In Northern Mists Volume I Part 4

If we now sum up what is known of Pytheas's voyage to the North, we shall find that it all hangs well together: he first came to the north of Scotland, where the longest day was of eighteen hours, thence to Shetland with a longest day of nineteen hours, and then to a land beyond all, Thule, where the longest day was in one place twenty-one hours and in another twenty-two, and which extended northwards as far as the midnight sun and the Arctic Circle (at that time in 66 15' N. lat.). There is nothing intrinsically impossible in the supposition that this remarkable explorer, who besides being an eminent astronomer must have been a capable seaman, had heard in the north of Scotland of an inhabited country still farther to the north, and then wished to visit this also. We must remember how, as an astronomer, he was specially interested in determining the extent of the "c.u.mene" on the north, and in seeing with his own eyes the remarkable phenomena of northern lat.i.tudes, in particular the midnight sun. It is not surprising that he was prepared to risk much to attain this end; and he had already shown by his voyage to the northernmost point of Britain that he was an explorer of more than ordinary boldness, and equal to the task.

Nevertheless it has seemed incredible to many--not only in antiquity, but in our own time as well--that Pytheas should have penetrated not only so far into the unknown as to the islands north of Scotland, but that he should have ventured yet farther into the absolutely unexplored Northern Ocean, and found an extreme country beyond this. He would thus have pushed back the limit of the learned world's knowledge from the south coast of Britain to the Arctic Circle, or about sixteen degrees farther north. As a feat of such daring and endurance has appeared superhuman, a great deal of ingenuity has been employed, especially by Mullenhoff [1870, i., pp. 392 f.], to prove that Thule was Shetland, that Pytheas himself did not get farther than the Orkneys or the north of Scotland, and that he heard from the natives of the country still farther north, which he never saw. But in order to do this almost all the statements that have been preserved on this part of Pytheas's voyage must be arbitrarily distorted; and to alter or explain away one's authorities so as to make them fit a preconceived opinion is an unfortunate proceeding. Unless, like Polybius and Strabo, we are willing to declare the whole to be a freely imaginative work, which however is remarkably consistent, we must try to draw our conclusions from the statements in the authorities as they stand, and in that case it must for the following reasons be regarded as impossible that Thule means Shetland:

[Sidenote: Thule is not Shetland]

(1) It is improbable that (as Mullenhoff a.s.serts) so capable an astronomer as Pytheas should have made a mistake of several hours when he gave the length of the night as two or three hours. There is little intrinsic probability in the conjecture that he had overcast weather all the time he was in the north of Scotland and Orkney, and therefore relied on the approximate statements of the natives, which he did not fully understand, and which when translated into Greek measures of time might produce gross errors. But it is worse when we look at it in connection with Hipparchus's statements from Pytheas, that in Britain the longest day was of eighteen hours, and nineteen hours in a region (i.e., Shetland) farther north, where the sun at the winter solstice stood less than three cubits above the horizon. Unless he has given the latter region a long extension to the north, he must have made several conflicting statements about the same region. It will be seen that this leads us to a violent and arbitrary alteration of the whole system of information, which is otherwise consistent.

(2) The a.s.sertion that Pytheas did not himself say that he had been in the country where the night was two and three hours long, conflicts with the words of Geminus. Cleomedes also tells us that Pytheas is said to have been in Thule.

(3) The definite statements in a majority of the authorities that Thule lay within the Arctic Circle and was the land of the midnight sun, also exclude the Shetland Isles. The astronomer Pytheas cannot have been so far mistaken as to the lat.i.tude of these islands.

(4) That it was six days' sail to Thule from Britain[55] will not suit Shetland, even if we make allowance for the frequently obscure statements as to the day's journeys that are attributed to Pytheas (e.g., by Strabo).

(5) That Strabo in one place [ii. 114] calls Thule "the northernmost of the British Isles" cannot be used, as Mullenhoff uses it, as a proof of its belonging to these islands and having a Celtic population. There is not a word to this effect. To Strabo, who also placed Ierne (Ireland) out in the sea north of Britain, it must have been natural to call all the islands in that part of the world British. Indeed, he says himself in the same breath that Thule, according to Pytheas, lay within the Arctic Circle. How little weight he attached to the expression British is additionally apparent from another pa.s.sage [ii. 75], where he says that "Hipparchus, relying on Pytheas, placed these inhabited regions [Shetland]

farther north than Britain."

