THE FIRST MENTION OF THE LOADSTONE IN HISTORY—ITS EARLY NAMES—THE FIRST MENTION OF ITS DIRECTIVE POWER—A POEM UPON THE COMPASS SIX HUNDRED YEARS OLD—FRIAR BACON'S MAGNET—THE LOADSTONE IN ARABIA—AN EYE-WITNESS OF ITS EFFICIENCY IN THE SYRIAN WATERS IN THE YEAR 1240—THE MAGNET IN CHINA—EARLY MENTION OF IT IN CHINESE WORKS—THE VARIATION NOTICED IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY—OTHER DISCOVERIES MADE BY THE CHINESE—MODERN ERRORS—FLAVIO GIOIA—THE ARMS OF AMALFI—ALL RECORDS LOST OF THE FIRST VOYAGE MADE WITH THE COMPASS BY A EUROPEAN SHIP.

We have arrived at a momentous epoch in the history of the sea. It was at this period that the mariner's compass was—we do not say invented—but introduced into European navigation. That this admirable instrument, which, in half a century, changed the face of the earth, by leading to the discovery of America and thus proving the sphericity of the world, should remain unclaimed by its author, and that we are unable to point to him who thus blessed and benefited his race; must always be a subject of regret. So far from being able to name the individual to whom the invention is due, it has long been deemed impossible to fix even upon the nation who first used the needle at sea. We hope, however, by availing ourselves of recent researches made in France, to arrive at a conclusion not only satisfactory, but inevitable. In tracing the history of the compass, we must naturally begin with the magnet.

The ancients were fully acquainted with the loadstone, and with its power of attracting iron, though they were totally ignorant of its polarity. That they were so, is evident from the fact that the classic authors and ancient works upon navigation and kindred subjects do not furnish one word upon the subject. Claudian has left, in one of his idyls, a long description of the stone, and of its peculiar, indeed, magical, affinity for iron. Had he entertained the most distant idea that this stone could communicate to a steel needle the power of indicating the north, it is not to be supposed for an instant that he would have omitted mentioning it. The earliest name of the loadstone was Hercules' Stone, which was soon changed to magnes, from the fact that it was found in abundance in a region called Magnesia, in Lydia. Hence our word magnet. It was not till the fourth century of our era that the quality of repelling as well as of attracting iron seems to have been discovered. Marcellus, the physician of Theodosius the Great, is the first author who mentions this new quality.

The Romans, who acquired a knowledge of the magnet from the Greeks, preserved the name, though several of their authors, and Pliny among them, mention a tradition, that the magnet was so called from a shepherd named Magnes, who was the first to discover a mine of loadstone, by the nails in his shoes clinging to the metal.

The first mention in European history of the polarity of the magnetized needle, and of its importance to mariners, occurs in a satirical French poem written in 1190 by one Guyot de Provins. His object was to level, by implication, an invective against the Court of Rome; and he did it in the following neat manner. The translator has endeavored to preserve the quaint style of the original:

"As for our Father the Pope,
I would he were like the star
Which moves not. Very well see it
The sailors who are on the watch.
By this star they go and come,
And hold their course and their way.
They call it the Polar Star.
It is fixed, very unchangeable:
All the others move,
And alter their places and turn,
But this star moves not.
They make a contrivance which cannot lie,
By the virtue of the magnet.
An ugly and brownish stone,
To which iron spontaneously joins itself,
They have: and they observe the right point,
After they have caused a needle to touch it,
And placed it in a rush:
They put it in the water, without any thing more,
And the rush keeps it on the surface;
Then it turns its point direct
Towards the star with such certainty,
That no man will ever have any doubt of it;
Nor will it ever for any thing go false.
When the sea is dark and hazy,
That they can neither see star nor moon,
Then they place a light by the needle,
And so they have no fear of going wrong:
Towards the star goes the point,
Whereby the mariners have the skill
To keep the right way.
It is an art which cannot fail."

It may be very properly inferred, from the fact that the poet does not merely allude to the compass, but describes it and the polar star at some length, that it was not generally known, and, in fact, had been lately introduced into the Mediterranean. Whence it had been introduced there, we shall learn as we proceed.

