In Northern Mists Volume I Part 5

[Sidenote: Importance of Pytheas]

Little as we know of Pytheas himself, he yet appears to us as one of the most capable and undaunted explorers the world has seen. Besides being the first, of whom we have certain record, to sail along the coasts of northern Gaul and Germany, he was the discoverer of Great Britain, of the Scottish isles and Shetland, and last, but not least, of Thule or Norway, as far north as to the Arctic Circle. No other single traveller known to history has made such far-reaching and important discoveries.

But Pytheas was too far in advance of his time; his description of the new lands in the North was so p.r.o.nouncedly antagonistic to current ideas that it won little acceptance throughout the whole succeeding period of antiquity. His younger contemporary, Dicaearchus, doubted him, and Polybius and Strabo, who came two hundred and three hundred years later, endeavoured, as we have seen, to throw suspicion upon Pytheas and to stamp him as an impostor. The two eminent geographers and astronomers, Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, seem to have valued him more according to his deserts. Polybius's desire to lessen the fame of Pytheas may perhaps be explained by the fact that the former, a friend of Scipio, had taken part in many Roman campaigns, and claimed to be more widely travelled than any other geographer. But as his farthest north was the south of Gaul, he did not like the idea that an earlier traveller, who enjoyed great renown, should have penetrated so much farther into regions which were entirely unknown to himself. Men are not always above such littleness.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The World according to Strabo (K. Kretschmer, 1892)]

CHAPTER III

ANTIQUITY, AFTER PYTHEAS

There was a long interval after the time of Pytheas before the world's knowledge of the North was again added to, so far as we can judge from the literature that has come down to us. The mist in which for a moment he showed a ray of light settled down again. That no other known traveller can have penetrated into these northern regions during the next two or three centuries appears from the unwillingness of Polybius and Strabo to believe in Pytheas, and from the fact that Strabo p.r.o.nounces him a liar [i. 63], because "all who have seen Britain and Ierne say nothing about Thule, though they mention other small islands near Britain"; furthermore, he says expressly [vii. 294] that "the region along the ocean beyond Albis [the Elbe] is entirely unknown to us. For neither do we know of any one among the ancients who made this voyage along the coast in the eastern regions to the opening of the Caspian Sea, nor have the Romans ever penetrated into the countries beyond Albis, nor has any one yet traversed them by land." If any other traveller had been currently mentioned in literature it is incredible that the well-read Strabo should not have known it. He therefore ascribed all that he found about these regions to Pytheas.

There are nevertheless indications that the Greeks had commercial relations with the coasts of the Baltic and North Sea, and fresh obscure statements, which may be derived from such a connection, appear later in Pliny, and to some extent also in Mela. It may be supposed that enterprising Greek traders and seamen, enticed by Pytheas's accounts of the amber country, attempted to follow in his track, and succeeded in reaching the land of promise whence this costly commodity came. And if they had once found out the way, they would certainly not have relinquished it except upon compulsion. But it must be remembered that the voyage was long, and that they had first to pa.s.s through the western Mediterranean and the Pillars of Hercules, where the Carthaginians had regained their power and obtained the command of the sea. The overland route was easier and safer; it ran through the country of tribes which in those distant times may have been comparatively peaceful. The trade communication between the Black Sea and the Baltic countries seems, as mentioned above, to have developed early, and it may be thought that the active Greek traders would try it in order to reach a district where so much profit was to be expected; but no certain indication of this communication can be produced from any older author of note after Pytheas's time, so far as we know them, and even so late an author as Ptolemy has little to tell us of the regions east of the Vistula.

[Sidenote: Eratosthenes, c. 200 B.C.]

The founder of scientific geography, Eratosthenes (275-circa 194 B.C.),[73] librarian of the Museum of Alexandria, based what he says of the North chiefly on Pytheas. He divided the surface of the earth into climates (zones) and constructed the first map of the world, whereon an attempt was made to fix the position of the various places by lines of lat.i.tude and meridians. He started with seven known points, along the old meridian of Rhodes. They were: Thule, the Borysthenes, the h.e.l.lespont, Rhodes, Alexandria, Syene, and Meroe. Through these points he laid down lines of lat.i.tude (see the map). He also made an attempt to calculate the circ.u.mference of the globe by measurement, and found it 250,000 stadia (== 25,000 geographical miles), which is 34,000 stadia (== 3400 geographical miles) too much. He placed the island of Thule under the Arctic Circle,[74] far out in the sea to the north of Brettanice. This was to him the uttermost land and the northern limit of the "c.u.mene," which he calculated to be 38,000 stadia (== 3800 geographical miles) broad,[75]

which according to his measurement of the circ.u.mference of the earth is about 54 17', since each of his degrees of lat.i.tude will be about 700 stadia. His "c.u.mene" thus extended from the lat.i.tude of the Cinnamon Coast (Somaliland) and Taprobane (Ceylon), 8800 stadia north of the equator, to the Arctic Circle. South of it was uninhabitable on account of the heat, and north of it all was frozen.