(6) Pliny [Nat. Hist. iv. 104] mentions among islands north of Britain as "the greatest of all, 'Berricen,' which is the starting-place for Thule."

Berricen, which in some MSS. is written "Nerigon," has been taken for Mainland of Shetland,[56] while others have seen in the form Nerigon the first appearance in literature of the name of Norway ("Noregr"),[57]

though with doubtful justification, since this name was hardly in existence at that time. But whether the island be Shetland or Norway, this pa.s.sage in Pliny puts Thule outside the Scottish islands. And the reference to that country makes it probable that the statements, in part at any rate, are derived from Pytheas.

(7) Finally, it may perhaps be pointed out that Thule is nowhere referred to as a group of islands; the name rather suggests the idea of a continuous land or a single island. To this it may be objected that neither is Orkan referred to as an archipelago in the oldest authorities; but it is uncertain whether in Pytheas, as in Diodorus, Orkan was not used of the northern point of Brettanice, and only later transferred to the islands lying to the north of this. Thule, on the other hand, always appears as a land far out in the ocean, and it is moreover uncertain whether Pytheas ever expressly described it as an island.

[Sidenote: Thule is not Iceland]

But if none of the statements about Thule answers to Shetland, it becomes a question where we are to look for this country.[58] The Irish monk Dicuil, who wrote about 825 A.D., regarded it as self-evident that Iceland, which had then been discovered by Irish monks, must be Thule, and called it so. After him Adam of Bremen and many others have looked upon Iceland as the Thule of the ancients. The objections to this hypothesis are: first, that Thule was inhabited (cf. Geminus, Strabo, and others, see pp. 54-55), while Iceland probably was not at that time. Even in Dicuil's time only a few monks seem to have lived there (see below on the discovery of Iceland). Nor is it likely that Pytheas should have continued his voyage at haphazard across the ocean, unless he had heard that he would find land in that direction. To this must be added that Iceland lies so far away that the distance of six days' sail will not suit it at all.

Finally, if Pytheas had sailed northward at haphazard from Scotland or from Shetland, the least likely thing to happen was for him to be carried towards Iceland; neither the currents nor the prevailing winds bear in that direction; but, on the other hand, they would carry him towards Norway, and it would be natural for him to make the land there, perhaps just between 63 and 64 N. lat. or thereabouts.

[Sidenote: Thule is Norway]

All the statements about Thule which have been preserved answer to Norway,[59] but to no other country; and even if it may seem a bold idea that there should be communication over the North Sea between the Scottish islands and Norway 300 years before Christ, or 1000 years before the age of the Vikings, we are compelled to accept it, if we are to rely upon our authorities as they stand, without arbitrarily altering them; and Pytheas will then be the first man in history to sail over the North Sea and arrive on our coasts.[60]

That Thule, according to Strabo, lies six days' sail "north of" Brettanice is no objection to its being Norway. "North of" can only mean "farther north than," in the same way that Brittany and places in Britain are described as being so many stadia north of Ma.s.salia. It also looks as though Eratosthenes, according to the lat.i.tudes and distances which he has taken from Pytheas, actually puts Thule to the north-east of Britain (see his map, p. 49), or precisely where Norway lies. Besides, Pytheas had no means of determining his course in overcast weather, or of fixing the longitude, for which reasons he supposed, for instance, that Cabaeum (the extreme point of Brittany) lay farther west than Cape Finisterre.

That Thule is often referred to as an island by later authors is of little weight. In the first place we do not know whether Pytheas himself so described it; according to all the geographical ideas of the ancients about the north a land in the ocean farther north than the British Isles must necessarily have been an island, even if Pytheas did not say so. In the next place, if a traveller sails northwards, as he did, from one island to another, and then steers a course over the sea from Shetland and arrives at a country still farther north, it would be unlikely that he should believe himself back again on the continent. Besides, Pytheas made another voyage eastwards along the north coast of Germany, past the mouth of the Elbe, and then he had the sea always to the north of him in the direction of his Thule. In order to discover that this land was connected with the continent, he would have had to sail right up into the Gulf of Bothnia. It would therefore have been illogical of Pytheas if he had not conceived Thule as a great island, as in fact it was spoken of later. It is mentioned indeed as the greatest of all islands. When the Romans first heard of Sweden or Scandinavia (Skne) in the Baltic, they likewise called it an island, and so it was long thought to be.

