Great Explorers before Columbus

 

By John Reade

 

[Published by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec in Transactions, New Series, No. 17 (1883)]

 

A PAPER READ BEFORE

THE

Literary and Historical Society, Quebec,

FEBRUARY 2nd, 1883,

 

I have undertaken to deal very briefly with a single feature of human progress, that which has to do with the growth of man's knowledge of the earth which he inhabits. Our great inter-oceanic highway will hardly have reached completion when the nations will be preparing to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of this continent by Columbus. That great event was so unlooked for, was attended with circumstances so strange and romantic, and was destined to exert so marked an influence on the human race, that it has, to some extent, overshadowed the hardly less praiseworthy explorations of earlier navigators. Even for the honor of that service to mankind which has rendered his name illustrious, there are claimants who preceded him by centuries, while others sought by an eastward, what his studies prompted him to seek by a westward, course. The spread of geographical knowledge was, indeed, more gradual than has been generally supposed and, in order to indicate the steps by which it advanced, it may be well to give a brief sketch of the progress of discovery from the earliest times to the 12th century. I will then consider more at length the voyagers who preceded Columbus in the four centuries of which the last was distinguished by his own great triumph.

 

The earliest description that has come down to us of the distribution of mankind over the face of the earth is that of the 10th chapter of Genesis. It contains, as Professor Rawlinson tells us, “an account of the nations with which the Jews, at the date of its composition, had some acquaintance." Eastward, those nations did not extend beyond the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf; westward, the Adriatic seems to have been their limit; they ranged as far north as a short distance beyond the northern shore of the Euxine, while southward they covered the Peninsula of Arabia and the Nile country to nearly opposite the Strait of Babelmandeb. Compared with the world as it is known to us to-day, that of the writer in Genesis was exceedingly limited. Nevertheless, he indicates the beginnings of that westward movement, which was, ages afterwards, to re-settle this great continent, and the ethnic affinities which he implies correspond with those which modern research has revealed. To what extent the rest of the world was peopled at that time we can only conjecture from what it had come to be at a later period, but that there were other nations besides those mentioned in existence then, it is reasonable to conclude. The record, says Canon Rawlinson, "does not set up to be, and it certainly is not complete. It is a genealogical arrangement of the races best known to Moses and to those for whom he wrote, not a scientific scheme embracing all the tribes and nations existing in the world at the time." We may, therefore, infer, that exploration had already made considerable progress. Among the nations mentioned are some of those which contributed to make up the great Aryan race to which we belong. The migration which was to plant the agents of civilization in India and Iran, and along the shores of the Mediterranean, and thence to the Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, had already begun. It would be out of place in such a paper as this to touch on such a vexed question of ethnology as the limits of the Hamites and the Shemites. The admission, just quoted, of Canon Rawlinson, certainly simplifies the matter, and allows some claims of science without offence to those of Scripture. It would be interesting to inquire from what beginnings and by what processes the human race came to be thus spread over the earth's surface. Where was man's earliest home? Various answers have been given to this question. Some have fixed upon Central Asia, others have raised up from the ocean's depths the buried continent of Lemuria, in the Indian Ocean. In his "Preadamites," Dr. Winchell gives a chart of the progressive dispersion of mankind from this supposed primitive centre. In his “Island Life," Mr. Wallace has set himself strongly in opposition to this theory, though he admits that there is ground for believing that some large islands — as large as Madagascar, perhaps — once existed in the designated locality. More summarily he dismisses the "Atlantis" theory, on which Mr. Ignatius Donnelly has written what is, at least, an entertaining book. We can, even without asking for any modification of the continents as they exist, imagine the fathers of mankind pushing farther east or farther west, as their necessities urged them, first on foot, then on horse-back or in wagons, and finally in the rude boats of primitive construction. Next neighbors, and probably akin by blood, as they were by tongue, to those for whom the record in Grenesis was primarily written, were the foremost of ancient explorers and