Among the nations of antiquity, navigation, as may well be supposed, was in a very rude and imperfect state. Unacquainted with the mariner's compass, which during the darkest and most tempestuous nights safely leads the modern seaman over the pathless ocean, the sparkling constellations of a serene sky, or the position of the sun, were the only guides of the ancient navigator. He therefore rarely ventured to lose sight of land, but cautiously steering his little bark along the shore, was subject to all the delays and dangers of coast navigation. Even under the mild sky and in the calm waters of the Mediterranean, it was only during the summer months that he dared to leave the port; to brave the fury of the wintry winds was a boldness he never could have thought of. Under such adverse circumstances, it is surely far less astonishing that the geographical knowledge of the ancients was so extremely limited when compared with ours, than that with means so scanty they yet should have known so much of the boundaries of ocean.

But the spirit of commercial enterprise triumphs over every difficulty. Stimulated by the love of gain, and the hope of discovering new sources of wealth, the Phoenicians, the first great maritime nation mentioned in history, were continually enlarging the limits of the known earth, until the fatal moment when the sword of the conqueror destroyed their cities, and extinguished their power for ever.

The first periods of Phoenician greatness are veiled in the mysterious darkness of an unknown past, yet so much is certain, that their date must have been very remote; as, according to the accounts which Herodotus received from the priests, the foundation of Tyre took place thirty centuries before the Christian era.

Long before the expedition of the Argonauts, the Phoenicians had already founded colonies on the Bithynian coast of the Black Sea (Pronectus, Bithynium); and that at a very early time they must have steered through the Straits of Grades into the Atlantic is proved by the fact, that, as far back as the eleventh century before Christ, they founded the towns of Grades and Tartessus on the western coast of Southern Spain. Penetrating farther and farther to the north, they discovered Britain, where they established their chief station on the Scilly Isles, at present so insignificant and obscure, and even visited the barbarous shores of the Baltic in quest of the costly amber. They planted their colonies along the north-west coast of Africa, even beyond the tropic; and, 2000 years before Vasco de Gama, Phoenician mariners are said to have circumnavigated that continent, for Herodotus relates that a Tyrian fleet, fitted out by Necho II., Pharaoh of Egypt (611-595 B.C.), sailed from a port in the Red Sea, doubled the southern promontory of Africa, and, after a voyage of three years, returned through the Straits of Grades to the mouth of the Nile.

Less wonderful, but resting on better historical proof, is the celebrated voyage of discovery to the south which Hanno performed by command of the senate of Carthage, the greatest of all Phoenician colonies, eclipsing even the fame of Tyre itself. Sailing from Cerne, the principal Phoenician settlement on the western coast of Africa, and which was probably situated on the present island of Arguin, he reached, after a navigation of seventeen days, a promontory which he called the West Horn (probably Cape Palmas), and then advanced to another cape, to which he gave the name of South Horn, and which is manifestly Cape de Tres Puntas, only 5° north of the line. During daytime the deepest silence reigned along the newly discovered coast, but after sunset countless fires were seen burning along the banks of the rivers, and the air resounded with music and song, the black natives spending, as they still do now, the hours of the cool night in festive joy. Most likely the Canary Islands were also known to the Phoenicians, as the summit of the Peak of Teneriffe is visible from the heights of Cape Bojador.

The progress of the great mariners of old in the Indian Ocean was no less remarkable than the extension of their Atlantic discoveries. Far beyond Bab-el-Mandeb their fleets sailed to Ophir or Supara, and returned with rich cargoes of gold, silver, sandal-wood, jewels, ivory, apes, and peacocks, to the ports of Elath and Ezion-Geber at the head of the Red Sea. These costly productions of the south were then transported across the Isthmus of Suez to Rhinocolura, the nearest port on the Mediterranean, and thence to Tyre, which ultimately distributed them over the whole of the known world.

The true position of Ophir is an enigma which no learned Œdipus will ever solve. While some authorities place it on the east coast of Africa, others fix its situation somewhere on the west coast of the Indian peninsula; and Humboldt is even of opinion that the name had only a general signification, and that a voyage to Ophir meant nothing more than a commercial expedition to any part of the Indian Ocean, just as at present we speak of a voyage to the Levant or the West Indies.

But whatever Ophir may have been, it is certain that the Phoenicians carried on a considerable trade with the lands and nations beyond the Gates of the Red Sea. Their trade in the direction of the Persian Gulf was no less extensive. Through the Syrian desert, where Palmyra, their chief station or emporium, proudly rose above the surrounding sands, their caravans slowly wandered to the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, to provide Nineveh and Babylon with the costly merchandise of Sidon and Tyre. Following the course of the great Mesopotamian streams, they reached the shores of the Persian Gulf, where they owned the ports of Tylos and Aradus and the rich pearl islands of Bahrein, and, having loaded their empty camels with the produce of Iran and Arabia, returned by the same way to the shores of the Mediterranean. How far their ships may have ventured beyond the mouth of the Persian Gulf is unknown, but the researches of the learned orientalists, Gesenius, Benfey, and Lassen, render it extremely probable, that, taking advantage of the regularly changing monsoons, they sailed through the Straits of Ormus to the coast of Malabar.