According to what has been advanced above we must then believe that Pytheas had already received information in northern Brettanice or in the Scottish islands about Thule or Norway across the sea. But from this it follows that in his time, or more than a thousand years before the beginning of the Viking age, there must have been communication by sea between North Britain and Norway. It may seem that this is putting back the Nors.e.m.e.n's navigation of the high seas to a very remote period; but as we shall see in a later chapter on the voyages of the Nors.e.m.e.n, there are good reasons for thinking that their seafaring is of very ancient date.

Pytheas may have sailed from Shetland with a south-westerly wind and a favourable current towards the north-east, and have arrived off the coast of Norway in the Romsdal or Nordmore district, where the longest day of the year was of twenty-one hours, and where there is a free outlook over the sea to the north, so that the barbarians may well have shown him where the sun went to rest. From here he may then have sailed northwards along the coast of Helgeland, perhaps far enough to enable him to see the midnight sun, somewhere north of Donna or Bodo; this depends upon how early in the summer he reached there. On midsummer night he would have been able to see a little of the midnight sun even at about 65-1/2 N.

lat.; or south of Vega.[61]

It is nowhere expressly stated that Pytheas himself saw the midnight sun; but a pa.s.sage in Pomponius Mela [iii. 6, 57] may perhaps point to this. He says of Thule: "but at the summer solstice there is no night there, since the sun then no longer shows merely a reflection, but also the greater part of itself." It is most reasonable to suppose that this statement is due to actual observation; for if it were only a theoretical conclusion it seems extraordinary that he should not rather mention that the whole of the sun is above the horizon in northern regions, which was clearly enough grasped long before his time (cf. for instance Geminus of Rhodes). Now it may, of course, be thought that such an observation was made by people who came from northernmost Europe later than Pytheas's time and before Mela wrote; but so long as we do not know of any such authority it is doubtless more reasonable to suppose that like so many other pieces of information it is derived from Pytheas.

[Sidenote: The inhabitants of the northern regions]

Strabo has a statement about what Pytheas said of the peoples of the northernmost regions. In a special section wherein he is speaking of Thule, and, as usual, trying to cast suspicion on Pytheas's veracity, he says:

"Yet as far as celestial phenomena and mathematical calculations are concerned, he seems to have handled these subjects fairly well. [Thus he says not inappropriately that] in the regions near the cold zone the finer fruits are lacking and there are few animals, and that the people live on millet [i.e., oats] and other things, especially green vegetables, wild fruits and roots; but among those that have corn and honey they make a drink thereof. But because they have no clear suns.h.i.+ne they thresh the corn in large buildings after the ears have been brought thither; for it becomes spoilt on the open thres.h.i.+ng-floors by reason of the want of suns.h.i.+ne and the heavy showers."

As Diodorus [v. 21] says something similar about the harvest in Britain, it seems possible that Strabo is here thinking rather of what Pytheas had said in a more general way about the peoples near the cold regions, than of his observations on the actual inhabitants of Thule, though, as already remarked, the pa.s.sage occurs in a section devoted to the latter. The mention of honey may strengthen this view; for even though bee-keeping is now practised in Norway as far north as Hedemarken, and also on the west coast, it is doubtful whether such was the case at that time, though it is not impossible. That wild honey is alluded to, or honey imported from abroad, is improbable.

In the MSS. of Solinus there is a statement about the people of Thule which will be referred to later. Even if the pa.s.sage were genuine it could hardly, as some have thought, be derived from Pytheas; in any case it does not agree with what he is said by Strabo to have related of the people of the North. In particular it may be pointed out that while the inhabitants of Thule according to the Solinus MSS. lived princ.i.p.ally as herdsmen, and are not spoken of as agriculturists, Strabo says nothing about cattle, but on the contrary calls them tillers of the soil. In both accounts they also live on herbs and wild fruits; but, in spite of that, these two pa.s.sages cannot be derived from the same description. It is true that Strabo was not acquainted with Pytheas's original work, in which other northern peoples may have been referred to; but this is not very likely.

