THE STONE OF HERCULES.
“Behold thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can
hide from thee.”
“The wise men that were in thee, O Tyrus, were they pilots?”
The magnetic needle has become so essential in the economy of the
world, that we can hardly imagine the consequences which would ensue,
were it suddenly to lose its power. It is not, however, difficult to
picture the sudden and gigantic growth of any one commercial state,
which, in such a contingency, should discover the means of restoring
its efficacy, and preserve the secret.
To what pitch of greatness must not any state have ascended, which,
from the beginning, had been favoured and distinguished by such a
possession? It would take tithes from the harvests of every land; the
produce of every zone would furnish its marts, the toil of every race
fill its coffers; and if by weakness, wisdom, or integrity it did
abstain from plotting and scheming, and contented itself with driving
its trade, and meriting by using its fortune, the other states of the
world, instead of hating it, and combining to destroy it, would favour
and cherish it as a common benefactor.
There is an ancient people whose history I have in the above
supposition described, whose growth and duration are in no ways to
be accounted for, as in the case of any other state; who had neither
number nor territory, yet who ascended to the loftiest pinnacle of
dominion, competed with Egypt in antiquity, and endured, more than
twice told, the career of Rome.
We are constrained to give credence to the facts; but the cause escapes
us. To admit is one thing--to comprehend another. To comprehend the
growth of Phœnicia, we must embody at least every known element of
prosperity, and, amongst these, at least _so much_ of the aids of
navigation as the polarity of the needle affords.
The proposition naturally arouses a host of contradictory suggestions.
“If the ancients had it,” it will be said, “we could not have failed to
have known it; we are acquainted with everything connected with their
seamanship, their voyages,[126] &c. It never could have been lost.
If any one people had it, it must have become known to the rest. Our
pre-eminence in navigation, discoveries, and commerce is essentially
associated with the compass. Why did they not reach America?[127] How
did it remain for us to make the discovery?”
These are all the objections I have been able to discover: they are all
preliminary, and are adjusted to a mark which I do not present, viz.,
the word “ancients.” Substitute the word “Phœnicians,” and they fall to
the ground.
The “ancients,” are to us Greeks and Romans. Very different men were
those traders, whose acute and vivid genius, flexible to all things,
could cover up, and conceal, what the brain had devised, or the hand
acquired. Those traders had no Penny Magazine, and published no Price
Current. Undenying at home, they were selfish abroad; they kept to
themselves what they knew, and did not overreach one another for the
profit or pleasure of strangers. Even in our own times, secrets are
kept by large bodies of men, about nothing, and for no end. The needle
would have been a talisman to the state exclusively possessing it; to a
few entrusted, not as an instrument, but as an oracle or a god.[128]
Of all factitious props, secretive habits are the most powerful. The
art of the Thaumaturgist, calculated in all other countries merely to
strike the vulgar with awe, became to them an element of political
greatness and commercial profit. They were ready to shed blood for
indiscretion or mischance. Patriotism, the mysteries, and natural
science formed, by their interlacing fibres, that strong yet flexible
tissue which enveloped and concealed the Phœnician polity, and remained
unchanged from the time when it served as swaddling-bands to an infant
community, to the hour when it wrapped as cerecloth the clay from which
fate, and not malady, had driven life. Reveal the polarity of the
needle! Tyrians suffer the secret of the compass to be extorted! He
who could conceive such a thing, may be learned in books, or perhaps
learned in history, but not in men. Yet this is the sole _argument_ of
the sceptics. “It could not have been concealed.” Who was to find it
out? Was curiosity of Greek or Roman to beat Punic astuteness? Were
stripes, or chains, or death, to conquer Punic endurance? and who had
the thought of exerting the one, or employing the other?
The sceptics are no less ignorant of seamanship: nothing was more
easy than concealment. We must not start by picturing a binnacle,
exposed by day, and lighted by night--a quartermaster conning by it,
and a steersman looking at it, second by second, in presence of ship’s
company, passengers, and strangers. We must bring before us habits of
navigation formed without this aid; mariners guiding themselves by
night by the stars, and lying to, when these could not be seen; or
perhaps with the instinct of the islanders of the Pacific, finding
their path through darkness, by watching the angle of incidence of
waves and wind, rating the effect of one on the direction of the
other, and thus by approximation holding on till the lights reappeared.
The heaven or the ocean was the binnacle. They would seek from the
needle what we seek from the Sextant,--conference and counsel. The
instrument so used by master or mate, is to our sailors as unknown as
the astrolabe or divining-rod. The navigator works out his place upon
the surface of the globe, and lays down the course; but the formulæ are
to him as much a secret as the instrument is a mystery to the crew.
The Phœnician skipper might refer to his magic _Cup_ in secret: an
approximation was all that, without the sextant and dead reckoning,
could be desired, and that only in case of doubt or difficulty arising
from bad weather.
Modern writers make a sad jumble whenever they touch ancient
navigation. They transfer--but not as a sailor would do--the ideas
derived from our practice, which in most things is changed, in some
reversed. Men-of-war now exceed merchantmen in dimensions, as much as
the merchantmen formerly exceeded the men-of-war. A Phœnician vessel
was able to stow 500 emigrants, with provisions for a long voyage, and
required for masts the cedars of Lebanon. They carried, in the earliest
period, heavy substances from the farthest points; the timber of India
is found amongst the tombs of Egypt. To apply to _their_ navigation,
the passages descriptive of the row-boats of the Greeks and Romans, is
a solecism and an anachronism:[129] they neither made their way by the
speed of oars, nor sheltered themselves by hauling up their vessels
upon the beach; their craft stood in the same relation to the μάκρη
ναυς the _longa navis_, as the trading vessels of Spezzia and Hydra
during the Greek war to the pirate _Mysticoes_: one of these darting
from under a low reef, would scatter a convoy of the largest vessels,
like a wolf among a flock of sheep. How could commerce have been
carried on in vessels that required oars to pull them, at the rate of
ten men to a ton, the crews of which had to land for their meals?
It is only by collecting the local traditions of distant regions, by
comparing the records of various nations, the writings of different
times, by analyzing the names of places,[130] and reasoning upon all
these various data at an interval of twenty centuries, that we are
discovering the extent of the settlements of the Phœnicians. They had
hidden their footsteps and concealed their ways from the wise[131]
alike and from the simple: who can tell how many secrets lie buried in
their tomb?
If I have shown that the ignorance of “classical writers” is neither
an argument nor an objection, the other objection that, “if known, it
could not have been lost,” falls to the ground, for if concealed, it
must have perished with the possessors. It is strange that, having
regained it, we do not detect its ancient vestiges, and are unable
to interpret the words, names, and phrases which, to the initiated,
unmistakably reveal it. After Galileo, we detected in antiquity, by
a passage of Pythagoras, the knowledge of the science of music. From
similar indications, we found out, after we possessed the knowledge
ourselves, that the whole scheme of the heavens was understood by
them.[132] After Franklin had drawn down lightning, we apprehended,
for the first time,[133] what chance had befallen Salmoneus, Servius
Tullius,[134] and Sylvius Alladus.[135] Yet, if any discovery might be
supposed to be notorious and incapable of concealment, and therefore
not liable to perish, it would be the calling down of thunder and
lightning, signalized, too, by the catastrophes of a prince of Greece,
a lucumon of Alba, a king of Rome, and an eastern legislator.[136]
Although the great ancient states did not pursue the sea trade, the
Phœnicians were not without competitors. The Pelasgi, the Etruscans,
the Greeks were their equals in _seamanship_. The two latter were far
more powerful. They reserved the long voyage by no navigation laws, and
must have been in possession of some exclusive knowledge. The compass,
however it might aid, is not absolutely required in many long voyages.
The Pacific was peopled without it. Within the Mediterranean the land
served to guide, weather shores to protect. These, and the tides,
aided the navigator all round Europe. The monsoons wafted him along on
the Indian Ocean. But there was one voyage, which, with none of these
aids, the Phœnicians, and they alone of all antiquity performed,--that
of Western Africa. It was upon that coast, and in sight of its
insurmountable natural difficulties, that the idea, here developed,
first occurred to me. I then turned to the records of antiquity,
and to those first and best pages of history, the myths, and found
confirmation, and what rocks and reefs, blasts and currents had taught
me.