The second historical mention of the compass occurs in a description of Palestine by Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, in the year 1218, in which is the following passage:—"The loadstone is found in India, to which, from some hidden cause, iron spontaneously attaches itself. The moment an iron needle is touched by this stone, it at once points towards the North Star, which, though the other stars revolve, is fixed as if it were the axis of the firmament: from whence it has become necessary to those who navigate the seas."

Brunetto Latini, a grammarian of Florence, and preceptor of Dante, settled in Paris about the year 1260, and composed a work entitled the "Treasure," in which he distinctly describes the process and the consequence of magnetizing a needle. He also went to England, and, in a letter of which fragments have been published, writes thus:—"Friar Bacon showed me a magnet, an ugly and black stone, to which iron doth willingly cling: you rub a needle upon it, the which needle, being placed upon a point, remains suspended and turns against the Star, even though the night be stormy and neither star nor moon be seen; and thus the mariner is guided on his way."

The Italian Jesuit Riccioli, in his work upon Geography and Hydrography, states, that before 1270, the French mariners used "a magnetized needle, which they kept floating in a small vessel of water, supported on two tubes, so as not to sink."

All these authors agree in fixing the period at which the use of the needle was popularized in Europe, at the latter part of the twelfth and the commencement of the thirteenth century. Not one of them mentions the inventor by name, or even indicates his nation. This circumstance leads to the conviction that it was unknown to them, and that, consequently, the inventor was not a European. The theory that the Europeans obtained it from the Arabians, and the Arabians from the Chinese, is supported by the following facts:

A manuscript work, written by an Arabian named Bailak, a native of Kibdjak, and entitled "The Merchant's Guide in the Purchase of Stones," thus speaks of the loadstone in the year 1242:—"Among the properties of the magnet, it is to be noticed that the captains who sail in the Syrian waters, when the night is dark, take a vessel of water, upon which they place a needle buried in the pith of a reed, and which thus floats upon the water. Then they take a loadstone as big as the palm of the hand, or even smaller. They hold it near the surface of the water, giving it a rotary motion until the needle turns upon the water: they then withdraw the stone suddenly, when the needle, with its two ends, points to the north and south. I saw this with my own eyes, on my voyage from Tripoli, in Syria, to Alexandria, in the year 640. [640 of the Hegira, 1240 A.D.]

"I heard it said that the captains in the Indian seas substitute for the needle and reed a hollow iron fish, magnetized, so that, when placed in the water, it points to the north with its head and to the south with its tail. The reason that the fish swims, not sinks, is that metallic bodies, even the heaviest, float when hollow, and when they displace a quantity of water greater than their own weight."

It may fairly be inferred, from this passage, that, at the time spoken of, (1240,) the practice was already of long standing in this quarter, and that the needle and its polarity had been long known and employed at sea. That is, the Arabs had become familiar with the loadstone in 1240, while Friar Bacon regarded it, in England, as a huge curiosity in 1260,—twenty years afterwards. The priority of the invention would seem to be thus incontestably proven for the Arabs. But we shall see speedily that it derived its origin from a region situated still farther to the east, and many centuries earlier.

A famous Chinese dictionary, terminated in the year 121 of our era, thus defines the word magnet:—"The name of a stone which gives direction to a needle." This is quoted in numerous modern dictionaries. One published during the Tsin dynasty—that is, between 265 and 419—states that ships guided their course to the south by means of the magnet. The Chinese word for magnet—Tchi nan—signifies, Indicator of the South. It was natural for the Chinese, when they first saw a needle point both north and south, to take the Antarctic pole for the principal point of attraction, for with them the south had always been the first of the cardinal points,—the emperor's throne and all the Government edifices invariably being built to face the south. A Chinese work of authority, composed about the year 1000, contains this passage:—"Fortune-tellers rub the point of a needle with a loadstone to give it the power of indicating the south."