[Sidenote: Length of the voyage]

Most writers have thought that Pytheas completed his voyage in comparatively few months, and that he was only some few days in Thule; while others have considered that he spent many years over it.[62] There is no cogent reason for a.s.suming this. As regards the first hypothesis, it is by no means impossible that he should have sailed from Spain to Helgeland in Norway and back again in one summer. But as the greater part of the voyage lay through unknown regions, and as he frequently stopped to investigate the country and the people, he cannot have proceeded very rapidly. To this must probably be added that he often had to barter with the natives to obtain the necessary provisions, since he certainly cannot have carried stores for so long a time. It therefore seems doubtful whether he was ready to return the same summer or autumn, and it is more reasonable to suppose that he wintered at some place on the way.

Whether it be Thule or Britain that is referred to in the pa.s.sage quoted above from Strabo, it seems to imply that he was in one of these countries at the harvest, and saw there the gathering in of the corn; but, of course, there is also the possibility that the people may have told him about it (through interpreters): and more than that we can scarcely say.

It might be objected that if Pytheas had spent a winter in Norway it is probable that he would have furnished many details, remarkable at that time, about the northern winter, of which we hear nothing in any of our authors. But it must always be remembered how utterly casual and defective are the quotations from him which have been preserved, and how little we know of what he really related.

[Sidenote: The sea beyond Thule]

Pytheas also furnished information about the sea on the other side of Thule. This may be concluded from the following pa.s.sages in particular:

Strabo says [i. 63]: "Thule, which Pytheas says lies six days' sail north of Brettanice, and is near to the congealed sea (pep????a ?a?atta, i.e., the Polar Sea)."

Pliny [iv. 16 (30)]: "After one day's sail from Thule the frozen sea ('mare concretum') is reached, called by some 'Cronium.'"[63]

Solinus [22, 11]: "Beyond[64] Thule we meet with the sluggish and congealed sea ('pigrum et concretum mare')."

Finally we have a well-known pa.s.sage in Strabo [ii. 104] which says that Pytheas a.s.serted that in addition to having visited the whole of Britain ...

"He had also undertaken investigations concerning Thule and those regions, in which there was no longer any distinction of land or sea or air, but a mixture of the three like sea-lung, in which he says that land and sea and everything floats, and this [i.e., the mixture]

binds all together, and can neither be traversed on foot nor by boat.

The substance resembling lung he has seen himself, as he says; the rest he relates according to what he has heard. This is Pytheas's tale, and he adds that when he returned here, he visited the whole ocean coast of Europe from Gadeira to Tanais."

This much-disputed description of the sea beyond Thule has first pa.s.sed through Polybius, who did not believe in Pytheas and tried to throw ridicule upon him. Whether Polybius obtained it directly, or at second hand through some older writer, we do not know. From him it came down to Strabo, who had as little belief in it, and was, moreover, liable to misunderstand and to be hasty in his quotations. The pa.s.sage is evidently torn from its context and has been much abbreviated in order to accentuate its improbability. It is, therefore, impossible to decide what Pytheas himself said. As it has come down to us the pa.s.sage is extremely obscure, and it does not even appear clearly how much Pytheas a.s.serted that he had himself seen, and how much he had heard; whether he had only heard of the stiffened and congealed sea (the Polar Sea), while he had really seen the condition that he compared to a lung. As to the meaning of this word there have been many and very different guesses. Some have thought that a common jelly-fish may have been called a sea-lung in the Mediterranean countries at that time, in a.n.a.logy to its German designation, "Meerlunge." It may also be thought that Pytheas merely wished to describe a spongy, soft ma.s.s, like an ordinary lung.[65] In both cases the description may mean a gelatinous or pulpy ma.s.s, and what Pytheas himself saw may have been the ice sludge in the sea which is formed over a great extent along the edge of the drift ice, when this has been ground to a pulp by the action of waves. The expression "can neither be traversed on foot nor by boat" is exactly applicable to this ice-sludge. If we add to this the thick fog, which is often found near drift ice, then the description that the air is also involved in the mixture, and that land and sea and everything is merged in it, will appear very graphic. But that Pytheas should have been far enough out in the sea north of Norway to have met with drift ice is scarcely credible.[66] If, on the other hand, he wintered in Norway, he may well have seen something similar on a small scale. Along the Norwegian coast, in the Skagerak, there may be ice and ice-sludge enough in the late winter, and in the fjords as well; but in that case it is probable that he would also have seen solid ice in the fjords, and would have been able to give a clearer description of the whole, which would have left no room for such misunderstandings on the part of Polybius and Strabo. It may also appear unlikely that Pytheas should not have known ice before; he must, one would think, have seen it on pools of water in the winter even in Ma.s.salia, and from the Black Sea ice was, of course, well known to the Greeks. But then it is strange that he should have given such an obscure description of such a condition, and have said that the land was also involved in the mixture; unless we are to regard the whole pa.s.sage as figurative, in which case the word land may be taken as an expression for the solid as opposed to the liquid form (the sea) and the gaseous (the air).