Seated at the water-shed of the East and of the West--at the fountain
of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf--the Phœnicians passed down
both, and issuing into the Indian and Atlantic oceans, visited the
furthest regions of the earth. It was their province to gather the
produce of every land; so must it have been their aim to collect the
inventions of every people. If anywhere the magnetic needle had been
discovered, they would have been sure to find it; and if applied only
to the land, most certainly would they adapt it to their own element.
This discovery required no high standard of science. It could not have
been reasoned to _a priori_; by accident alone could it have been found
out. There is in it, therefore, nothing to flatter the self-love of
any, or to militate against referring it to the very earliest ages or
the rudest people.
The discovery is claimed by modern civilization, and is one of those
upon which it most prides itself. The place, the inventor, the precise
date are all known; and though by one section of literary men the
honour is referred to China, and by another, indications of some sort
of compass are admitted elsewhere, and at anterior dates, still the
compass in its present shape, and in its practical use, is next to
universally attributed to Flavio de Gioja, of Amalphi, in the year 1302.
The perusal of the catalogue of the Escurial suggested to M. Villemain
the remark, that most of the modern discoveries of which the date and
the name of the inventor are set down as certain, were no more than
inventions of the Arabs, which he had appropriated. Such in this case
was the fact. Amalphi, the earliest of European commercial states,
arose under the Greeks and the Saracens. To the latter people it
owed the lead it took in instruction and navigation. Centuries and
generations before Flavio de Gioja, the needle was known at Amalphi.
The _magnet_,[137] in its attracting power, was well known to the
Arabs, from the Greeks, Persians, and Jews. But they gave a new name,
which shows that they had become acquainted with its polarity, which
indicated the use to which, by them, it was applied, _Kiblah Nameh_.
Finding the direction towards the _Kiblah_, of course it would serve
to direct the caravan through the desert, and the caravel at sea. If
additional proof be wanting, the name supplies it.
“Mariner’s compass,” “magnetic needle,” are paraphrases; but in the
countries surrounding the Mediterranean, it has a name--_Boussole_,
for which no European etymology can be found.[138] The Arabic afforded
none, for by no process could Kiblah Nameh be emended into the root
of _Boussole_. There is, however, an Arabic word, which has escaped
our lexicographers. The figure,[139] which designates the north is
MOUASSOLA.[140] When Europeans first saw the instrument, this point,
the leading one, was doubtless pointed to and named. From Mouassola to
Boussola the transition is easy; M. and B., being labials and cognate
letters, and in some dialects of the Arabic constantly transposed.
The Greeks, the intermediaries between the Arabs and Europe, still
possessed Amalfi, which became a maritime state; Arabic and Greek, not
Latin and Italian, were spoken there; and in modern Greek the word for
compass is written Μπουσσολα.
The Arabic affords another etymology, and while either may have served,
both may have concurred to give us our word. The abstract which has
been preserved of El Edressi’s “Geography of Spain,”[141] has this
sentence, “The outer ocean,” that in which the compass was necessary,
“is termed _El Bahar el Bossul_ (the violent), as distinguished from
the interior, or _El Bahar el Muit_.”
European writers derive the compass from the Arabs.[142] The Arabic
geographers absolutely decline this honour.[143] They refer the
invention to the Chinese. They quote a Chinese name, _Kya-poun_,
meaning, as they assert, a board marked with lines. The Chinese
claim the discovery, and have and use the instrument. It is of their
own make and fashion, divided according to a rule of their own, and
connected with various astronomical and geographic points which we are
unacquainted with.
The Jesuits, who have been such judicious observers and accurate
describers of China, unanimously support the same conclusion.[144]
Klaproth, in a letter to M. Humboldt “Sur l’Invention de Boussole,”
argues in the same sense.
Humboldt, in his recent work, “Cosmos,” answers as follows the letter
addressed to him by Klaproth.
“Although a knowledge of the attracting power of the loadstone, or of
naturally magnetic iron, appears to have existed from time immemorial
among the nations of the West, yet it is a well established and very
remarkable historical fact, that the knowledge of the directive power
of a magnetic needle, resulting from its relation to the magnetism of
the earth, was possessed exclusively by a people occupying the eastern
extremity of Asia. The Chinese for _more than a thousand years before
our era_, at the obscurely known epoch of Codrus and the return of the
Heraclidæ to the Peloponnesus, already employed magnetic cars, on which
the figure of a man, whose movable outstretched arm pointed always to
the south, guided them on their way across the vast grassy plains of
Tartary. In the third century of our era, at least 700 years before
the introduction of the compass in the European seas, Chinese vessels
navigated the Indian[145] ocean with needles pointing to the south.
I have shown in another work[146] what great advantages in respect
to topographical knowledge the magnetic needle gave to the Chinese
geographers over their _Greek_ and _Roman_ contemporaries, to whom for
example, the true direction of the mountain chains of the Apennines and
the Pyrenees always remained unknown.”[147]
These writers conceive that they have settled the question by tracing
the invention from the Chinese to the Arabs. This at least is
established, that the Chinese had the compass at the period of the
greatness of the Phœnicians, and if they did not use it on the ocean,
traversing Tartary with it, brought it within reach of the Phœnicians,
who, as I shall show, knew the stations through Tartary to China.
Now, our instrument offered intrinsic evidence of a parentage wholly
distinct from the Chinese.
The _north_ is the leading point. The axis of the globe cut at right
angles by the equator, gives the four points which we term _cardinal_,
which are then subdivided into eight, sixteen, and thirty-two (the
latter appears to be comparatively modern). These constitute the points
which serve the mariner, and are employed in directing the course of
the vessel and steering it. The circle is then divided, according to
the astronomic measurement of the globe, into 360 degrees.
These _Points_ and _Degrees_ are figured on a card affixed to the
needle, and revolving with it on a pivot, so that the helmsman has the
circle of the earth before him, and has to bring the vessel’s head
(marked by a line in the cup in which the card and needle float) to
that point of the circle towards which he is directed to steer.
In every respect, save the polarity of the needle, the Chinese compass
differs. The south, taking the negative for the positive polarity, is
made the leading point: it is not marked by any mouassola or figure,
but painted _red_. There is no cross, and consequently no _centre_.
The needle bisects merely the instrument. There are no _cardinal_
points.[148] The first subdivision is into eight, the second into
twenty-four; avoiding _sixteen_--that essential number of augury and
of the Hindoos,[149] &c. This is the nautical part of the instrument,
and occupies four of the concentric circles that are traced on the
broad plate which surrounds the instrument; then succeed ten other
circles, through which the radii of the first four are not continued,
and where figure a variety of words and divisions, which no one has
explained, and which the highest authorities confess their inability to
comprehend. The astronomic degrees on the outer circle are not equal
to one another, and amount to about three hundred and eighty. Although
the needle revolves, it is not on a pivot, but on a point which, like
the letter T, descends into the wood of the box, and there turns in a
_socket_. No card is affixed on it: it traverses as an index, pointing
to the scale of the circle traced on the box. That the Chinese knew
the variation of the needle, and had accurately fixed that of Canton,
expressing it by the converse signs, has been established by M.
Klaproth, and might have led him to doubt the theory he has so boldly
asserted, of ours being derived from theirs. Thus, the Chinese compass
differs from ours _toto cœlo_, there not being a single point in which,
even by accident, we have hit upon the same method. A junk and a
Phœnician galley, or an English collier, are not more dissimilar: both
sail the seas, and both direct the ship--there all resemblance begins
and ends.
The Chinese instrument had been used on land for many centuries before
the Christian era. It had been adopted in navigation at least in
the third century of our era. It existed, therefore, in the form in
which we now see it, long antecedent to its use in the West. It is as
serviceable as ours for every purpose of navigation. Why should we
have reversed the whole order? How could we have done so with that
uniformity which prevails in all the countries of the West?
But there is still, if possible, a stronger argument. The needle, when
first used by the Arabs, received only a _temporary polarity_; the
Chinese give to theirs a _permanent polarity_. The former process was,
therefore, a step in the discovery: had it been borrowed they would
have at once used the perfect method. The process is thus described in
1242 by _Boulak Kibdjaki_.
“They take a cup of water, which they shelter from the wind; they then
take a needle, which they fix in a peg of wood (reed), or a straw,
so as to form a cross. They then take the _magnes_ and turn round
for some time above the cup, moving from left to right, the needle
following. They then withdraw the _magnes_, after which the needle
stands still and points north and south.”[150]
This description, confirmed by the authorities cited below, can leave
no doubt that we have arrived at the same end as the Chinese by a
different road. The invention of Flavio di Gioja may have consisted
in giving to the needle permanent polarity: the next step would be of
course to fix it on a pivot, which again differs from the Chinese.
