OCEAN, THE UNIVERSAL HIGHWAY 199 



country was; indeed, it is highly probable that no 

 amount of painstaking exploration would now discover 

 it, for the unstable earth may have long ago so changed 

 her contour that its place knows it no more. It must 

 be sufficient to say that it was either an island or 

 part of a continent washed by the sea, whose waves 

 constituted the terrific boundary between it and the 

 unknown beyond. It has long been the fashion, or 

 custom, to credit the Phoenicians, those hook-nosed 

 Philistines of the farthest Mediterranean, with being 

 the pioneers of seafaring, but that belief, like so 

 many others we hold, may only be based upon the 

 fact that our knowledge doesn't go any farther 

 back. Really, when you come to think of it, there 

 does not seem to be any reason why the ancient 

 Egyptians, whose recorded history ante-dates that of 

 the Phoenicians by a few thousand years, should not 

 have been navigators, especially when one recognizes 

 the intimate likeness between their works and phy- 

 sical characteristics to those of the aborigines of the 

 American continent. Or, to go even farther back 

 into the dim twilight of time, what about the Chinese ? 

 I hold in my hand a Chinese mariner's compass of 

 quaint design and unknown antiquity, and, reflecting 

 that the date of its invention by these immobile con- 

 servatives defies chronology, I am compelled to admit 

 that it is quite likely that these incomprehensible, 

 yellow people may have been navigating all the seas 

 of all the world long anterior to the rise of that hoary 

 mystery among nations Egypt. 



No, it does not now serve to credit those com- 

 paratively modern people, the Phoenicians, with being 

 the pioneers of seafaring, simply because of their 



