44ti THE PROGRESS OP MARITIME DISCOVERT. 



extension of a commercial intercourse which reached from 

 Britain to the Indus, and from the Black Sea to the Senegal. 

 They -wove the finest linen, and knew how to dye it with the 

 most splendid purple. They were unsurpassed in the workman- 

 ship of metals, and possessed the secret of manufacturing white 

 and coloured glass, which their caravans and ships exchanged 

 for the produce of the north and of the south. By the invention 

 of the alphabet, which with many other useful sciences and arts, 

 they communicated to the Greeks and other nations with whom 

 they traded, they no less contributed to the progress of mankind 

 than by the humanising influence of commerce. 



Thus when we consider the services which these merchant- 

 princes of antiquity rendered to their contemporaries, wherever 

 their flag was seen or their caravans appeared, the annihilation 

 of the maritime power of Tyre by Alexander (332 B.C.), and the 

 destruction of Carthage by the Eomans (146 b. a), must strike 

 us as events calamitous to the whole human race. Had the 

 Carthaginians, so distinguished by their commercial spirit and 

 ardour for discovery, triumphed over the semi-barbarous Eomans, 

 who, then at least, had not yet learned to imitate the arts of 

 plundered Greece, there is every probability that some Punic 

 Columbus would have discovered America at least a thousand 

 years sooner, and the world at this day be in possession of many 

 secrets still unknown, and destined to contribute to the comforts 

 or enjoyments of our descendants. 



In the times of Homer, when the Indian Ocean and the 

 Atlantic had long been known to the Phoenicians, the geogra- 

 phical knowledge of the Greeks was still circumscribed by the 

 narrow limits of the Eastern Mediterranean and part of the 

 Euxine, and many a century elapsed ere their ships ventured 

 beyond the Straits of Gades. Coitus of Samos (639 b.c.) is said 

 to have been the first seafarer of Hellenic race who sailed forth 

 into the Atlantic, compelled by adverse winds, and was able on 

 his return from his involuntary voyage to tell his astonished 

 countrymen of the wondrous rising and falling of the oceanic 

 tides. It was seventy years later before the Phoceans of Mas- 

 silia, the present Marseilles, ventured to follow the path he 

 had traced out, and to visit the Atlantic port of Tartessus. 



The town of Massilia had the additional honour of reckoning 

 among her sons the great traveller Pytheas, the Marco Polo ot 



