THE MEDITERRANEAN LOOKS WEST 75 



with this threat beyond the last charted league was also the 

 promise and excitement of renown and riches. And this is all 

 man needs, who of all animals has been led to the edge of 

 knowledge and looked upon the blank unknown. Pressed by 

 the foreknowledge of death, he measures his ambition by the 

 tick of the clock, and thus, self-driven, pursues plans and itin- 

 eraries forever beyond his reach. 



But contrary to the predictions of doom, the first Mediter- 

 ranean men to stick their high-bridged adventurous noses be- 

 yond the straits at the Pillars of Hercules picked up strange 

 news of the West. The great Ocean River, even at this remove, 

 drifted upon the shores of Spain and Morocco occasional re- 

 minders of unknown lands. Local fishermen on the Atlantic 

 beaches told legends of the Hesperides and the Fortunate 

 Isles. This warm drift upon the reaches beyond Gibraltar, 

 where the rugged green and red and amethyst of the Spanish 

 mountains rise from the sea, haunted the imagination. There 

 is no venture possible to the mind that will ever lack a volun- 

 teer. The West was a magnet even before Homer's day. The 

 Gates of Gibraltar at the same time welcomed the ghosts of 

 the dead and the ships of the living. Nothing could keep the 

 known world from expanding beyond its Mediterranean basin 

 to where the great Atlantic Gyre enlivened and warmed the 

 cold spread of western ocean. New islands and undiscovered 

 river valleys were the goal, for it was from such places the old 

 civilizations had flowered in their time. 



So the western Mediterranean and later the western ocean 

 became the wild west of the classic world, and its story was a 

 composite of fact and fiction like that of our own frontier in 

 North America. We have taken some pains to outline in pre- 

 vious pages the legendary history of the Atlantic, because each 

 year we live the historians are revising their textbooks to make 

 room for legends that have caught up with fact. Troy is a city 

 in history which was once a name in a poem. The stay and 



