208 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



Egyptians sailed with deliberate intention eastward 

 ever eastward. Their undoubted astronomical know- 

 ledge would enable them to direct their course by the 

 heavenly bodies, albeit without the compass it would 

 be very roughly made. And as their way would be 

 beset by islands after passing Hindostan, which they 

 probably would do without touching these, they would, 

 after crossing the great stretch of the Indian Ocean, 

 make what we should call a coasting voyage of it for 

 nearly three thousand miles before emerging upon the 

 vast open Pacific, with its stretch of seven thousand 

 miles, to the shores of the great American continent. 

 That part of their voyage confronts us with the pro- 

 foundest mystery of all; but we know it was made, 

 and must be content with that knowledge. 



Such stupendous journeys for these ancient 

 mariners must, however, have been the great ex- 

 ception to the rule of coasting necessarily followed 

 by early navigators, and nothing can well be more 

 certain than that for many centuries after the first 

 discovery of the possibility of using the ocean as a 

 toll-free road it remained in all its wider breadths 

 in utter solitude, as far as man was concerned. It was 

 in no sense a universal highway, and, indeed, even for 

 the timid coastal navigation that was carried on, only 

 men of the highest courage and enterprise, as well as 

 skill and adaptability to entirely new sets of conditions, 

 were available. Such men were, pre-eminently, to be 

 found among the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon, who 

 probably .obtained their seafaring bent from the 

 Egyptians; but whereas the latter did their marine 

 business along the shores of the Ked Sea, and crept 

 down the African coast probably as far south as Natal, 



