I am not sufficiently Quixotic to attempt a defence of the
Carthaginians on the western coast of Africa, or any where else, but
I submit that the accusation brought against them by Mr. S. Bannister,
formerly Attorney-General of New South Wales, is not sustained by
the only record we possess of Hanno's colonising expedition. That
gentleman, in his learned _Records of British Enterprise beyond Sea_,
just published, says, in a note, p. xlvii.:--
"The first nomade tribe they reached was friendly, and furnished
Hanno with _interpreters_. At length they discovered a nation _whose
language was unknown to the interpreters_. These strangers they
attempted to seize; and, upon their resistance, they took three of the
women, whom they put to death, and carried their skins to Carthage"
(_Geogr. Græci Minores_, Paris, 1826, p. 115.).
Hanno obtained interpreters from a people who dwelt on the banks
of a large river, called the Lixus, and supposed to be the modern
St. Cyprian. Having sailed thence for several days, and touched at
different places, planting a colony in one of them, he came to a
mountainous country inhabited by savages, who wore skins of wild
beasts, [Greek: dermata thaereia enaemmenon]. At a distance of
twelve days' sail he came to some Ethiopians, who could not endure
the Carthaginians, and who spoke unintelligibly even to the Lixite
interpreters. These are the people whose women, Mr. Bannister says,
they killed. Hanno sailed from this inhospitable coast fifteen
days, and came to a gulf which he calls [Greek: Notou Kera], or
South Horn.
"Here," says the Dr. Hawkesworth, of Carthage, "in the gulf,
was an island, like the former, containing a lake, and in
this another island, full of wild men; but the women were
much more numerous, _with hairy bodies_ ([Greek: daseiai tois
somasin]), whom the interpreters called [Greek: gorillas].
We pursued the men, who, flying to precipices, defended
themselves with stones, and could not be taken. Three women,
who bit and scratched their leaders, would not follow them.
Having killed them, we brought their skins to Carthage."
He does not so much as intimate that the creatures who so defended
themselves with stones, or those whose bodies were covered with
hair, spoke any language. Nothing but the words [Greek: anthropoi
agrioi] and [Greek: gunaikes] can lead us to believe that they were
human beings at all; while the description of the behaviour of the
men, and the bodies of the women, is not repugnant to the supposition
that they were large apes, baboons, or orang-outangs, common to this
part of Africa. At all events, the voyagers do not say that they
flayed a people having the faculty of speech.
It is not, however, improbable that the Carthaginians were severe
taskmasters of the people whom they subdued. Such I understand those
to have been who opened the British tin mines, and who, according to
Diodorus Siculus, excessively overworked the wretches who toiled for
them, "wasting their bodies underground, and dying, {362} many a one,
through extremity of suffering, while others perished under the lashes
of the overseer." (_Bibl. Hist._ l. v. c. 38.)
R.T. Hampson.
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