Eratosthenes was especially an advocate of the island-form of the "c.u.mene," and thought that it was entirely surrounded by the ocean, which had been encountered in every quarter where the utmost limits of the world had been reached. By a perversion of the journey of Patrocles to a voyage round India and the east coast of the continent into the Caspian Sea, he again represented the latter as an open bay of the northern ocean, in spite of the fact that Herodotus, and also Aristotle, had a.s.serted that it was closed. The view that the Caspian Sea was a bay remained current until the time of Ptolemy. Eratosthenes also held that the occurrence of tides on all the outer coasts was a proof of the continuity of the ocean. He said that "if the great extent of the Atlantic Ocean did not make it impossible, we should be able to make the voyage from Iberia to India along the same lat.i.tude." This was 1700 years before Columbus.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Reconstruction of Eratosthenes' map of the world (K.

Miller, 1898)]

With the scientific investigator's lack of respect for authorities, he had the audacity to doubt Homer's geographical knowledge, and gave offence to many by saying that people would never discover where the islands of aeolus, Circe, and Calypso, described in the Odyssey, really were, until they had found the tailor who had made the bag of the winds for aeolus.

[Sidenote: Hipparchus, 190-125 B.C.]

Hipparchus (circa 190-125 B.C.) also relies upon Pytheas, and has nothing new to tell us of the northern regions. Against Eratosthenes' proof of the continuity of the ocean, to which allusion has just been made, he objected that the tides are by no means uniform on all coasts, and in support of this a.s.sertion he referred to the Babylonian Seleucus.[76] But it is not clear whether Hipparchus was an opponent of the doctrine of the island-form of the "c.u.mene," as has been generally supposed; probably he merely wished to point out that the evidence adduced by Eratosthenes was insufficient. Hipparchus calculated a continuous table of lat.i.tude, or climate-table, for the various known localities, as far north as Thule. He introduced the division into degrees. It is also probable that he was the first to use a kind of map-projection with the aid of converging meridians, which he drew in straight lines; but as he was more an astronomer than a geographer it is unlikely that he constructed any complete map of the world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Terrestrial globe, according to Crates of Mallus (K.

Kretschmer)]

[Sidenote: Polybius, 204-127 B.C.]

Polybius (circa 204-127 B.C.), as we have seen, p.r.o.nounced against the trustworthiness of Pytheas, and declared that all the country north of Narbo, the Alps, and the Tanais was unknown. Like Herodotus, he left the question open whether there was a continuous ocean on the north side; but he appears to have inclined to the old notion of the "c.u.mene" as circular.

[Sidenote: Crates of Mallus, 150 B.C.]

The Stoic and grammarian Crates of Mallus (about 150 B.C.), who was not a geographer, constructed the first terrestrial globe, in which he made the Atlantic Ocean extend like a belt round the world through both the poles, and with the Stoic's wors.h.i.+p of Homer he thought he could follow in this ocean Odysseus's voyage to the regions of the Laestrygons' long day and the Cimmerians' polar night. Since the school of the Stoics considered it necessary that there should be ocean in the torrid zone, so that the sun might easily keep up its warmth by the aid of vapours from the sea--for warmth was supported by moisture--Crates placed a belt of ocean round the earth between the tropics, which formed the limits of the sun's path.

These two belts of water left four ma.s.ses of land of which only one was known to men.

[Sidenote: Posidonius, 135-51 B.C.]

The physical geographer Posidonius of Apamea in Syria (135-51 B.C.), who lived for a long time at Rhodes, took the Rhipaean Mountains for the Alps, and speaks of the Hyperboreans to the north of them. He thought that the Ocean surrounded the "c.u.mene" continuously:

"for its waves were not confined by any fetters of land, but it stretched to infinity and nothing made its waters turbid."

A s.h.i.+p sailing with an east wind from the Pillars of Hercules must reach India after traversing 70,000 stadia, which he thought was the half-circ.u.mference of the earth along the lat.i.tude of Rhodes. The greatest circ.u.mference he calculated at 180,000 stadia. These erroneous calculations were adopted by Ptolemy, and were afterwards of great significance to Columbus.

He made a journey as far as Gadir in order to see the outer Ocean for himself, to measure the tides and to examine the correctness of the generally accepted idea that the sun, on its setting in the western ocean, gave out a hissing sound like a red-hot body being dipped into water. He rightly connected the tides with the moon, finding that their monthly period corresponded with the full moon; whereas others had thought, for instance, that they were due to changes in the rivers of Gaul.

[Sidenote: Caesar, 55-45 B.C.]

