80 THE OCEAN RIVER 



foreign ill luck to the home port in Greenland. As a matter of 

 record, Chatterton in his Sailing Ships and Their History men- 

 tions that ''there are many points of resemblance of the Scan- 

 dinavian ships to certain seagoing Phoenician vessels of 1,000 

 B.C. and there exist Bronze Age rock carvings in Sweden of 

 long boats with figurehead and ramming prow almost identi- 

 cal with East African craft found on Lake Victoria Nyanza." 

 What does all this prove? Certainly no exact relationship 

 among far distant early peoples that can be called final. But 

 beyond any doubt this and much more available evidence 

 shows that there was a widespread diffusion of similar ship- 

 building techniques on a world-wide scale two or three thou- 

 sand years before the Christian era. This we hope will help the 

 modern-minded man of the age of steam and engines to real- 

 ize that speed was never an ancient necessity, that safety was 

 relative and not much considered by the pioneers of the dawn 

 of history, and that means were available for clever and adapt- 

 able adventurers to coast thousands of miles or even perhaps 

 drift across great distances of open sea in craft that remained 

 afloat and carried sufficient supply for long journeys. 



It is possible that Mediterranean man before the dawn of 

 history — let us say the ancestors of the Egyptians — made the 

 long journey downwind, helped by the equatorial current, to 

 far islands in the Atlantic. It is possible, and some think prob- 

 able, that great island civilizations existed where now Atlantic 

 waters cover the leagues between the Azores and Canaries and 

 our American West Indies. As a studious early Portuguese 

 historian, Antonio Galvano, wrote, 'Tt can not be denied, but 

 that there are many countries, islands. Capes, isthmus and 

 points, which now are grown out of knowledge, because the 

 names of them are found in histories. But the age of the world 

 and the force of the waters have wasted and consumed them, 

 and separated one country from another.'' 



So let's start our Atlantic chronicle of actual discovery with 