I beg particular attention to this manner of using the instrument by
the Arabs, as by it we shall be subsequently enabled to interpret the
Greek myths. Here we have the compass consisting of a _needle_, a
_cup_, and a _stone_, carried separately, and brought together when
consulted. The Arabs shut themselves out as the inventors--we have shut
out the Chinese. The distribution of the circle must have come to the
Arabs, together with the magnet and needle: it could only come from
ancient augury. The officer and priest, whose title has been given
to the science, marked out all bounds for consecration, building, or
other purposes, and commenced by drawing, on the spot where he stood,
the line of the axis of the globe, the _cardo_ crossing it by the
synatorial or decumonus. In the augurial operations the terrestrial
and celestial globes were made the counterparts of each other, and the
heavens were distributed into _sixteen parts_.[151]
Divination was rather _ars Etrusca_, and we are in the habit of
referring its source to that people; but the Etruscans had no
compass. Divination was no more original in Etruria than in Rome. It
was, indeed, the key-stone of their state, the link of science and
government, of astronomy and priesthood; but they came to Italy a
perfect state, and Tarchon’s genius, symbolized by the head of a man
and the body of a child, replaced the matured science of Canaan on the
young soil of Ausonia.
As in the West, those ceremonies in which religion was united with
science, and which therefore marked, not as they would with us,
ignorance and superstition, but learning and enlightenment, are traced
home to one particular people, and received their name, so also was it
in the East. Though dim the echoes (σκοτειναὶ ἀχοαὶ) that have been
handed down to us, we still recognise the voice and name of the masters
of whom Abraham was the disciple. In Europe, letters were Phœnician; in
the East, the learned were Sabeans. Rome got her ceremonies from Cere.
The Cerethims were Sabeans. From the Sabeans the Mussulman had his
Rekaat; the Polytheist his Incense; the Jew his Teraphim. Therefore the
Ars Etrusca was derived from the early seats of the Phœnicians.
After fruitless attempts to discover the etymology of _cardo_,[152] it
occurred to me that as the other names of winds, and, consequently, of
the points of the compass, had been derived from those of the countries
across which they blew,[153] so might this be a geographic term, and
might be found to the north of Sabea or Chaldæa. The mountain on which
the human race took refuge from the deluge is so placed, and bore this
very name.[154] Cardo was then the primitive geographic point for the
countries which were the cradle of the human race and the nurseries of
science, and the term could only be derivative in Italy. The north star
was the Kiblah of the Sabeans.[155]
Two people severally discovered the various branches of naval
architecture and navigation. The ends were attained by both; the
means they used were wholly different, both belonging to the earliest
constituted societies, both from periods antecedent to history,
navigating the Indian ocean. They alone constructing vessels of large
burthen, alone possessing that navigation.
The word “Phœnician,” is a great stumbling-block in these inquiries.
There was no people so called. It is a word of Greek invention[156]
and construction. As there were Carthaginians or inhabitants of
Carthage, so were there inhabitants of Tyre, and inhabitants of Sidon.
The Cerathians, who occupied the adjoining territory, were simply
“citizens,” as distinguished from the “Nomades,” or “Skenites,” and
Perizzites, the inhabitants of “unwalled villages.”[157] The word
Phœnix, or red, is identical with Adam, Edom, or Erythria. The Greeks
so called them as coming from the Red Sea. In the time of Alexander,
the Greeks found that they were also settled on the Persian Gulf, and
that there was the metropolis, of which the Sidon and the Tyre of Syria
were the daughters, as of these in subsequent times another progeny
was to be found in Leptis, Utica; Carthage, Carthagena; Troy on the
Scamander, and Tor in Devonshire.
For the word Phœnician we must then substitute, or by it we must
understand, “Sea-faring Arab.” The tribe which took to these
enterprises, had of course its early establishments on the Red Sea, the
southern shores of Arabia, the Persian Gulf, that is, on Arabian soil,
then it would reach to the Persian and Abyssinian coasts. The next
stage would be the shores of the Mediterranean. They would construct
on that sea such vessels as those with which they navigated the Indian
Ocean, and are thus celebrated by the Greeks as the inventors of ships.
There is therefore no difficulty in placing the Phœnicians, in so far
as antiquity is concerned, on a level with the Chinese, and in so
far as geography is in question, on the same field of navigation and
commerce. Yet the two systems are as opposite as it is possible for the
imagination of man to conceive.
Before the arrival of the Chinese junk, had any one said that he had
deciphered from the Eugubean tables that the discovery of America had
been made by a large vessel, which had neither stem nor stern, kelson
nor transom-beam, neither iron for its anchors, hemp for its cables,
canvass for its sails, pitch, oakum, standing-rigging, rudder pintles,
or pumps;--that with a taffrail standing forty feet above the water, it
was not caulked,--whoever believed the story would have been set down
as foolishly credulous and stupidly ignorant.
Men, after the original conception, are but blind practisers of what
they have been taught, and see only what they already know: with all
our travellers and sailors in China and in India, no one in Europe
could have imagined, that the Chinese had an original scheme of naval
architecture the very converse of ours, attaining the end in no
instance by the means which we employ, and standing in relation to ours
as a cetcaeous animal to one of the mammiferæ--as a turtle to a man.
The Chinese might have seen Phœnician vessels for 3,000 years before
ours came round the Cape. They have imitated them as little as they
have since copied ours. Vasco di Gama found the compass in these
seas, not in junks but in vessels constructed like ours: ours are the
continuation of those of the Phœnicians.[158] They left, doubtless, a
progeny in the Indian Ocean as well as the Mediterranean. As in naval
architecture neither of the styles could have been copied, and each
must have been original,--so is it with their compasses; neither could
have been copied from the other, and the invention must have been in
each case separately made.
A secret such as this could be preserved and transmitted only by
constant use. How then could it have come from Phœnicia to us? Augury
had been swept away from the face of the earth. A thousand years had
run their course between the fall of Tyre and the maritime enterprises
of the Saracens. Thirty generations had gone to the tomb.
The difficulty I fully admit and feel. I oppose to it the intrinsic
evidence offered by the instrument, and the impossibility of referring
it to any other race, Chinese, Mussulman, Arabs, Hindoos, or to the
systems of modern Europe. That it must have passed, I contend; how it
passed is another matter. The knowledge of the road is no point of my
argument:--nevertheless, I think I have found the clue.
From the close of the reign of the Ptolemies, to the Portuguese
discoveries in India, we have but a single record of eastern commerce,
given by a trader named Sopater, to Cosmas, and inserted in his
Typographia Christiana. Every country, from China to Ethiopia, is
mentioned, and the produce or merchandise which each sent or received,
enumerated. The centre of this traffic was Ceylon, by whose merchants
and shipping it was carried on. That island thus possessed commercial
prosperity of the first order, while the great empires were sinking
into that decrepitude which invited the northern invasion, and
facilitated the outbursts of Saracenic enthusiasm.
This commerce was not carried on by the Cingalese, but by _strangers_,
settled in the country, who had kings; occupied the maritime places;
were of a different religion, and had temples.--Who could those
strangers be?
Ceylon was never invaded by a foreign state, or overrun by a foreign
race. The struggle of Buddhism and Brahminism had not extended to that
island (at the time in question, Buddhism had been expelled from the
continent). These strangers could not have been from India--they were
not Greeks or Romans. Had they been Chinese, they would have been
mentioned as such, and have been, like the Cingalese, Buddhists. They
were not accidental rovers.
Sopater mentions various peculiarities--one, a hyacinth in one of the
temples, which, when illumined by the rays of the sun, radiated with
light. Does not this recall the emerald emitting light in the Temple
of Hercules at Tyre?[159] Another coincidence may be found in the name
of the cocoa-nut, as given by Cosmas (Argillia), with that of the
cocoa-nut tree (Argel), still used by the Arabs.
“There was,” he says, “a church of Christians.” These had therefore
temples and churches; their presbyter was ordained in Persia, whence
they had their deacons and ecclesiastical chiefs. In the mountains
above Mesopotamia, to this day there are Jews and Christians
intermingled, the Christians avowing themselves converted Jews, the
Jews declaring themselves apostate Hebrews. This recalls the old Jewish
and Phœnician association of the time of Solomon, and their common
expedition to Darohish.
The Phœnician settlements in Ceylon corresponded with those in Spain.
