History of geography / by J. Scott Keltie and O.J.R. Howarth.

  • John Scott Keltie
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: History of geography / by J. Scott Keltie and O.J.R. Howarth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the Carthaginians carried out trading enterprises on their own account from their central point of vantage on the North African coast. Some time after Necho’s expedition (probably about 500 b.c.) they sent out two distant expeditions. One of these, under Hanno, appears to have consisted of a very large fleet, and to have been intended to establish trading posts along the west coast of Africa, which was already known to the Carthaginians. Certain details are furnished which serve to identify points at which he touched, and it is generally agreed that he got as far south as the neigh- bourhood of the Bight of Benin. Almost simultaneously Himilco made a voyage north along the west coast of Europe. He appears to have visited Britain, and mentions the foggy and limitless sea to the west. Information obtained by such means as this cannot have become in any sense the common property of the period. But there would be no mean supply of geo- graphical data at the disposal of traders on the one hand, and at least of a few philosophers and generally well-informed persons on the other, at a period long anterior to that at which it is possible to begin our detailed history. Whatever tendency there may have been on the part of the Phoenicians, and no doubt their predecessors, to preserve their commercial secrets, there is no necessity to suppose that traders in distant lands did not describe these lands to those with whom they immediately dealt. The links in the commercial chain would then become links in a chain of geo- graphical knowledge. This supposition granted, geo- graphers may be prepared to risk the charge ot temerity if they recognize and enjoy, as an exquisite description of the unbroken summer daylight on some northern fiord-coast, the picture of the Laestrygons’ land in
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