Caesar's Gallic War and his invasion of Britain (55-45 B.C.) contributed fresh information about these portions of Western Europe; but it cannot be seen that they gave anything new about the North. Caesar describes Britain as a triangle. This is undoubtedly the same idea that we find in his contemporary Diodorus Siculus, and is derived from Pytheas. Caesar merely gives different proportions between the sides from those of Diodorus. He puts Hibernia to the west of Britain, not to the north like Strabo, and makes its size about two-thirds of the latter, from which it is separated by a strait of about the same breadth as that between Gaul and Britain.

Between Ireland (Hibernia) and Britain is an island, "Mona" (Anglesey), and scattered about it many other islands. In some of them there was said to be a month of unbroken night at the winter solstice; but of this Caesar was unable to obtain certain information. This must be an echo of the tales about Thule, which he had got from older Greek or Roman authors.

Caesar is a good example of the Romans' views of and sense for geography.

In spite of this military nation having extended their empire to the bounds of the unknown in every direction, they never produced a scientific geographer, nor did they send out anything that we should call a voyage of exploration, as the Phnicians, Carthaginians, and Greeks had done. They were above all a practical people, with more sense for organisation than for research and science, and in addition they lacked commercial interests as compared with those other peoples. But during their long campaigns under the Empire, and by their extensive communications with the most distant regions, they brought together an abundance of geographical information hitherto unknown to the cla.s.sical world. It is natural that it should have been a Greek who, in one of the most important geographical works that have come down to us from ancient times, endeavoured to collect a part of this information, together with the knowledge already acquired by the Greeks, into a systematic statement.

[Sidenote: Strabo, Christian era]

This man was the famous geographer Strabo, a native of Asia Minor (about 63 B.C.-25 A.D.). But unfortunately this critic has nothing to tell us about the North, and in his anxiety to avoid exaggeration he has, like Polybius, been at great pains to discredit Pytheas, of whose statements he will take no account; nor has he made use of the knowledge of the northernmost regions which we see, from Pliny among others, that other Greek authors possessed. He has not even made use of the geographical knowledge which was gained in his own time during the Roman campaign in Northern Germania under Augustus, if indeed he knew of it. To him the Ister (Danube), the mountainous districts of the Hercynian Forest, and the country as far as the Tyregetae formed, roughly, the northern boundary of the known world. He thinks it is only ignorance of the more distant regions that has made people believe the fables "of the Rhipaean Mountains and the Hyperboreans, as well as all that Pytheas of Ma.s.salia has invented about the coast of the ocean, making use of his astronomical and mathematical knowledge as a cloak." "Ierne" (Ireland) was placed by Strabo out in the ocean to the north of Britain. He took it for the most northern land, and thought that its lat.i.tude (which would have to be about 54 N.) formed the boundary of the "c.u.mene."

"For," he says [ii. 115], "living writers tell us of nothing beyond Ierne, which lies near to Britain on the north, and is inhabited by savages who live miserably on account of the cold." He says further [iv. 201] of this island at the end of the world: "of this we have nothing certain to relate, except that its inhabitants are even more savage than the Britons, as they are both cannibals and omnivorous [or gra.s.s-eaters ?], and consider it commendable to devour their deceased parents,[77] as well as openly to have commerce not only with other women, but also with their own mothers and sisters. But this we relate perhaps without sufficient authority; although cannibalism at least is said to be a Scythian custom, and the Celts, the Iberians, and other peoples are reported to have practised it under the stress of a siege."

Strabo evidently attributes to a cold climate a remarkable capacity for brutalising people, and he considers that the reports of the still more distant Thule must be even more uncertain.

The breadth of the "c.u.mene," from north to south, he made only 30,000 stadia, and thought that Eratosthenes, deceived by the fables of Pytheas, had put the limit 8000 stadia (== 11 26') too far north. Of the countries beyond the Albis (Elbe), he says, nothing is known. Nevertheless he mentions the Cimbri as dwelling on a peninsula by the northern ocean; but he has no very clear idea of where this peninsula is.

No one can believe, he thinks [vii. 292], that the reason for their wandering and piratical life was that they were driven out of their peninsula [which must be Jutland] by a great inundation, for they still have the same country as before, and it is ridiculous to suppose that they left it in anger at a natural and constant phenomenon, which occurs twice daily [i.e., the tides], etc. But it appears from Strabo's statements that there had been many reports of a great storm-flood in Denmark, which the Cimbri escaped from with difficulty.

Of the customs of these people Strabo relates among other things that they were accompanied on their expeditions by priestesses with gray hair, white clothes, and bare feet. "They went with drawn swords to meet the captives in the camp, crowned them with garlands and led them to a sacrificial vessel of metal, holding twenty amphorae [Roman cubic feet]. Here they had a ladder, upon which one of them mounted and, bent over the vessel, they cut the throat of the prisoner, who was held up. They made auguries from the blood running into the vessel; while others opened the corpse and inspected the entrails, prophesying victory for their army. And in battle they beat skins stretched upon the wicker-work of their chariots, making a hideous noise." This is one of the first descriptions of the customs of the warrior-hordes roving about Europe, who came in contact with the cla.s.sical world from the unknown north, and who in later centuries were to come more frequently. But the description is certainly influenced by Greek ideas.