They had, moreover, been already established there for fifteen hundred
years. On all the western coasts of the Indian Ocean, dwelt cognate
tribes, with which they trafficked, and from whom they could be
sustained or recruited. They were in that Indian island exposed to none
of the conquests, invasions, or convulsions which have so often changed
the face of the West. If the story of Sopater had never been told, and
the work of Cosmas had, like so many others, perished, we might have
assumed that Phrygians continued to dwell and traffic in that central
yet secluded station of the Indian ocean. Neither Hindoos nor Persians
had taken to the sea; China had not engaged in conquest; no Carthage
had interfered with them, and no Rome swallowed them up.
Isolated not from Europe only, but from Asia also and Africa;
surviving the fall of Tyre and Carthage, and, without passing through
Christianity, they thus, down to Mussulman times, preserved the augury
of Paganism with the enterprise of Phœnicia.
Sopater did not describe them as Phœnicians, because, when he wrote,
Tyre was deserted; Carthage was a Vandal town, Cadiz and Carthagena
were Gothic cities. The Phœnicians had disappeared, and the name was
forgotten, and this people, who had never so called themselves even in
the West,[160] could not have told him in the East that such was the
name which European writers had given them.
If these conclusions are correct, we may expect to find remnants of
them still. In India proper, the Mussulman dominion, the invasion
of Tatar and Patan, and the settlement of Arab tribes would have
effaced the trace of such a colony: but Ceylon having remained
free from such disturbance, we may not unreasonably look for this
further confirmation--and we find it. There _does_ exist such an
Arab population[161] of 70,000 souls, where no Arabs ever entered
as invaders or mercenaries. The Arabs of the Continent are military
bodies--these are given to commerce; their own traditions carry them
back nearly to the period of Sopater. They report their forefathers to
have come by sea, flying from the persecutions of Andalmaleh.
No tribes were driven forth by these persecutions: compromised
individuals only escaped.[162] The times and events prior to their
conversion are held by the Mussulmans as those of ignominy; and,
consequently, this population, having been by those refugees converted,
dated from that period and forgot all that preceded it: they were
grafted and took no account of the original stock. The same thing
precisely has happened in Morocco.
On their conversion the secret, which neither Alexander could extort
from Tyre, nor Rome from Carthage, would be surrendered, like the
architecture of Mauritania, to Islam; and thus it was that Vasco di
Gama, when he reached the Indian ocean, found the compass in common
use. It provokes no remark: it was not then the Chinese compass, but
the same as that which, in the Mediterranean, had been derived from the
Saracens.[163]
The only objection which I have not disposed of, is that of
Voltaire,--that the Saracens, if they had had the compass, would not
have left to us the discovery of America. I will here remark, that it
does not apply, because they did not navigate the Atlantic. It is good
against the Phœnicians. But who can assert that they did not discover
America?--the tradition of the _Atlantic Island_ cannot be explained
away:--knowing the dimensions of the earth they would not, like
Columbus, mistake America for India.[164] Beyond the Atlantic are to
be found traces of their worship, of their manufacture,[165] of their
symbols,[166] and even of the instrument by which the way was found.
The temples are placed according to the cardinal points.
Having now set aside every objection that has been raised, I proceed
to the indications or proofs contained in classical writing. Homer
speaks of vessels finding their way without pilots, gliding through the
waters as if endowed with natural organs.[167] The passage, it is true,
has been accepted as a poetic image;[168] in Virgil’s hands it is no
more. He speaks of “_keels_ feeling their way.” Homer was describing
_particular ships_, and those Phœnician--the name is indeed Phæacean: a
Hebrew lexicon will show that these two names apply to one people. The
Phæacians were remarkable for industry, wealth, and refinement; they
were distinguished by their “baths, beds, and changes of raiment.” They
were εὐδαίμονας χαὶ ἰσοθέους, “happy and equal to the gods,” neither
molesting nor being molested.[169] The daughter of their prince,
Nausicaa, has been chosen as the type of industry and purity; they
were, therefore, preeminently _noble_ and surprisingly _tranquil_; such
is the interpretation in Hebrew of the names by which they and their
island were known--_Phaik_[170] and _Carcar_;[171] Phæacia,[172] and
Corcyra. As if to prevent any doubt, Homer gives to the island another
name, or epithet, Σχερίη, the Hebrew for “_Mart_.”[173] The three
words, _Phaik_, _Corkura_, and _Scheria_, are meaningless in Greek, but
descriptive in the Phæacian; and Homer’s lines, shadowing forth the
mariner’s compass,[174] apply to their vessels.
By his golden arrow, Abaris “traversed the winds,” by it he “steered.”
Pythagoras forced him to reveal his secret.[175] There was then a
secret in reference to steering, not as to dexterity in _conning_ a
vessel, but in finding the point to which her course lay.
Hercules,[176] the symbol of Phœnician enterprise, departs on his
expedition for opening navigation to the westward, with a cup. This cup
he gets from Apollo, and it was destined of course to aid him on his
way; here is the cup of water in which the needle was floated.[177]
The name of Hercules is given to a _stone_--that stone so called
_is_ the magnet. Why should the magnet have been called the stone of
Hercules? The explanations offered are,--that it is emblematic of
strength in its attraction; or that it was found at Heraclea.[178] Here
is the magnet to polarise, floated in the cup.
Fuller alone has attributed to the Phœnicians this invention,[179] and
he does so solely on account of the Heraclean stone. “It could have
had no other meaning,” says he, “than the compass; possessing it, the
Tyrians must have carefully concealed it, consequently there is nothing
surprising in its having been lost;
“Sol’s golden bowl he entered to pass o’er
The hoary _ocean’s_ stream, and reached the shore,
The sacred depths of venerable night.”--STESICHORUS.
many arts have been lost--amongst others, the purple dye for which Tyre
was celebrated.”[180] He supposes it to have been first communicated
by Solomon to the Jews. Bochart,[181] in confuting him, uses the
argument which I have already disposed of--the impossibility of the
Phœnician steersman concealing what he was about, from the crew and
the passengers, often Greeks or Romans--the impossibility, that once
discovered, it should be lost. Those arts alone he owns, had perished
which belonged to luxury, not those which were of universal use; and
he concludes, that this invention is to be considered a benefit of God
reserved for the old age of the human race, in order that the Gospel
might be promulgated throughout the world. He adopts as the explanation
of the name Herculean, its being found near the town of Heraclea,
noticing but not meeting the objection, that in that case it would have
been called Heraclean. Lastly, he asks, why should the name be referred
to a Phœnician and not to a Greek Hercules? These are the objections of
the most learned of modern antiquaries, and urged by the most devoted
partisan of the Phœnicians.
So far Greek mythology and poetry; and taken in conjunction with the
explanation I have given of the cup, the stone, I think they are
conclusive: for there can be but one explanation for vessels endowed
with instinct _to find their way_, for an arrow _to steer_ _by_, for
a stone called by the name of the Columbus of antiquity, from the
association of a _stone_ and a _cup_ with navigation, and of the sun
with Hercules. But Hellas does not bound our sight: there are beyond
higher springs and more sacred fountains, and to these I pass on. The
Greek tongue has preserved, though it may have disfigured, the oracular
accents of Palestine.
In the abstract of the Cosmogony of Sanchoniathon, translated
into Greek by Philo Byblius, and preserved by Eusebius, these
words appear;--Ἐπενόησε Θεὸς Οὐρανὸς, Βαιτύλια, λίθους ἐμψύχους
μηχανησάμενος. “Ouranos contrived Batylia, stones with life.”
This has been taken to be a metaphorical representation of creative
power; but the _thing_ made or contained is mentioned, a thing well
known by its name; and being so named, it is then _described_ as
being stones with life. Besides the words of Homer, describing the
Phæacian ships, I know of no other passage in writings of antiquity,
in which inanimate bodies are so spoken of. The λίθους ἐμψύχους of
Sanchoniathon, and the νοήματα καὶ φρένας ἀνδρῶν of Homer, apply to the
same thing, the one being descriptive of the instrument, the other of
its effects. These Batylia are often mentioned, not on board ship, but
in temples; they are described by travellers down as late as the fourth
century of our era. They were many in number in the same temple. They
were not in all temples; I find no mention of them in any Greek temple,
or consequently in Greece or Asia Minor; the stones endowed with life,
might be supposed to mean statues, but these were not images nor things
that could be classed in any known category of objects of worship or
ornament. The Greek writers do not know what to make of them: they
looked upon them not as a mystery, but as a piece of necromancy: a
thousand wonderful things were narrated of them, amongst which were the
upturning of walls, and the capturing of cities; they were said to move
in the air, and to have little demons inside.[182] We are not, however,
destitute of description of their figure. They were in size and shape
like cricket balls, of a dark indistinct colour, πόρφυροτίδης, or
black; of the substance nothing is said.