colonizers. Long before Athens had a name, the Phoenicians were a nation of skilled mechanics, of merchant princes, and had learned to give permanence to their thoughts by writing. Unhappily their literature has perished, and even of their language only a few scattered fragments have survived. Tyre was a strong city in Joshua's time. The cunning work of the Sidonians is frequently referred to by Homer, and in both sacred and profane history and poetry the skill and daring of the early Phœnician navigators are abundantly attested. If we comprise under the same category them and the Carthaginians, the portion of the globe traversed by or known to that hardy and enterprising race was of no small extent, even according to modern ideas. We know that ages before the Christian era they had made their way to Britain and to the Baltic, and that they acted as carriers westward of the fabrics and products of the far East is sufficiently established. Xenophon commends the proficiency to which they had brought the art of shipbuilding, and their orderly arrangement of tackle and cargo. There is reason to believe that the Phoenicians knew more of distant regions than they pretended, having concealed their discoveries lest others should compete with them in trade and rob them of their profits. Even the argument that they were not unaware of the existence of this continent has some support. Dr. Daniel Wilson, in a paper read before the American Association, at Montreal, says that "at periods, probably wide apart, races from the Old World have reached the shores of the American continent and planted there the germs of later tribes," and in his inaugural address to the English Literature Section of the Royal Society of Canada, he says that "there seems nothing improbable in the assumption that the more ancient voyagers from the Mediterranean, who claimed to have circumnavigated Africa and were familiar with the islands of the Atlantic, may have found their way to the great continent which lay beyond." One of the most interesting records of the exploring experiences of ancient navigators is the "Voyage of Hanno," the authenticity of which Heeren sees no good reason why any one should doubt. It is extant in a translation supposed to have been made by some Greek merchant from the original Punic. Hanno's expedition is thought to have taken place about 500 B. C. in the most flourishing days of the Carthaginian Republic. Setting out with 60 ships and 30,000 men and women, after two days' sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules, he came to a place where the city Thymiaterium was founded. Passing-many wondrous scenes and seeing elephants and other wild animals, they came to the river Lixus, on the banks of which a tribe of shepherds fed their flocks, and from them they obtained interpreters. At the mouth of another river they saw crocodiles and hippopotami. At Cerne they were as far from the Straits as the latter were from Carthage. Passing some mountainous regions where fires were continually burning, including the Chariot of the Gods, they reached the Southern Horn, where they fell in with an extraordinary tribe of savage people, all hairy, and whom the interpreters called Gorillas. They succeeded in capturing three of them, but they proved so fierce and dangerous that it was necessary to kill them. They then flayed them and brought their skins to Carthage. At this point, their provisions having failed them, the voyagers were compelled to return. Time will not permit me to say anything of the various comments that have been written on Hanno's narrative. Suffice it to say that, in Heeren's opinion, the Southern Horn was the mouth of the Gambia, and the West Horn, that of the Senegal. The hot region of which Hanno speaks would then be the country which we know as Senegambia. Nor would that be surprising, as Herododus states that the Carthaginians had regular intercourse with the natives of the Gold Coast. Dr. Thiercelin is of opinion that the Boobies of Fernando Po are descendants of the Punic settlers. In the Canary Islands Phoenician remains have been found, and possibly they had also visited Madeira. M. Paul Graffarel thinks that the Cassiterides were not the Scilly Isles, as generally supposed, but the Azores, and he argues the point with considerable research and skill. The claim brought forward on behalf of the Phoenicians of having discovered America has also been ably maintained by the same writer. Even if we set aside this claim, which they never made themselves, and that of their circumnavigation of Africa (which seems to be proved by the very assertion (Herod: IY. 42) which made the ancients discredit it — that of their having the sun on their right hand during a portion of their course,) it must be acknowledged that great Rome's great rivals had a geographical knowledge which was by no means contemptible, even according to our modern ideas. It is a pity that we have not the account of Himilco's explorations of the western Coasts of Europe, though a good deal of it has been preserved in the Ora Maritima of Festus Avienus.

