r)8 



DISCOVERY 



time like IhkIn i.i |M»;ige to all foreign countries." 

 The early spring season is much less reliable ; heavy 

 gales occur and the adventurer may suffer shipwreck. 

 The worst time of all is the autumn, when the rains 

 begin. Then you must avoid lingering at sea, or you 

 may suffer like St. Paul. The winter was a close 

 time for navigation ; ships were hauled up and the 

 tackle stored by the fire. This seasonal limitation 



A VIEW OF THE COAST : CXIFFS AND SCRUn ON THE 

 WEST SIDE OF CORFU. 



remained a characteristic of navigation in classical 

 times. When Julius Csesar, after the defeat of Pompey, 

 became involved in Egypt in 48 B.C., no news of him 

 was received in Rome throughout the winter. And 

 here a small point may be noticed. Many of the 

 Greek harbours point south and are e.xposed to 

 southerly gales (e.g. the harbour of ancient Samos). 

 Southerly gales, however, are mainly to be feared in 

 the winter, when the ships in ancient times were safely 

 hauled up upon terra firma. Short of beaching his 

 ship for the winter, the skipper of St. Paul's vessel 

 had no choice of remaining in " the Fair Havens." It 

 is an admirable little harbour for a small vessel (as 

 upon one occasion at least a U-boat commander 

 appreciated) when the wind is in another quarter, 

 but its mouth lies open to the prevailing gales of 

 winter. 



Despite the difficulties of earlj' navigation, Greek 

 explorers persevered, and in the Eastern Mediterranean 

 they wrested the monopoly of the carrying trade from 

 the Phoenicians. In the west Carthage proved too 

 strong a rival. Tartessus in Spain was sporadically 

 visited by ^Eginetans, Phoca;ans, and Samians ; but 

 Marseilles remained the isolated western limit of Greek 

 colonisation, and attempts to found intermediate 

 posts were frustrated by the Carthaginian-Etruscan 

 alliance. " The Silent Trade " of the West African 



coast' and i the passage to the Tin Islands remained 

 wholly in Carthaginian hands. The secrets of their 

 charts were jealously guarded by the Semites, and the 

 skippers of other nationalities whom they caught 

 beyond the Straits of Gibraltar were made to walk the 

 plank. 



Apart from the Carthaginians, life upwn the sea was 

 pretty lawless — commerce and piracy went hand in 

 hand. " I am the servant of the lord god of war," 

 sang the adventurer Archilochus in the middle of the 

 seventh century, " and I know the lovely gifts of the 

 Muses. In my spear is kneaded bread, in my spear is 

 wine of Ismarus, and I lie upon my spear as I drink." 

 The merchantmen of a rival state were fair game, and 

 competition was not restricted to peaceful rivalry. 

 The smaller islands were nests of wreckers, and the tale 

 of Wrecking goes back to the legendary times of the 

 return from Troy, when Nauplius lured the Greeks 

 upon the rocks by means of misleading flares. 



The disorder upon the high seas was naturally in- 

 creased by the Persian conquest of the Greeks of Asia 

 in the sixth century. Refugees and desperate exiles 

 were driven to homeless wandering or preferred the 

 freedom of adventure to the burden of a foreign yoke. 

 For this ferment the Western Mediterranean provided 

 to some extent a safety-valve, and Greek adventurers 

 in Carthaginian waters played a role comparable to 

 that of our Elizabethan sailors in the Spanish Main. 

 That stout sea captain, Dionysius the Phocaean, when, 

 thanks to divided leadership and the desertion of 

 traitors, the cause of the Ionian rebels weis irretriev- 

 ably lost at Lade in 494, escaped with the ships under 

 his command, and after a raid upon Phoenician shipping 

 in the Levant, established himself in Sicilian waters as 

 a patriotic pirate, plundering Carthaginians and 

 Etruscans, but not his own countrymen. 



The Mediterranean, indeed, with its numerous 

 islands, has always been a prey to piracy. \\liate\'er 

 the political shortcomings of Athenian imperialism, 

 the Athenian Empire conferred no small material benefit 

 upon Greek commerce as a whole by effectively policing 

 the seas and suppressing, as at Scjtos in 474, the pirate 

 strongholds. For up to the nineteenth century there 

 have been but two periods when the sea routes of the 



• Herodotus (iv. 196) describes, but from hearsay only, how 

 the Carthaginian merchants laid their goods upon the beach 

 and rc-cmbarked after making a smoke signal. The natives 

 then laid gold beside the goods and retired. If the Carthaginians 

 did not think it sufficient, they returned again to their ships 

 and remained at anchor while the natives added to the gold. 

 When a fair price was reached the Carthaginians look the gold, 

 left the goods, and sailed away. This method of silent trading 

 finds analogies to-day ; see. for instance, the account of the barter 

 between the Hawai-u and Kuku-kuku peoples in the Official 

 Report for Papua, 1907 (Report of H. L. Grifhn. R.M. Gulf 

 Division). 