The name Batylia is spoken of as Greek, and is given as the translation
of another term used by the Phœnicians. The Greeks, however, could
find no more a meaning for the word than for the thing; but as Greeks
always have recourse to a fable when they are in want of an etymology,
they gave us the following. When Rhea gave a stone instead of Jupiter
to Saturn, to cover the deceit she wrapped it in a skin: the skin was
Βαίτη, hence Batylia, but unluckily, _the very_ stone swallowed for
Jupiter, and which, at his son’s request, Saturn afterwards vomited,
was itself preserved at the temple of Delphi.[183] This is all that
Greek ingenuity can effect in the way of explanation. In this shape
this “indigesta moles” descends to the learned hands of modern critics.
What do the critics do with it? They look at it, handle it, turn it
over and over, taste it, chew it, kick it, and do everything with it
but explain it; exerting all the while the extremest ingenuity to
avoid the simple explanation before their eyes. Some make them to be
pillars set up like those of Hercules,[184] some “votive offerings,”
some “rocking stones,”[185] some “amulets.” Of course there is not a
shadow of ground for any one of these interpretations, and they are
each directly at variance with the description which the ancients have
left us of the thing; their explanation, in every case, consisting in
making out the thing to be different from that which it is described.
Some indeed go further, and scoff and jeer; set Sanconiathon right,
and undertake the revision of all the writers, and of all the copyists
who have ever described Batylia, or transcribed the description.
We learn by a line in Priscian, the name or _a_ name, by which the
Phœnicians knew them. He says, “they call _Abadir_, the stone given
by Rhea to Saturn;” elsewhere the word Abadir occurs, as said to be
applied by the Phœnicians to “unknown gods.” Abadir is not Hebrew, and
an emendation has been suggested by Bochard, _aban-dir_, which means
_round stone_.
These round stones[186] supply the last link in the chain. The magnet
must have been consulted with ceremonies, and considered as an oracle
or a god. When the vessels returned into harbour it would be carried to
the Temple, and exposed, like the other mysteries, to the gaze of the
vulgar and uninitiated. Here, laid up in the Temples, are the compasses
of the Phœnician argosies, preserved as sacred to the latter days of
Paganism, although the secret would have died out centuries before.
The Batylia would be placed only on board the vessels destined for
Lybia, Southern Africa, Spain, or Britain; and they would not be
shipped like a bale of goods, or invoiced like a case of instruments.
But whatever ceremonies were employed in Tyre, the Straits themselves
must have been the scene of the initiation connected with their use.
We may assume, with perfect confidence, that, in passing the Straits,
every means were taken that craft could devise or superstition enforce,
to preserve secret _all the means_ through which this exterior commerce
was carried on; whether the knowledge of the currents, the winds, the
tides, the seas, the shores, the people, or the harbours. The traffic
of the Phœnicians and Carthaginians was a mystery, and that mystery
lay beyond the Straits. The Phœnician vessel running herself on the
rocks that the Roman might not find the passage, tells the whole
story; and this secrecy was enforced by the most sanguinary code:
death was the penalty of indiscretion. We know from the Greek writers
that particular ceremonies were performed in passing the Straits. They
approached the Groves of Hercules with votive offerings, and departed
in haste, oppressed by the sanctity of the spot. _Hercules_ is the
name associated with these mysteries, which seem to possess all the
character of initiation, although there is no Dimeter, Dionysius, or
Astarte.
Sailors are a primitive people: like children, they retain usages
and traditions long forgotten by the other classes of a community.
This spot is above all others on earth, fitted to imbibe such a
superstition, and to retain such a ceremony. The races have remained
undisturbed: I therefore hoped to find, even still, some remnants, and
diligently made inquiries amongst Spaniards and Moors, but was not
rewarded by any discovery.[187]
But in one of the accounts of the Missionary expeditions to Morocco,
for the redemption of slaves, I fell upon a description of the
ceremony, as practised here down to the close of the seventeenth
century. The vessel was proceeding from Ceuta to Cadiz: the ceremony
was not performed on crossing between Europe and Africa, but on passing
through the Straits and passing outwards.[188] It is a pantomime, of
which that performed by our sailors in crossing the line might be
given as a description: it is in fact the copy, the old Phœnician
initiation, preserved down to the time when navigation took her new
spring; and at the very spot, and amongst the mariners who first
reached and passed the Equator, was by them transferred to the ideal
line of the Equator, mingling in strange and inexplicable incongruity
ancient mythology with modern science; and then changing Hercules, who
had nothing to do with the sea, for Neptune. The duckings with water
mean the ablution; the shaving and fining recall the oaths and penalty;
the white wig, the veil of the priests of Hercules; and the cooking
utensils are paraded in memory of the victim[189] and altar.
I now come to the last point which I shall notice: it is the one which
first suggested to me the thought; and in it are involved debated
questions of history and undescribed and unnoted geographical features.
When Don Henry established himself upon the western limit of the
world, to plan adventures over the then unexplored waste of waters,
it was the shade of Necho that beckoned him down the African coast;
led him on from cape to cape, and invited him from cluster to cluster
of its islands. At length Africa was turned; there was the Indian as
well as the Pacific ocean opened, and that wonderful discovery and
dominion--the colonization and commerce of the Portuguese established,
which dotted with their settlements the line of coast from the Pillars
of Hercules to China.
In Herodotus he found the voyage round the cape ordered by the Egyptian
king, and the return likewise ordered _by the Pillars_ of Hercules:
these orders were obeyed. The father of history, it is told, was
treated as a dreamer by his Roman and Alexandrian successors; but
the recent extension of knowledge has in every point confirmed his
statements, and shown that, five centuries B.C., more was known of
geography than in the golden age of Augustus.[190] Whether it be in
fixing the points of the Lybian deserts, or in tracing the outlines
of the Caspian Sea,[191] it is the old Greek who appears the accurate
modern; and the geographer of the time of the Cæsars, who is the
reporter of fables and of tales.[192] Thus do we find in antiquity, a
counterpart to our modern disputes, and Pliny, Mela, and Strabo, are
the prototypes of Rennell, Gosselin, and Mannert.
The events which throw light on the circumnavigation of Africa are. 1.
The expedition of Necho, as hearsay. 2. The Periplus of Hanno, in a
fragment copied, by an unknown hand, from a Carthaginian monument. The
voyage does not so appear to have extended beyond the western coast;
but Pliny, who had other data, carries it round to the Erythræan sea.
3. The traffic of the Carthaginians on the Gold coast.
The expedition of Necho[193] is flatly contradicted by Strabo, after
an examination of all the evidence. The same opinion was pronounced by
the school of Alexandria, Pomponius Mela, and Pliny, who contending for
at least the possibility of the voyage, do not so much as mention the
narrative of Herodotus, considering it doubtless a fable, because of
the asserted change of shadow, which to us is evidence of its reality.
Gosselin, after writing a learned work to prove that the statement of
Herodotus was correct, wrote a still more learned work to prove the
reverse. The new idea which had turned the current of his conclusions
was, _the impossibility of such a voyage without the compass_. Major
Rennell presses him with objections, asserting the consistency of the
narrative, and authority of the evidence, and, arguing against the
objection, says, that “the barks of the ancients were adapted for
coasting navigation, could keep close in shore, and might be hauled
up on the beach. This voyage, immense as it was, did not therefore
necessitate any venturesome entrance into the open sea--they needed
not to have lost sight of the land even for a day.”
Heeren seats himself on the bench, and sums up, and without combating
M. Gosselin, decides against him. “This gentleman’s arguments,” he
says, “amount to nothing; for _are we_ in a situation to judge of the
perfection of Phœnician navigation? Nations accustomed to coasting
navigation are generally much better acquainted with its difficulties
than _great_ sea-faring nations. It has been recently ascertained
that the difficulties in reaching the Cape from the Red Sea, are not
so great as from the Mediterranean. All here combined to facilitate
the progress of the expedition.” Yet these favourable circumstances,
however, served only until the coast of Guinea was reached, and thence
“to the Straits of Gibraltar, was _the most difficult part of the
voyage_.”
