THE MEDITERRANEAN LOOKS WEST 83 



entire length of northern Europe. As he went, being somewhat 

 of an astronomer, he took observations of the tides and cur- 

 rents, and is said by the historian Eratosthenes, who wrote 

 shortly after the voyage, to have been the first man to note the 

 compass variation between the true and magnetic north pole. 



Pytheus was a rare combination of intellectual and bold 

 adventurer. After visiting the Cornish tin mines he went on 

 north of the Scilly Isles to Scotland and the Orkneys, and 

 several days' voyage beyond to an island he called Thule, 

 which very likely was Iceland. In this area he met foul weather 

 that so impressed his Mediterranean senses that he said air, 

 ice, and water formed a kind of turgid mixture he called the 

 ''sea-lung." He noted in his log that hereabouts the midsum- 

 mer night was only two hours long; he must have been off 

 Norway. Coming south he stopped to examine the Frisian 

 coast, where his countrymen were used to pick up amber for 

 the southern trade. On this great journey Pytheus circumnavi- 

 gated Britain, and three centuries before Christ and seventeen 

 before Columbus covered a distance of some seven thousand 

 miles. 



Within a hundred and fifty years after this exploration, 

 Carthage, after a series of disastrous wars, fell before the 

 Roman power and thus ended the Phoenician world of adven- 

 turous seapower that first opened up the prolonged but inter- 

 mittent exploration of the Atlantic waters. Roman power, 

 essentially land power, expanded east and north from the 

 Italian peninsula. All the secret knowledge of closely held 

 trade routes and northern explorations by sea apparently died 

 with the fall of Carthage, and for a while the Gates of Gibral- 

 tar were closed. 



We can make a kind of picture of just what was lost to the 

 world in Roman times. Though there is no authentic record 

 of the orderly advance of scientific inquiry up to the time the 

 Phoenicians pushed westward from the Gates of Gibraltar, 