 

The progress of archeologic and philologic research is every day revealing new facts as to hitherto undreamed of relations between ancient peoples widely severed. Chinese porcelain has been found in Egyptian tombs. Professor Sayce has shown that the culture of the Babylonians, including the art of writing, had been communicated to the Hittites, and by them to the people of Asia Minor long before the introduction there of the Phœnician or Greek alphabet. The still more extraordinary discovery of a connection between the most ancient literature of China and that of the Turanian founders of Babylon has been made quite recently. For nearly 3,000 years Chinese scholars had tried in vain to solve the problem of the origin and authorship of the Yih King, but it was not until the Akkadian Syllabaries, brought from Babylonia by the late George Smyth, had been thoroughly studied by Western scholars that the secret was revealed and the affinity between the written characters of Babylon and China was made clear. Thus also is a civilization accounted for which has for milleniums been a puzzle even to those who possessed it and which was already in a stage of considerable advancement when their far-off forefathers first set foot in China. (London Quarterly, July, 1882). This is only one of the wondrous conquests which philology has made, when wielded by men of patience and insight.

 

The progress of navigation among the Greeks is fairly indicated in their history and traditions. The story of the Argonauts is a romancified narrative of the adventures of men who were pirates rather than colonizers or traders. Coming down to Homer, the question arises whether he tells us all he knew of the world or has disguised his knowledge for poetic purposes. Professor Virchow, following Dr. Schliernann, thinks it impossible for the Iliad to have been written by a man who had not been in the country which it describes. Mr. Gladstone divides the region which Homer mentions into countries apprehended by Phoenician report and countries known by experience. He also classes the Homeric geography as inner — confined to the Greek Peninsula and Islands — and outer — the wonderland bounded by the river Okeanos, with its eternal flux and reflux around the abode of man. From the days of Homer to those of Herodotus the Greeks had greatly extended their range both of knowledge and influence. They had pushed their colonial enterprise to the mouth of the Don on the shores of the Palus Mœotis and westward to the Golfe du Lion, while Sardinia, Sicily, Italy and Africa had received the impress of their civilization The young man who, in the middle of the 5th Century, unrolled the volume of his travels at the great Olympic festival, in the presence of his assembled compatriots, addressed hearers not quite strangers to the remotest countries which he described. The world, as conceived by Herodotus, comprised less than the half of Europe, about a fifth of Asia, and about a quarter of Africa — a considerable enlargement on that of Homer. He gives hints, moreover, which, if logically followed up, would lead to still further extension, for in almost every direction, the bounding lines are undefined. These lines included in the east the region of the Punjaub or five tributaries of the Indus, which had been explored by Scylax of Caryanda; westward, they touched the Pyrenees and the Atlantic, where Herodotus speaks of the Celts and Iberian Cynesians as having their abode. In the days of Eratosthenes, who died towards the close of the second century, these limits had been pushed back considerably — India being known as far as its southern extremity while much additional light had been cast on the northern portions of Europe. Among whose to whom this added knowledge was due may be mentioned Xenophon, Pytheas, Ctesias, Aristotle and Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander the Great. Xenophon cleared up the obscurity that hung over regions partially known before his time. Aristotle dealt with the earth as a naturalist, rather than a geographer. Of Ctesias little has come down to us and for that we are mainly indebted to the diligent ecclesiastical diplomatist, Photius. He was a pretentious writer and it is doubtful whether his experience was as comprehensive as his imagination. Whether by travel or by inquiry, he had, however, added some interesting contributions to the sum of Greek knowledge concerning the East, especially India, in those times. His account of the fauna and flora of the peninsula was largely mingled with fable, and his jealous detraction of the works of his predecessors would hardly add to our respect for his character. Pytheas has an interest for us as being what now-a-days would be termed a Frenchman. He was a native of the Greek colony of Massilia, then renowned for its learning and enterprise. In the latter part of the 4th Century B. C. he sailed through the columns of Hercules and turned northwards past the coast of Spain and Prance until he reached Britain, which he was the first Greek to explore. He proceeded thence to the Baltic, passing, on his way, a region which be called Thule and which some suppose to be Jutland. Then retracing his course, he arrived at the - mouth of the Rhine, where he became acquainted with a German nation called the Osthiones, that is, Ost-wohner, or dwellers in the east. Having coasted along till he came to another river, he ascended it and thus made his way back overland to Massilia.