Why does Heeren slur over the difficulty of which he is evidently
aware? Was it that, placed in a dilemma between the desire of deciding
a controversy, and the fear of risking his character for “critical
discrimination,” he had recourse to a little mystification?[194]
For those who have the compass, it is true that the difficulties are
less in coming from the Red Sea, but exactly the reverse for those who
have it not:--a vessel sailing from the Guinea coast to the Straits of
Gibraltar, must keep far out to sea.[195]
Gosselin was perfectly right in his second work, when he said that
the circumnavigation of Africa was impossible without the compass,
as he was right in his first, when he asserted that it had been
circumnavigated. There is no contradiction between the two propositions.
Such difficulties surround, and such dangers attend that navigation,
that I do not understand how we to-day could navigate that coast, were
the magnetic needle to lose its virtue. Impelled by the eddy from
America, the Atlantic draws down the African shore. There is below
Mogadore a night breeze from the sea; the land is low, and stretches in
a line of sand-banks or breakers. There are no inlets and no shelter,
and certain destruction awaits the mariner on a lee shore, on which a
current sits. Their vessels did not lie closer to the wind than seven
points, and could never get off. Is this a navigation to be performed
by creeping along the shores and dragging up vessels on the beach at
night? and for five hundred miles of the northern coast, there is
a continuous range of breakers without shelter of any kind, and no
port which can be entered except over a bar, and in fine weather, so
that there is a wholly inaccessible coast, equal in length to the
Mediterranean sea.
Major Rennell, in his work on the “currents of the Atlantic,” estimates
the daily easting of a vessel at _seventeen miles_, so that between
the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Madeira islands, a vessel is carried
out of her dead reckoning to the eastward, according to the length
of the voyage, _from eighty to two hundred miles_. It is thus, that
so frequently vessels with chronometer, quadrant, charts, and log,
besides compass, have been wrecked on the African coast, when believing
themselves to be in the longitude of Teneriffe, or even further to
the westward. One of the sufferers, Ryley, master of an American
vessel, has given us a lively description of such a scene, and of
the shore on which it occurred;[196] and has assigned as the cause
of his misfortune, the indraught both of current and wind, and the
impossibility of getting off the coast when once thus got upon it. Even
after his vessel had struck he could see no land.
And what is the fate of the survivors? Death by thirst or slavery.
The nature of the inhabitants has no more changed than that of the
shore:--what the one spares, the other will devour.
The land of Europe is high: its coasts are provided with harbours,
tides run along it, and vessels can tide their way; but the African
coast is unseen till you are upon it; there is no escape when
within reach of it. It lies all along the course of the voyage; it
presents certain destruction to the vessel, and if evitable death,
inevitable slavery to the crew. The coasters of the Mediterranean, the
circumnavigators of Europe, the monsoon traders of India, were not
matched with the difficulties of such a sea; they were unacquainted
with the terrors of such a land.[197]
After the Phœnician time every endeavour to navigate this coast failed,
and amongst the adventurers, one Eudoxus seems to have been a man of
extraordinary resources, energy, and perseverance. For nearly two
thousand years, the coast south of the Straits of Gibraltar remained
unvisited by the traders of the seas, who were constantly entering in
at, and issuing from, these straits, and thence pursuing voyages for
thousands of miles within and without. The passage--if I may so call
it--along the coast, was re-opened only after the compass had been
re-discovered, and then only after long and persevering efforts; but
as soon as the westernmost cape was doubled, all the world lay open,
and there was no further difficulty in reaching India on the East, and
the new continent on the West, the discovery of which was in reality
effected as a consequence.
The opinion which I had formed on the spot respecting the navigation
of the coast, is entirely confirmed by all naval authorities. I never
met an officer, knowing the coast, who, on the question being put to
him, did not answer of Africa, “without the compass it is impossible
to navigate the coast.” The statements of Herodotus, the Periplus
of Hanno, the sea traffick of the Carthaginians on the Gold Coast,
present no difficulty, if you admit the stone of Hercules, the cup of
Apollo, the arrow of Abaris, and the Batylia to have any meaning; and
you must reject several of the most authoritative statements of history
if you will not.
I must apologise for the space I have devoted to this antiquarian
subject. The matter is so incidental to the spot, and interwoven with
the patron of these volumes, that, however at variance my conclusions
may be with the host of the Olympus of history, I could not omit them.
Whatever be the verdict of the reader on other parts of the case,
it can only be favourable as to the objections which our highest
authorities have raised. I have proved its case to be compatible with
secresy;--and if it was secret it could be lost. I have shown in the
method first practised by the Arabs, the instrument to which the
otherwise meaningless myths of Greece refer. I have identified the
stone of Hercules, the cup of Apollo, the arrow of Abaris, the Batylia
of Sanchoniathon, the Abadir of the Temple of Hierapolis. That the
“Stone of Hercules” was the magnet no one contests. I have shown from
extrinsic evidence, that our instrument is not Chinese, and that it was
associated with ancient augury; and I have found a people stretching
through that chasm of years,--from pagan Rome to Christian science,--a
people of Phœnicians, who, away from Europe, preserved the faith and
industry of their sunk metropolis, and could transmit the magnet from
Hercules to Flavio de Gioja.
The polarity of the needle, the art of manufacturing gems, which did
not die with them,--were of the secrets not hidden from Tyre. Her
story, by their aid, ceases to be a vision, and becomes a state;--her
greatness descends from its cloud, and walks the earth.
FOOTNOTES:
[126] “Numberless passages of Greek and Latin authors prove that _the
ancients_, when they lost sight of land, had no other guide than the
stars.”--PUGENS, _Trésor des Origines_, p. 190.
[127] “Had the Saracens known the compass, it was for them to have
discovered America.”--VOLTAIRE, _Ep. sur les Mœurs_, c. cxlix.
[128] The Phœnician name for the compass was interpreted by the Greeks
“unknown gods.”
[129] This was written before the appearance of Mr. Smith’s interesting
work on the “Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul.” He has vindicated
ancient seamanship as to dimensions of vessels, length of voyage,
working, &c. One deficiency in that work has been supplied by Humboldt
in “Cosmos,” in reference to calculation of distances, or the “Log.”
[130] The original names of Greece and the Islands, of Asia Minor,
the Black Sea, Spain, France, Italy, and England, are indelible
monuments of the presence and wisdom of the Phœnicians. Plato refers
reverentially to the men who gave the first names. Bochart, in the
preface to “Pheleg,” enumerates about 400 names; for instance,
Parnassus, Ithaca, Malaga, Samos, Marathon, which are without meaning
in Greek. It is descriptive in Hebrew and Arabic,--that is, in
Phœnician.
[131]
Τὸ πόρσω
Δ’ ἔσι σοφοῖς ἄβατον
κᾀσόφοις, οὺ μὴν διὠξω κενὸς εἴην.
PIND. _Olymp._ 3.
He is speaking of the region beyond the Pillars.
[132] In the twelfth century, B.C., Thschen-li records a measurement of
the solstitial shadow, which La Place found accordant with the theory
of the alteration of the obliquity of the Ecliptic. _Cosmos_.
The Babylonian astronomical observations sent by Callisthenes to
Greece, have been calculated by Simplicius to extend back 1903 years
before Alexander the Great.
Mr. Colebrooke has settled the date of one of the Vedas to be the
fourteenth century B.C., by the place given to the solstitial points in
a calendar appended to it.
“That the planets and their courses, the comets and theirs, that
gravitation and repulsion were perfectly familiar to the priests of
Memphis, though unknown to, or rather repudiated by, the most learned
and philosophical of the Greeks, cannot to-day be questioned. They know
the milky way to be composed of fixed stars, and the sun to be a fixed
star.”--DRUMMOND’S _Origines_, b. iv. c. 6; b. vii. c. 8.
“Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the French astronomers
found with surprise that there existed in Siam a mode of calculating
eclipses by successive operations worked with numbers apparently
arbitrary. The key of this method has been long lost.”--_Occult
Sciences_, vol. i. p. 191.
[133] Unless the words of Rabelais are to stand for the precocious
discrimination of his age:--“Qu’est devenu l’art d’evoquer des cieux la
foudre et le feu céleste, jadis enseigné par le sage Prométhée?”
[134] “Guided by Numa’s books, Tullius used the same ceremonies,
but through inaccuracy (_parum ritè_) he perished, struck by the
lightning.”--LUCIUS PISO apud PLINY, _Hist. Nat._ 1. xxviii. cap. 11.