Strabo thought that besides the world known to the Greeks and Romans, other continents or worlds, where other races of men dwelt, might be discovered.

[Sidenote: Albinova.n.u.s Pedo]

In a work called "Suasoriae" (circa 37 A.D.) of the Spanish-born rhetorician Seneca there are preserved fragments of a poem, written by Albinova.n.u.s Pedo (in the time of Augustus), which described an expedition of Germanicus in the North Sea. It has been thought that this may have been the younger Germanicus's unfortunate campaign in 16 A.D., when he sailed out from the Ems with a fleet of a thousand s.h.i.+ps. This supposition is strengthened by the fact that Tacitus mentions a cavalry leader, Albinova.n.u.s Pedo, under the same commander in 15 A.D., and it is easy to believe that he was the poet.[78] But as this unhappy fleet did not get far from the coast, and the poem describes a voyage into unknown regions, others have thought that it might be an expedition undertaken by Drusus, the elder Germanicus, in some year between 12 and 9 B.C.[79] How this may be is of less importance to us, as the poem does not mention any fresh discoveries. It is interesting because it gives us a picture of the ideas current at that time about the northern limits of the world. Where the fragments commence, the travellers have long ago left daylight and the sun behind them, and, having pa.s.sed beyond the limits of the known world, plunge boldly into the forbidden darkness towards the end of the western world. There they believe that the sea, which beneath its sluggish ("pigris") waves is full of hideous monsters, savage whales ("pistris"), and sea-hounds ("aequoreosque canes" == seals ?), rises and takes hold of the s.h.i.+p--the noise itself increases the horror--and now they think the s.h.i.+ps will stick in the mud, and the fleet will remain there, deserted by the winds[80] of the ocean--now that they themselves will be left there helpless and be torn to pieces by the monsters of the deep. And the man who stands high in the prow strives with his eyes to break through the impenetrable air, but can see nothing, and relieves his oppression in the following words: "Whither are we being carried? The day itself flees from us, and uttermost nature closes in the deserted world with continual darkness. Or are we sailing towards people on the other side, who dwell under another heaven, and towards another unknown world?[81] The G.o.ds call us back and forbid the eyes of mortals to see the boundary of things. Why do we violate strange seas and sacred waters with our oars, disturbing the peaceful habitations of the G.o.ds?"

This last conception is clearly derived from the "Isles of the Blest" of the Greeks (originally of the Phnicians), which were situated in the deep currents of Ocea.n.u.s and are already referred to in Hesiod.

Seneca, on the other hand, says of the outer limits of the world: "Thus is nature, beyond all things is the ocean, beyond the ocean nothing" ("ita est rerum natura, post omnia ocea.n.u.s, post oceanum nihil"), and Pliny speaks of the empty s.p.a.ce ("inane") that puts an end to the voyage beyond the ocean.

[Sidenote: Augustus, 5 A.D.]

In the year 5 A.D. the emperor Augustus, in connection with Tiberius's expedition to the Elbe, sent a Roman fleet from the Rhine along the coast of Germania; it sailed northward by the land of the Cimbri (Jutland), past its northern extremity (the Skaw), probably into the Cattegat, and perhaps to the Danish islands. Augustus himself, in the Ancyra inscription, tells us of the voyage of this fleet, and says that it came "even to the people of the Cimbri, whither before that time no Roman had penetrated either by land or sea,[82] and the Cimbri and the Charydes (Harudes, Horder), and the Semnones, and other Germanic peoples in those districts sent amba.s.sadors to ask for my friends.h.i.+p and that of the Roman people."[83]

Velleius [ii. 106] also gives an account of this voyage, and Pliny [ii.

167] gives the following description of it: "The Northern Ocean has also been in great part traversed; by the orders of the divine Augustus a fleet sailed round Germania to the Cimbrian Cape, and saw therefrom a sea that was immeasurable, or heard that it was so, and came to the Scythian region and to places that were stiff [with cold] from too much moisture. It is therefore very improbable that the seas can run short where there is such superfluity of moisture." Mullenhoff thinks [iv., 1900, p. 45] that on this voyage they saw the Norwegian mountains, the immense "Mons Saevo" (see later under Pliny), rising out of the sea. This is not impossible, but we read nothing about it; nor indeed is it very probable. On the other hand, it is likely that the voyage resulted in fresh knowledge about the North, and that at any rate some of the statements in Mela and Pliny may be derived from this source.

[Sidenote: Mela, c. 43 A.D.]