The progress of the Phoenician race in the technical arts, as well as in the astronomical and mathematical sciences so highly important for the improvement of their navigation, was no less remarkable for the age in which they lived, than the vast 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 workmanship 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 Romans (146 B.C.), 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 Romans, 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 geographical 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. ColÆus 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 Massilia, 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 of antiquity. This far-wandering philosopher, who lived about 330 years before Christ, had visited all the coasts of Europe, from the mouths of the Tanais or Don to the shores of Ultima Thule, which, according to Leopold von Buch, was not Iceland, nor FeroË, nor Orcadia, but the Norwegian coast. His narrative first made the Greeks acquainted with North-western Europe, and remained for a long time their only geographical guide to those hyperborean lands.

While the horizon of the Greeks was thus considerably expanding towards the regions of the setting sun, the conquests of Alexander opened to them a new world in the distant Orient. Greek navigators now for the first time unfurled their sails on the Indian Ocean. The Macedonian, desirous not only of subduing Asia but of firmly attaching it to the nations of the Mediterranean by the bonds of mutual interest, and hoping by this means to consolidate his vast conquests, sent a fleet under the command of Nearchus, from the mouths of the Indus to the head of the Persian Gulf, to establish if possible a new road for a regular commercial intercourse between India and Mesopotamia. The performance of this voyage was reckoned by the conqueror one of the most glorious events of his reign, but it may serve as a proof of the slowness of ancient navigation, that Nearchus took ten months to perform a journey which one of our steamers might easily accomplish in five days.

After the disruption of the Macedonian empire, the circle of the Greek discoveries in the Indian Ocean was widened by the enterprising spirit of the SeleucidÆ and Ptolemies. Seleucus Nicator is said to have penetrated to the mouths of the Ganges, and the fleets of the Egyptian kings sailed round the peninsula of Hindostan and discovered the coasts of Taprobane or Ceylon, the spicy odours of whose cinnamon-groves are said to be wafted far out to sea, so that—

But now came the time when earth-ruling Rome called the whole civilised world her own, and her victorious eagles expanded their triumphant wings from the Red Sea to the coasts of the Northern Ocean. What discoveries might not have been expected from such a power, if the Romans had possessed but one tithe of the maritime spirit of conquered Carthage? But even this military empire contributed something to the enlargement of maritime knowledge. Under the reign of Augustus a Roman fleet sailed round the promontory of Skagen, discovered about sixteen years after the birth of Christ the Island of Fionia or FÜnen, and is even supposed to have reached the entrance of the Gulf of Finland. In the year 84 A.C. Julius Agricola, the conqueror of Britain, sailed for the first time round Scotland, and discovered the Orcadian Isles.

In Pliny's time the real magnitude of the earth was still so imperfectly known that, according to the calculations of that great though rather over-credulous naturalist, Europe occupied the third part, Asia only the fourth, and Africa about the fifth, of its whole extent.

The geographer Ptolemy, who lived about the middle of the second century, under the reigns of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, describes the limits of the earth as far as they were known in his time. To the west, the coast of Africa had been explored as far as Cape Juby; and the Fortunate Islands or Hesperides, the present Canaries, rose from the ocean as the last lands towards the setting sun.

To the north discovery had reached as far as the Shetland Isles, and the promontory Perispa at the entrance of the Gulf of Finland; while on the east coast of Africa Cape Brava formed the ultimate boundary of the known world. Soon after Ptolemy's time the whole coast of Malacca (Aurea Chersonesus) and the Siamese Sea, as far as the Cape of Cambogia (Notium promontorium), was explored, and the Romans even appear to have had some knowledge of the great islands of the Indian archipelago, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo.

And yet, notwithstanding all this progress towards the East, it may well be asked whether the Phoenicians had not embraced a wider horizon than the Romans in the full zenith of their fortunes. Even though we reject the circumnavigation of Africa under Necho, and the discovery of America by Punic navigators, as not fully proved or fabulous, it is quite certain that they had explored the west coast of Africa to a much greater extent than the Romans, and extremely probable that they knew at least as much of the lands which bound the Indian Ocean. But, as from a narrow-minded mercantile policy they kept many of their discoveries profoundly secret, all knowledge of them perished with their ruin. In ancient times, when the defeat of a people too often led to its complete destruction, or at least to the extinction of its peculiar civilisation, and the difficulties of intercourse rendered the diffusion of knowledge extremely difficult and slow, it not unfrequently happened that useful discoveries were erased from the memory of mankind, a danger which, thanks to the printing-press and the steam-engine, is now no longer to be feared.