A medical natural history, published in China in 1112, speaks even of the variation of the needle,—a phenomenon first noticed in Europe by Christopher Columbus in 1492:—"When," it says, "a point of iron is touched by a loadstone, it receives the power of indicating the south: still, it declines towards the east, and does not point exactly to the south." This observation, made at the beginning of the twelfth century, was confirmed by magnetic experiments made at Pekin, in 1780, by a Frenchman; only the latter, finding the variation to be from the north, set it down as from 2° to 2° 30' to the west, while the Chinese, persisting in calling it a variation from the south, set it down as being from 2° to 2° 30' to the east.

Thus, the Chinese, who were acquainted with the polarity of a magnetized needle as early as the year 121, and who noticed the variation in 1112, may be safely supposed to have employed it at sea in the long voyages which they made in the seventh and eighth centuries, the route of which has come down to us. Their vessels sailed from Canton, through the Straits of Malacca, to the Malabar coast, to the mouths of the Indus and the Euphrates. It is difficult to believe that, aware of the use to which the needle might be applied, they did not so apply it.

While thus claiming for the Chinese the first knowledge and application of the polarity of the needle, we may say, incidentally, that it is now certain that they made numerous other discoveries of importance long before the Europeans. They knew the attractive power of amber in the first century of our era, and a Chinese author said, in 324, "The magnet attracts iron, and amber attracts mustard-seed." They ascribed the tides to the influence of the moon in the ninth century. Printing was invented in the province of Chin about the year 920, and gunpowder would seem to have been made there long before Berthold Schwartz mixed it in 1330. Still, it is not necessary to resort to the argument of analogy to support the claims of the Chinese to this admirable invention: the direct evidence, as we have rehearsed it, is amply sufficient.

A century ago, Flavio Gioia, a captain or pilot of Amalfi, in the kingdom of Naples, was recognised throughout Europe as the true inventor of the compass. He lived in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and biographers have even fixed the date of the memorable invention at the year 1303. The principal foundation for this assertion was the following line from a poem by Antonio of Bologna, who lived but a short time after Gioia:—

"Prima dedit nautis usam magnetis Amalphis."
Amalfi first gave to sailors the use of the magnet.

The tradition was subsequently confirmed by the statement made by authors of repute, that the city of Amalfi, in order to commemorate an invention of so much importance, assumed a compass for its coat of arms. This was believed till the year 1810, when the coat of arms of Amalfi was found in the library at Naples. It did not answer at all to the description given of it: instead of the eight wings which were said to represent the four cardinal points and their divisions, it had but two, in which no resemblance to a compass could be traced. Later investigations have, as we have said, completely demolished all the arguments by which the compass was maintained to be of European origin and of modern date. The curious reader will find the extracts from Chinese works which substantiate the Chinese claim, in a volume upon the subject published in 1834, at Paris, by M. J. Klaproth, and composed at the request of Baron Humboldt.

In the sketch which we are now about to give of the Portuguese voyages to the African coast, it will be remarked that the compass was already introduced and acclimated. No mention whatever is extant of the first venture made upon the Atlantic under the auspices of this mysterious but unerring guide. Science and history must forever regret that the first European navigator who employed it did not leave a record of the experiment. What would be more interesting to-day than the log of the earliest voyage thus accomplished in European waters? The modern reader would surely give his sympathy, unreservedly, to a narrative in which the navigator should describe his wonder, his terror, his joy, when, throughout the voyage, he saw the tremulous index point invariably north; when, upon the dispersion of the clouds which had concealed the Star from view, it was found precisely where the needle indicated: when, upon its being diverted from the line of direction by some curious and perhaps incredulous experimenter, it slowly but surely returned, remaining fixed and constant through storm and calm, at midnight and at noon. What would be more interesting than the speculations of such a captain upon the cause of the marvellous dispensation? And what more amusing than the commentaries of the forecastle, and the learned explanations of the veteran salts to the raw recruits? But all this absorbing lore has hopelessly disappeared, and the mariner's compass will forever remain mysterious in its principle, mysterious in its origin, mysterious in its history. We shall have occasion to return to the subject from another point of view, when, in describing the Arctic voyages of the present century, we shall find James Clarke Ross standing upon the North Magnetic Pole.