Livy uses the expression _pravâ religione_.
[135] “Fulmineo periit imitator fulminis ictu.”--OVID. _Metam_. 1. xiv.
v. 617.
[136] Suidas, verbo “Zoroaster.” See also Müller.
[137] This word is found in the _pharanks_ or dictionaries of the
Persians, and is described as the iron-attracting stone. It is
mentioned in the Talmud. It was known to the Hindoos, as it was to the
Greeks and Romans.
[138] Those assumed are “Buxus, Buxolus, Buxola, Bussola,
Boussole.”--MENAGE. “Buso, _Ital._ eye of a needle.”--COVARRUVIAS.
“Boxel, _English_.”--POUQENS. “Bruxa, _Spanish_, sorcerer.” “Boursole,
_French_, little purse.”--P. LABBE.
[139] This figure being now a _Fleur de Lis_, the French claim the
invention. The profound Germans surrender it to them as a national
property. Voltaire, however, remarks that the Fleur de Lis was the
cognizance of Naples at the time of Flavio de Gioja.
[140] The term “Mouassola” is preserved to this day among the
Mussulmans in connection with their religious edifices. It signifies
the square open space corresponding with the Fane of the Etruscans, in
which the two festivals of the Bairam are held, and where consequently
the Mussulman _sacrifice_ is performed. The connection is evident, but
how it is to be established I am not at present prepared to say. Cf.
Hariri. Chresth. Arabe, i. 191; iii. 167.
[141] I picked up this little work at a book-stall of Cadiz. A Spanish
translation is printed, page for page with the Arabic, and thus it was
that I fell upon the word. It so happened that I chanced on it midway
between the two seas. Consult Khabil Dhaheri. Apud Ch. Arabe, ii. 13
_et seq._
[142] Tiraboschi, iv. 1. xi. § 35; Andrea, _Orig. D’Ogni Letter_.;
Gueguenné, _Hist. de la lit. Italienne_, iv.
[143] Consult El Edrisi on the “Straits of Babel-Mandel,” the “Arabian
Book of Stones,” as quoted by Bailak Kibdjak, the “Treasury of
Wonders,” as quoted by El Edrisi; Ptolom. i. vi. 2; Palladius, de
Gentibus Indiæ; S. Ambrosius, de Moribus Brachmanorum; Anonymus, de
Bragmanibus: ed. Bissæus, Lond. 1665.
[144] P. Martini (Hist. p. 106), P. Amiot (Abrégé chronologique de
l’histoire de la Chine, contained in the collection of the Mémoires
sur les Chinois, tom. xiii.), Mailla (Hist. Gener. de la Chine, Paris,
1777, tom. i. p. 317), P. Gaubil (Astronomie Chinoise), Sir G. Staunton
(Embassy to China), M. Roding (Dict. Polyglotte de Marine), W. Josh.
Hager (Dissert. sur la Boussole), contend that from time immemorial
the Chinese were in possession of the magnet. That the compass came
from the Chinese to the Europeans, through the Arabs, is maintained by
Bergeron (Hist. des Sarrazins, p. 119). Riccioli (Geogr. et Hydrogr.
Ven. 1672.) Mention is made of the compass _afloat_ in the third and in
the fifth centuries of our era. “There were then (Tsin dynasty) ships
directed to the south by the needle.”--_Poi-wen-jeu-fou_, or Great
Encyclopedia.
[145] Arago, in the Annales de Chimie, t. xxxii. p. 214; Brewster,
Treatise on Magnetism, 1837, p. 111; Baumgarten, in the Zeitschrift für
Phys. und Mathem. bd. ii. s. 419.
[146] Humboldt, Examen critique de l’Histoire de la Géographie, t. iii.
p. 36.
[147] Cosmos, vol. i. p. 169.
[148] Klaproth speaks of the “cardinal” points, not apprehending the
value of the term. In Meredith the “four points” are given in Chinese,
so also _Cut-Leet_ (Cutlet).
[149] “Those who have not been in India cannot know how all-important
the division of everything into sixteen parts is, or some multiple or
sub-multiple of that number: not only is the money of the country so
divided, and all the weights and measures, but all property is divided
into annas (sixteenths): in conversation it is the usual expletive of
quantity.”--FERGUSON’S _Hindostan_, Intro., p. 12.
[150] The passage of Brunetto Latini (_Lib. du Tresor_, MSS. du
Roi, No. 7609), is too well known to quote; but I subjoin a curious
fragment of a letter, attributed to him, which was published in the
“Monthly Review” of June, 1802. It appears to me to be of indubitable
authenticity. He is describing the wonders shown him by Roger Bacon,
who was a disciple of the Arabs, and had studied at Cordova, like
Gerbert, Abelard, and all the distinguished men of the period:--“La
magnete pierre laide et noire, ob el fer volontiers se joint, lon
touche ob une aiguillet et en festue lon fischie (fix it on a piece of
reed); puis lon mette en laigue (float it on the water) et se tient
dessus, et la pointe se torne contre l’estoille: quand la nuit fut
tenebrous, et lon ne voie estoille ni lune, poet li mariner tenir
droite voie.”
“Acus ferrea, postquam adamantem contigerit, ad stellam
septentrionalem, quæ, velut axis firmamenti, aliis vergentibus, non
movetur, semper convertitur, unde valde necessarius est navigantibus in
mari.”--JAC. DE VIT. _Histor. Hyerosolymit._ c. 89, A.D. 1215.
[151] Univ. Hist. vol. xviii. p. 213. Müller’s Etrüsker, “On the
Temple,” vol. iii. Niebuhr’s Rome, app. to vol. ii. p. 624.
[152] The name _Cardaces_ among the Persians is said to be derived from
“courage,” “virtue.” Such words are generally derived from the names of
tribes whose qualities are thus conveyed.
[153] Thus, on the north coast of Africa, the south wind is called
_Giblu_, the north wind _Baharu_, because the one blows from the
mountains, the other from the sea.
[154] The Tasguments, Jonathan and Onkelos, say that the ark rested,
the former on _Kardon_, the latter on _Kardu_.--DRUMMOND’S Origines,
vol. i. p. 69.
[155] Four thousand years ago the polar star was apud Draconis. See
Herschell on the Entrance to the Pyramid of Gizeh, _apud_ Vyse.
[156] _P’hn_ does occur in the hieroglyphics as the name of a people,
but who they are is not known. _Sharu_ is the general name given to the
Phœnicians or “Celequins,” as the Turks say to-day _Shaerli_, otherwise
the name of the town is used. As Homer has it: “Speak of the fortress
in the waters, Taru of the Sea is its name. Water is carried to it in
boats. It has fishes for bread.” British Museum Papyrus, Pl. Lv.
[157] From תוזרפ _perazoth_, dwellers in unwalled villages.
[158] Our best vessels are on the lines of the old French, which in the
time of Louis XIV. were copied from the Turks, who had them from the
Byzantine Greeks, who originally derived them from the Phœnicians.
[159] Herodotus, l. ii. c. 44. President Goguet, Origines des Lois,
vol. ii. p. 114. Drummond’s Origines, vol. iii. p. 94.
[160] The word _P’hen_ occurs, though I believe only once, in our
Egyptian monuments as the name of a people: who the people were is
uncertain.
[161] These statements rest on the authority of Sir Alexander Johnson.
An account of these people is given in Pridhane’s Ceylon, p. 470-480.
The Cingalese call them _Marakkalaya_, which means boatmen; they are
_Sheas_, while the Mussulmans of the continent are _Souni_.
[162] Towards the end of his reign an insurrection took place, of which
the field lay principally at Bussorah; but in this case we know that
the defeated insurgents retreated northward to seek the protection of
the Turks.--See Ockley, vol. ii. p. 372.
[163] At the beginning of the eleventh century the western Arabs
were not in possession of the compass, for the astronomer Ebu Youni
constructed a table by which to find the Kibleh.
[164] Columbus, on reaching dry land westward, wrote, “The world is not
so large _as is supposed_.”
[165] Glass, for instance, not as a native product, but as an exotic.
[166] Such as “the Seal of Solomon.”
[167] “Homer, in the Odyssey, says that the Greeks used the needle in
the time of the siege of Troy: thus it is certain that the polarity of
the magnet and the mariner’s compass were discoveries which date back
3000 years.”--BUFFON, t. xii. p. 386. This passage is often quoted to
throw ridicule on the supposition. The only mistake of Buffon was in
reading as general the description which in Homer was particular and
restricted.