 

Alexander the Great's expedition to Asia inaugurated a new era in geographical discovery, making the Greeks acquainted with countries and nations previously known to them only by hearsay. Arrian, Quintus Curtius and Plutarch (as well as other writers), have left us complete accounts of his conquests and their results on the countries which he invaded. He went no farther eastward than the Hyphasis, but he there formed a project which tended to add considerably to the knowledge of Asia already acquired. He sent a great armada dowrn the Indus and the explorers reached the Ocean after a voyage of nine months. There they observed what to them was the mystery of the tides, and the King was so pleased with the success that had been achieved that he formed another scheme which was to have a survey made of the entire coast from the mouth of the Indus to that of the Euphrates. While others recoiled from so arduous a task, Nearchus undertook it, and after seven months, reached the Persian Gulf.

 

From Alexander to Julius Cæsar is a natural transition. During the interval Roman conquest had carried on the work begun by the Phoenicians and continued by the Greeks. Cæsar's Commentaries, supplemented by the works of Tacitus, a century and a-half later, present pictures of the ancestors of the three most civilized nations of Europe, of which it would not be easy to over-estimate the value. But, as yet, we see little extension of the boundaries of the known world. Barely contemporary with Cæsar was the Greek geographer, Strabo, whose account of the world of his age is one of the treasures of the past which have escaped the ravages of time. His work contains a careful summing-up of all the geographical knowledge which had been won by former explorers and commentators. The historians proper, both Greek and Latin, necessarily treat largely of geographical subjects and the works of such writers as Pausanias, Pliny and Dionysius of Halicarnassus are also valuable from the same point of view. The poets have also thrown considerable light on the geographical discoveries of the ancients. Pomponius Mela, a Spaniard, who in the reigns of Caligula and Claudius, wrote a treatise on geography, customs and manners, gives descriptions of Europe, Asia and Africa, which are not without interest. There is a passage in Scipio's Dream, in which Cicero gives a general view of the earth as known in his day, which seems in certain respects to anticipate some discoveries generally attributed to later investigation. He makes Africanus speak of the small portion of the earth that is inhabited, and also of the Antipodes who dwell on the other side of it. After comparing the inhabited earth to a small island in the midst of the ocean, he asks whether the fame of any European is likely to cross the Caucasus or the Ganges, or whether the people of the distant East or West or South will ever hear the name of even the most illustrious Roman.

 

