-•» History Prior to the Middle Ages 



and found his way on a trading voyage to tropical West 

 Africa. In the first place, if there be any truth in Hanno's 

 story, he merely started with a small fleet of ships, colonists, 

 soldiers, traders, and women, to revictual as well as to found 

 Carthaginian posts along the north and north-west coasts 

 of Africa.^ From the Morocco coast district round about the 

 town of Al-Arish (the ancient Lixus) Hanno took Moorish 

 interpreters, who of course at that period, one thousand two 

 hundred years before the Arab invasion, would have spoken 

 Berber dialects like those that are still to be heard in Western 

 Morocco. These Berber interpreters might have been able to 

 link on with the less savage Fula and Wolof people about the 

 Lower Senegal and Cape Verde ; and these latter peoples perhaps 

 acted as interpreters during the third and southernmost voyage 

 from Kerne to Sherbro. Such brief glimpses as we get of the 

 West African Negroes in Hanno's narrative show them to have 

 been sufficiently advanced in human development to know the 

 use of fire, since at that period, two thousand five hundred years 

 distant from the present day, they were burning up the dry 

 grass and bush at the end of the rainy season, just as they do 

 at the present time ; and the sheets of flame on the grass plains 

 and the fires that climbed Mount Kakulima filled the Carthaginian 

 explorers with terror. 



Was this first recorded intercourse between the civilised 

 Caucasian and the black savages of Western Africa the 

 commencement of a more or less unrestricted intercourse which 

 has continued down to the present day .'' Did the Carthagin- 

 ians or Phoenicians repeat and extend Hanno's experiments ? 

 And when Rome took the place of Carthage, how far did 



1 Bunbury states that in the extant Greek version Hanno is credited with 

 having conveyed thirty thousand people in a fleet of sixty ships, but this was 

 no dgubt a great exaggeration. 



21 