It appears most probable that Pytheas himself never saw the Polar Sea, but heard something about it from the natives,[67] and his description of the outer ocean has then been coloured by older Greek, or even Phnician, ideas.[68] It may suggest the old conception, which we find even in Homer, that at the extreme limits of the world heaven, earth, ocean, and Tartarus meet. To this may possibly have been added Platonic ideas of an amalgamation of the elements, earth, sea, and air; and this may have led to a general supposition that in the outer ocean everything was merged in a primeval chaos which was neither solid, liquid, nor gaseous. It is further legitimate to suppose that Pytheas in the course of his voyage in northern waters may have thought in some way or other that he had found indications of such a state of things as pointed out by Kahler [1903], for example, when he arrived at the flat coasts of Holland and North Germany (die Wattenzone), where the sea at high water pours in over the swampy land through a network of innumerable channels, which might suggest the idea of a lung, and where the peat bogs are sometimes impossible to traverse, being neither land nor sea. If Pytheas said that this was like a lung, he can only have used the word as a figure of speech, for it is incredible that he should have really regarded this as the lung of the sea, whose breathing was the ebb and flood, as he had discovered the connection between the tides and the moon.

Other interpretations are also possible; but as we do not know what Pytheas really said, a true solution of the riddle is unattainable, and it is vain to speculate further upon it. In any case one thing is certain: his description of the outer ocean gave rise to an idea in the minds of others that it was sluggish and stiffened, or congealed, a conception which is current with most later authors who have written on it, far down into the Middle Ages. It is the same idea which we recognise as the congealed ("geliberot") sea in the "Meregarto" and under the name of "Lebermeer" in German mediaeval poetry, "la mar betee" in French, and "la mar betada" in Provencal poetry. Seafaring peoples between the Red and the Yellow Seas have similar tales,[69] but whether they are due to Greek influence or the reverse is not easy to decide.

[Sidenote: The voyage along the coast of Germany]

Since Pytheas, as mentioned above, was probably acquainted with both the east and west coasts of Britain, we must a.s.sume either that on his way back from Norway he sailed southwards along the side which he had not seen on his voyage northwards, or else that he made more than one voyage to Britain. From Strabo (see above, p. 66) we know that Pytheas also a.s.serted that he had visited "the whole ocean coast of Europe from Gadeira to Tanais," and that he had furnished information "about the Ostiaei[70] and the countries beyond the Rhine as far as the Scythians," all of which Strabo looks upon as imaginary. As Thule is never alluded to as lying north of these regions, but always as north of Britain, we cannot believe that he went straight from Norway south or south-eastwards to Jutland or the north coast of Germany. The meaning of Strabo's words must be that he claimed to have sailed along the west and north-west coast of Europe (which looks towards the ocean) as far as the borders of Asia, since Tanais (the Don) was generally used as defining the frontier of the two continents.

We do not know when Pytheas undertook this voyage; but the pa.s.sage quoted from Strabo [ii. 104] points to some time after the journey to Thule.

There is no sufficient reason for believing that it was all accomplished at one time, or even in one year, as some will have it. It is more probable that a discoverer and explorer like Pytheas made several voyages, according as he had opportunity; and the rich commercial city of Ma.s.salia was greatly interested in the communications with the tin and amber countries, and in hearing about them.