Thus a darkening or eclipse of intellectual life took place to a vast extent when the western Roman Empire succumbed to the barbarians of the North, and the bands which for centuries had united the cities of the east and west were violently sundered. Under that fatal blight Civilisation vanished from the lands which had so long been her chosen seat, only to dawn again after a long and obscure night. Commercial intercourse ceased between the sea-ports of the Mediterranean, all communication with distant countries was cut off, and the boundaries of the known earth became more and more narrow, as the ignorance of a barbarous age increased.

It is not before the beginning of the ninth century that we perceive the first glimpses of a better day in the rising fortunes of some Italian sea-ports, where favourable circumstances had given birth to liberal institutions. As early as the year 840 Amalfi possessed a considerable number of trading-vessels, and carried on a lucrative commerce with the Levant. The maritime code of this little republic regulated the commercial transactions of all the Mediterranean sea-ports; as in a later century the law-book of Wisby served as a guide to the merchants of the Baltic. A few years after its submission in 1131 to the arms of King Roger of Sicily, Amalfi was plundered by the Pisanese and almost entirely destroyed. The neglected harbour was gradually choked with sand, and the little town, which now numbers no more than 3000 inhabitants, has nothing to console it for its actual poverty but the remembrance of a glorious past. Along with Amalfi, GaËta, Naples, and Pisa, rose to considerable eminence in commerce, though far from equalling the power and splendour of Genoa and Venice, the great republics of northern Italy.

As far back as the beginning of the sixth century, the city of the lagunes fits out a small fleet to purge the Adriatic of Istrian pirates. By a prudent course of policy she renders herself indispensable to the Byzantine court, and acquires great privileges in Constantinople. It is here she purchases the costly productions of the East, with which during the ninth and tenth centuries, she provides Northern Italy and a great part of Germany. About the beginning of the eleventh century her trade with Egypt and Syria begins to flourish, and soon raises her to the pinnacle of her power and wealth. In the year 1080 she extends her rule over Croatia and Dalmatia, and gains in 1204 considerable advantages by assisting the western crusaders in the conquest of Constantinople. Pera, numerous coast towns from the Hellespont to the Ionian Sea, a great part of the Morea, Corfu, and Candia fall to the winged lion's share, and requite the services of "blind old Dandolo." The silk manufacture is transported, as a valuable fruit of conquest, from the Morea to Venice, and becomes a new source of wealth to the Adriatic Tyre. The Euxine opens her ports to the Venetian seamen, treaties of commerce are concluded with Trebizond and Armenia, and a factory is established at Tana, at the mouth of the Don.

While thus the power of Venice rises more and more in the East, Genoa, which already in the tenth century carried on a flourishing trade, acquires by degrees the supremacy in the Western Mediterranean. The aid afforded by the republic to the Greek emperor Michael PalÆologus contributes largely to the overthrow of the Latin throne of Constantinople, and opens the Bosphorus and the Black Sea to the enterprise of her merchants. The grandeur of Genoa now reaches its height; she holds fortified possession of Pera and Galata, and covers the coasts of the Crimea with her strong-holds and castles.

At a later period the Florentines appear on the scene, and assume the rank formerly held by Pisa in Mediterranean commerce. The acquisition of the sea-port of Leghorn (1421) opens the barriers of the ocean to the birthplace of Dante and Galileo.

After their deliverance from the Moorish yoke in the ninth century, a fresh and vigorous spirit begins also to animate the Catalans. They conclude treaties of commerce with Genoa and Pisa, and towards the end of the thirteenth century the ships of Barcelona are found visiting all the ports of the Mediterranean.

But in spite of the growth of trade and navigation in Italy and Spain, many years had yet to elapse after the fall of the Roman empire ere the gates of the Atlantic were once more opened to the navigators of the Mediterranean. It was not before the middle of the thirteenth century, after Seville and a great part of the Andalusian coast had been wrested from the Moors by Ferdinand of Castile, that the Italian and Catalonian seafarers, encouraged by privileges and remissions of duties, began to visit the port of Cadiz, where they met with merchants from Portugal and Biscay. Soon after, and most probably in consequence of the connexions thus formed, we find Italian ships visiting the ports of England and the Netherlands. About 1316, Genoese vessels began to carry goods to England; and somewhat later the Venetians, whose visits are not mentioned by the chroniclers before 1323.

