavigation) was written about the first century of the Christian 
era by an Egyptian Greek, an intelligent merchant and practical navigator upon the Eryth- 
rean Sea. 
