2 FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY 



Cape of Good Hope, and Magellan, who first tried to sound 

 the Pacific, were early oceanographers ; so were Captain 

 James Cook and Sir J. Clark Ross, who first dredged the 

 Antarctic ; but long before their days the early Phoenician, 

 Carthaginian, and Greek explorers, starting with their home 

 sea, the Mediterranean, brought back the first records of the 

 nearer parts of the Indian Ocean and of the Atlantic outside 

 the Pillars of Hercules. The records of the early voyages of 

 the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, all apparently under- 

 taken with commercial ends in view, have unfortunately 

 not been preserved ; ^ but we know that the Phoenicians 

 reached Britain, and there is reason to believe that the 

 Carthaginians discovered the Sargasso Sea off the west 

 coast of Africa, and that Hanno the Carthaginian, about 

 500 B.C., penetrated as far south as the Gambia. Herodotus 

 states that Necho II, King of Egypt about 600 B.C., sent 

 certain Phoenician sailors to go down the Red Sea and along 

 the east coast of Africa, and that in the third year they 

 came back by the Pillars of Hercules and reached Egypt by 

 the Mediterranean, reporting that as they sailed round 

 Africa, after a time they had the sun on their right hand — that 

 is, to the north — which Herodotus does not believe possible ; 

 but the observation as to the sun is very convincing. It is 

 doubtful whether the circumnavigation was ever repeated 

 until Vasco da Gama, two thousand years later, in the fifteenth 

 century, doubled the Cape of Good Hope from the west. 



It is unnecessary to trace all the stages ^ in the accumula- 

 tion of this earliest knowledge of the sea : they may be 

 illustrated by three examples selected from the writings and 



^ It is thought that Marinus of Tyre, the first really scientific 

 geographer, who lived towards the close of the first century a.d., 

 in the time of Trajan and Hadrian, made use of the store of geographic 

 and hydrographic knowledge accumulated by the Phoenicians in 

 the construction of his improved maps ; and that Ptolemy of Pelusium 

 in turn founded his geographical work upon the maps of Marinus. 



2 A very full account will be foimd in Sir John Miu-ray's *' Sum- 

 mary " in the " Challenger " Reports, which I have used freely. 