[Sidenote: Abalus and Balcia]

On his voyage along the coast beyond the Rhine, Pytheas must have come to an island where there was amber, for according to Pliny [Nat. Hist., x.x.xvii. 2, 11]: "Pytheas relates that the 'Gutones,' a Germanic people, dwelt on a bay of the sea ('aestuarium') called 'Metuonidis,'[71] the extent of which was 6000 stadia. From thence it was one day's sail to the island of 'Abalus.' Here in the spring the waves cast up amber, which is washed out of the congealed sea ['mare concretum,' the Polar Sea]. The natives use it instead of wood for fire, and sell it to the neighbouring Teutons. This was also believed by Timaeus, but he calls the island 'Basilia.'"

It is possible that this island, Abalus, is the same as the amber island mentioned in another pa.s.sage of Pliny [iv. 13, 27], where he says of the Scythian coast that there are reports of "many islands without a name, and Timaeus relates that among them is one off Scythia, a day's sail away, which is called 'Baunonia,' and on which the waves cast up amber in the springtime." In any case they are both mentioned in very similar terms [cf. Hergt, 1893, pp. 31 f.]. In the same place we read that "Xenophon, of Lampsacus [about 100 B.C.], mentions that three days' sail from the Scythian coast there is an island called 'Balcia,' of immense size.

Pythias calls it 'Basilia.'" This conflicts with the pa.s.sage quoted above from Pliny, and here there must be a misunderstanding or confusion of some kind, either on the part of Pliny or of his authority. A possible explanation may be that Pytheas referred to his island of Abalus as a as??e?a ??s??, i.e., an island with a king [cf. Detlefsen, 1904, p. 18].

This would agree with the statement of Diodorus Siculus (1st century B.C.) [v. 23], which he gives without quoting any authority: "Just opposite Scythia, above Galatia [Gaul], an island lies in the ocean called 'Basilia'; upon it amber is cast up by the waves, which is otherwise not found in any place on the earth." It is probable that this is taken from Timaeus and originally derived from Pytheas, and that the island is the same as Abalus. It is to be noticed that in Pytheas's time the name Germania was not yet used; northern Europe, east of the Rhine, was counted as Scythia, whereas the name Germania was well known in the time of Diodorus.

Pytheas may also have heard of, or visited, a country or a large island (Jutland ?), which lay three days' sail from the coast he was sailing along, and he may likewise have referred to it as a king's island (as??e?a). Timaeus, or others, may have taken this for a name, both for Abalus and for this larger and more distant island, which has later been a.s.sumed to be the same as Balcia, a name that may be derived either from Pytheas or from some later writer.

As the Gutones resemble the Gytoni (Goths) of Tacitus, who lived on the Vistula, and as further Basilia and Balcia were the same country, the name of which was connected with that of the Baltic Sea, and as this country was identified with the south of Sweden, it was thought that Pytheas must have been in the amber country on the south coast of the Baltic, and even in Skne. This view may appear to be supported by the fact that Strabo says he lied about the "Ostiaei," who might then be the Esthonians. But as already remarked this word may be an error for "Ostimians"; and Gutones may further be an error for Teutones, since a carelessly written ?e? may easily be read as G?? [cf. Hergt, 1893, p. 33], and immediately afterwards it is stated that the Teutones (not Gutones) lived near Abalus. Whether Pytheas really mentioned "Balcia" or "Baltia" is, as already remarked, extremely doubtful; but even if he did so, and even if it lay in the Baltic, it is not certain that he was there, and he may only have been told about it. We need not therefore believe that he went farther than the coast of the North Sea. "Abalus" may have been Heligoland [cf. Hergt], or perhaps rather one of the islands of Sleswick,[72] where beach-washed amber is common, as along the whole west coast of Jutland. The statement that the natives used amber as fuel is a misunderstanding, which may be due to a discovery of Pytheas that amber was combustible. If he had really sailed past the Skaw and through the Belts into the Baltic, it is unlikely that he should only have mentioned one amber island Abalus, and another immense island farther off. We should expect him to have changed the ideas of his time about these regions to a greater extent than this. It is true that he might have travelled overland to the south coast of the Baltic; but neither is this very probable. It must nevertheless be borne in mind, as will be pointed out later, that until Strabo's time no other voyages in these regions were known in literature, and it is, therefore, possible that much of what we find in Mela and Pliny on the subject was originally derived from Pytheas. If we did not possess this one chance pa.s.sage in Pliny about Abalus and the amber, we should not know that Pytheas had said anything about it. But of how much more are we ignorant for want of similar casual quotations?