The names of Africanus, the elder and the younger, and of Cicero, who has thus brought them together in his philosophic fancy, have, far in excess of the hopes of any of them, long since transcended those barriers of fame which the great orator and statesman thought impassable. Though many generations had still to come, and go before those obstacles which furnished Cicero with his illustration of the fleeting nature of fame were so surmounted as to allow of easy intercourse between those on either side, even in Ptolemy's map of the world, we can see signs of the coming dawn, which should disclose the vast East to the wondering, West. It looked as if the prophecy of the chorus in Senecas Medea of the time when there should be no more limit to men's knowledge of the earth, were already on the way to fulfilment, as if, before the Roman Empire began its decline, its proud rulers were to have a glimpse of that mighty world, which had not been included in their own orbis terrarum. It is, perhaps, an indication of the wider views so characteristic of Christianity, which embraced in its reconciling and redeeming mission, not one great conquering people, but "all people that on earth do dwell," that in the second century, Pausanias published his itinerary or travellers' guide to ancient Greece. It was from Christian missionaries that the Romans were first to learn the lesson that the nations beyond the confines of their power had their part in the scheme of existence and were worthy of study and consideration. They had grown accustomed, as Gibbon says, to "confound the Roman monarchy with the globe of the earth," but were now to learn what they should afterwards acutely feel, the importance of races whom they had scornfully ignored. Before the close of the second century, zealous missionaries had preached the Gospel, not only in every province of the Empire, but in many of the remote regions beyond it. The tradition that St. Thomas evangelized a part of India, is well known. The native Christians of Malabar firmly believed it when they were first visited by the Portuguese. More authentic is the record of the establishment of Christianity in the Chinese Province of Shensi, by the Nestorians, as attested by the Siganfu tablet, discovered in 1625. The Rev. "Wells Williams, who lectured in Montreal a few years ago, and who spent much of his life in China, has no doubt of its genuineness. Arnobius, who wrote in the beginning of the third century, mentions the Seres among those who had, in part, accepted Christianity in his time. The monks who brought the eggs of the silkworm to Constantinople in the middle of the sixth century had long resided in China, and, as Mr. Williams says, it is reasonable to suppose that they were not the first or the only ones who went thither to preach the Gospel. On the other hand, let us see whether the Chinese had been doing anything to overcome the barriers that separated them from the western world. It is certain that the Greeks took the name (ser) for silkworm from the Chinese name for the same useful insect. How did it reach them? Nearchus, already mentioned, is the first to speak of the Seric stuffs of India and of the people of the Seres. It is thought that the Princes of the House of Tsin extended their sway to Central Asia, and that thus the trade was carried in caravans to the countries along the Oxus. Those who acted as carriers seem to have kept the secret of the manufacture, if they knew it, to themselves, for the Romans, though they made abundant use of silk, long continued ignorant of it. In the early silk-trade, it is not likely that there was any contact between the Chinese and the Occidentals. The commodity passed, probable, through many successive hands, before it reached those who were to wear it. In the year 140 B. C., an emperor of the Han dynasty sent a general with an army into Central Asia, and the general wrote a desription on his return of all the countries and people that he had seen. This is known from Chinese sources. After that, for 120 years, the trade route remained open, until the turbulent Huingnu, who, in later centuries, were to turn their strength against Europe, succeeded in closing it. But never, at any time, had the traffic come further west than the Caspian. There it was taken up by Turkees and western merchants, who acted as middlemen.

 

The day was to come when pure curiosity to know more of the western nations was to impel and ardent disciple of Buddha (or Confucius,) to turn his steps westeard. It was towards the end of the 4th century that Fa-Hian, a monk, accompanied by a few of his brethern, started on a journey over the hills and far away to the lands of the setting sun. They crossed the desert, which Marco Polo was to traverse 800 years later, passed through the country of the Ouigours, the Khanates where the Czar now reigns, through Afghanistan, through the Punjaub and a great part of India. From the continent they sailed to Ceylon, of which Jamboulos, the Greek merchant (mentioned in Tzetzes) had already written an account in his Book of Wonders. From there they went to Java, where they stayed five months, and thence they returned home by way of Canton and Nankin. It was of such religious knowledge as would confirm him in his faith that Ha-Hian was mostly in quest, and he was greatly pleased with ceremonies and other signs of piety which he witnessed among the people with whom he be­came acquainted.

 

A still more interesting Chinese traveller was he who, in the fifth century of our era, discovered Fou Sang which, if We can credit some learned inquirers, was neither more nor less than the continent of America. The story has been translated from the Chinese annals of Li Yen by M. de Guignes and is to the effect that a Buddhist priest of China discovered a country called Fou Sang, the description of which, in several particulars, is applicable to the western portion of this continent. The mention of horses is hardly consistent, however, with the natural history of North Ame­rica at that period, which was too late for Mr. Huxley's pliohippus and too early for the introduction of its descendants by Europeans. The narrative is important, nevertheless, as indicating the enlightened curiosity and exploring enterprise of the Chinese of that time.

 

it is then that we are conscious of the great debt of gratitude which we owe to them, without whose valiant dutifulness we should not be either what or where we are.[1]