Thus after a long interruption we see the seamen of the Mediterranean at length resuming the track to the Atlantic ports that had been struck out more than thirty centuries before by their predecessors the Phoenicians. But their voyages to the western ocean took place under circumstances much more favourable than those which had attended the men of Tyre and Carthage in their adventurous expeditions. Not only the better construction of their ships, but still more the use of the mariner's compass, for which Europe is probably indebted to the Arabs, who in their turn owed its knowledge to the Chinese, enabled them to steer more boldly into the open sea, and regardless of the bendings of the coasts to reach their journey's end by a less circuitous route. The period when the magnetic needle was first made use of by the Mediterranean navigators is not exactly known, but so much is certain that it did good service long before the time of Flavio Gioja (1302), to whom its discovery has been erroneously ascribed, though he may have introduced some improvement in the arrangement of the compass. Humboldt tells us in his "Cosmos," that in the satirical poem of Guyot de Provens, "La Bible" (1190), and in the description of Palestine by Jaques de Vitry, bishop of Ptolemais (1204-1215), the sea-compass is mentioned as a well-known instrument. Dante also speaks of the needle which points to the stars (Paradise, xii. 29); and in a nautical work by Raimundus Lullus of Majorca, written in the year 1286, we find another proof of a much earlier knowledge of the compass than before the beginning of the fourteenth century, since its use by the mariners of his time is expressly mentioned by that author.

Confidently following this unerring guide, the Catalonians sailed at an early period to the north coast of Scotland, and even preceded the Portuguese in their discoveries on the west coast of Africa, since Don Jayme Ferrer penetrated to the mouth of the Rio de Ouro as early as August 1346. About the same time the long-forgotten Canary Islands were rediscovered by the Spaniards; and at a later period (1402-1405) conquered and depopulated by some Norman adventurers, the Bethencourts.

While thus the South-European navigators unfurled their sails on the Atlantic, and gave the first impulse to the glorious discoveries that in the following century were destined to open up the ocean, and reveal its hitherto unknown greatness to mankind, the Indian Sea still remained closed to their enterprise; for though the Venetians by this time rivalled, if they did not surpass the ancient maritime greatness of the Tyrians in the Mediterranean, they did not, like them, directly fetch the rich produce of the South in their own ships from the East-African and Indian ports, but received them at second hand from the Arabian masters of Syria and Egypt.

But though no ship of theirs was ever seen in the Indian seas, through them the knowledge of the Arabian discoveries in those parts penetrated to Europe, and widely extended the knowledge of the ocean. For when the Arabs, fired by the prophetic ardour of Mahomet, suddenly emerged from the obscurity of pastoral life, and appeared as conquerors before the astonished world, the trade of the Indian Ocean fell into the hands of these new masters of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, who soon learnt to pursue it with an energy which the Romans and Persians had never known. The town of Bassora was founded by the caliph Omar on the western shore of the great stream formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, and soon emulated Alexandria herself in the greatness of its commerce. From Bassora the Arabs sailed far beyond the Siamese Gulf, which had formerly bounded European navigation. They visited the unknown ports of the Indian archipelago, and established so active a trade with Canton, that the Chinese emperor granted them the use of their own laws in that city.

This progress of the Arabs, and the vast treasures accruing to Venice from the overland Indian trade, could not fail to excite the envy of the other seafaring powers, and to call forth an increasing desire of discovering a new maritime route to the wealth-teeming regions of Southern Asia.

The wonderful narratives of the first travellers who wandered by land to the distant East likewise contributed in no small degree to foment the ardour of discovery. The most celebrated of these geographical pioneers was Marco Polo, a noble Venetian who had resided many years at the court of the Mongol ruler, Kublai Khan, and visited the most remote regions of Asia. He was the first European that ever sailed along the western shores of the Pacific, the first that told his astonished countrymen of the magnificence of Cambalu or Peking, the capital of the great kingdom of Cathay, and of the splendour of Zipanga or Japan situated on the confines of a vast ocean extending to the east. He also made more than one sea-voyage in the Indian Ocean, and to him Europe owed her first knowledge of the Moluccas, the east coast of Africa, and the island of Madagascar.

This greatest of all the mediÆval travellers, who without exaggeration may be said to have enlarged the boundaries of the known earth as much as Alexander the Great, was followed by Oderich of Portenau, who travelled as far as India and China (1320-1330); by Sir John Mandeville, who visited almost all the lands described by Marco Polo; by Schildberger of Munich, who accompanied the barbarous Tamerlane on his locust expeditions; and finally by Clavigo, sent in the year 1403 by the Spanish court on an embassy to Samarcand. The truths which these bold travellers communicated to their countrymen about the riches and the commerce of the nations they had visited, as well as the fables in which their credulity or their extravagant fancy indulged, made an enormous impression on the European mind, and raised to a feverish heat the longing after those sunny lands and isles which imagination adorned with all the charms of an earthly paradise.