[168]
Οὔ γὰρ φαιήκεσσι κυβερνητῆρες ἔασιν,
Οὐδέ τι πεδαλι’ ὲστὶ, τά τ’ ἄλλαι νῆες ἔχουσιν,
Ἀλλ’ αὐταὶ ἴσασι νοήματα καὶ φρένας ἀνδρῶν.
_Od._ θ. 557.
[169]
Οὔ γὰρ φαιήκεσσι μέλει βιός, οὐδὲ φαρέτρην.
Ἀλλ’ ἴστοι καὶ ὲρετμὰ νεῶν, καὶ νηἔς ἐἴσαι,
Ηἴσιν ὰγενόμενοι, πολιτὴν περόωσι θαλάσσην.
_Od._ γ’. 370.
[170] ךיאפ φαἴακ
[171] “Carcar, inde רקרק carcar, quiescere et in tuto esse significat.
An inde dicta est Corcyra, in qua Phæaces per multa sæcula tuto et
pacate vixisse constat.”--Chonaan l. i. cxxiii. Whence also Carcer. The
name is preserved in Barhary and Spain in Carcer.
[172] The name of the Slaavs and that of the Shelloks (Ama-zirgeh) are
derived in the same manner, also the Etruscan states Ardea (noble); for
from it was taken by Rome the institution which made Rome noble and
great--the fecial vows and college, _i.e._ heraldry, or the laws of
war.--See Servius on Æn. vii. v. 412.
[173] ארחס, Shara. Isaiah (xxiii. 3) applies the same epithet to
Sidon, _Shar-goim_, “mart of nations.” This is the _Sharu_ of the
hieroglyphics.
[174] “We can discern why their good fortune ceased after this
separation, under the reign of Alcinous, if the Phocians (Phæacians)
renounced navigation. Was it not that the instruments (mariner’s
compass), obtained from their masters were lost, and they knew not how
to construct others?”--Salverte, _Occult Sciences_, f. ii. p. 251. See
also Cook’s “Inquiry into the Patriarchal and Druidical Religion,” p.
22.
[175] See Jamblicus, Vit. Pythagor. c. xxviii.; Diod. Sic. l. iii. c.
xi.; Herodot. l. iv. c. 36; Suidas _Verbo_ Abaris.
[176] One of the recent flippant writers on ancient things says, “The
most famous bowl of antiquity was that of Hercules, which served its
illustrious owner in the double capacity of drinking-cup and canoe;
for, when he had quenched his thirst, he could set it afloat, and,
leaping into it, steer to any part of the world he pleased. Some,
indeed, speak of it as a borrowed article, belonging originally to the
sun, and in which the god used nightly to traverse the ocean from west
to east.”--ST. JOHN’S _Ancient Greece_, vol. ii. p. 114.
[177] The statue of Hercules at Tarentum, enumerated by Pliny in his
list of Colossi, had a _key_ in one hand and a _cup_ in the other. On
the coins of Crotona Hercules bore a cup in his hand.
[178] Ἡράκλεια δὲ ἤ διὰ τὸν ἴσχυρὸν καὶ κρατερὸν τῆς ὁλκης, ἤ μᾶλλον
δίοτι περὶ Ἡράκλειαν τὸν πρῶτον ἐφάνη.--HESYCHIUS.
[179] Incidental suppositions are scattered through various works. See
Lavinius Lemnius, De Occult. Nat. Mir., 1. i. c. iii.; Buffon; J. de
Pineda, De Rege Salomone; Fortuesto, William Cook, Stukely, &c. I do
not include Sir William Bethune; the grounds of his supposition are so
preposterous. It is from the supposed resemblance of a vessel to the
compass actually in use that Sir W. Bethune starts. See the practical
exposure as given in Dennis’s Etruria, vol. ii. p. 105.
[180] Miscell. Sacra, 1. iv. c. 19.
[181] Canaan, 1. i. c. 98. See also H. Kepping, Antiq. Rom. 1. iii. c.
6.
[182] Εἴδον τὸν Βαίτυλον διὰ τοῦ δέρος κινούμενον.--DAMASCIUS. Εἴναι
τίνα Δαίμονα τὸν κινοῦντα αὐτόν.--ISIDORUS.
[183]
Τὸν μὲν Ζεὺς στήριξε κατὰ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης
Πυθοὶ ἐν ὴγαθέη, γυάλοις ὑπο Παρνήσοιο,
Σἤμ’ ἔμεν ἐξοπίσω, θαῦμα θνητοἴσι βροτοἴσι.
HESIOD. _Theo._ 498.
[184] Drummond, after laughing at Bochart, says, “But, after all that
has been said, the _etymology_ of the word appears to me to be very
plain;” and then proceeds to show that “Baitulos” was no more than
Jacob’s “Beth-el,” forgetting that the word was Greek, not Hebrew, or,
if not forgetting, disposing of the objection as follows: “Those _who
would rather_ derive it from the Greek may consult,” &c.--_Origines_,
vol. iii. p. 215-435.
[185] The ancients have described rocking-stones, but never called them
“Baitula.”--See Apoll. Rhod. Argon. l. i.; Pliny, Nat. Hist. vol. ii.
c. 28. For some amusing learning on the subject, see Moore’s Hist. of
Ireland, vol. i. p. 39-59. See also Dissert. sur les Bætyles, Mém. de
l’Académie, vol. vi.; Rem. de l’Abbé Bautier, vol. vii. p. 241.
[186] During the Catalonian insurrection of 1834, the name _Patulea_
was given to the insurgents. Whence it has been derived, I have
been unable to discover. In Portugal it has recently been adopted.
The insurgents were called Patulea, the chiefs _Conocedos_, or “the
known.” This return to the “Unknown gods,” of the Greeks, if a mere
coincidence, is a curious one.
[187] In the course of them I came upon a singular instance of popular
memory. I was sitting with a Braber baker of Tangier, on the promontory
looking towards Spain, and asking him the names of places, to see if I
could identify in their recollections some of the old Iberian names: he
directed my attention to a white streak on the coast opposite, and then
said, “There is Belon.” The place has disappeared for 1500 years, and
no Spaniard knows the name.
[188] “Le lendemain matin on fit la cérémonie ordinaire quand on passe
le Detroit. Un homme de l’équipage tenant un livre à la main, la
commença par faire un serment sur ce livre pour tous ceux du vaisseau.
_Par ce serment il voulut distinguer ceux qui avoient déjà passé le
Detroit d’avec ceux qui ne l’avoient pas encore passé_, et en même
temps il faisoit promettre a tous ceux de l’équipage de faire la même
cérémonie toutes les fois qu’ils le passeroient. Après il parut sur le
pont une compagnie de jeunes matelots avec un tambour, chacun ayant
une moustache. Cette compagnie avoit pour armes tous les instrumens
de la cuisine. Ceux qui n’avoient pas encore passe le Detroit,
payerent pour n’etre point baptisé une seconde fois. Personne n’est
exempt--capitaine, officiers, matelots, passageurs, et _la vaisseau
même_ doivent si c’est la première fois qu’on a passé le Detroit; un
matelot, n’ayant jamais, voulut rien donner, fut mis le cul dans un
baquet, et on l’injetta sur le corps une quinzaine de séaux d’eau de
mer. Assurément il a du se souvenir de ce second baptême (permettez moi
cette comparaison) plus que du premier. Pour mieux prouver qu’on a déjà
passé le Detroit, il faut dire, le mois et l’année qu’on l’a passé, le
nom du capitaine et du vaisseau sur lequel on étoit.”--_Trois Voyages
au Maroc_, p. 179.
This is not the only nautical ceremony with a classical origin. A
former traveller in Greece thus describes a launch,--“A crown of
flowers is placed on the bow, then καραβοκήρι, or master, raises a
jar of wine to his lips, and then pours it on the deck. Nothing can
be more beautifully classical. It were to be wished that we could
trace the ceremony which takes place amongst us to this source, and
not consider it an imitation of one of the most sacred rites of our
religion.”--DOUGLAS, p. 65.
[189] No ancient or modern European language affords an etymology for
the nautical designation of a fire-place--_Cabouse_. It is Arabic, and
means “a thing consecrated to a mosque.” In Pagan times it would be
the temple or the sacrifice. The Phœnician vessels had their altars
and their gods, _Patacoi_. Nautical terms, of which the etymology is
unknown, are generally traceable to the Phœnicians--for instance,
_Davit_ in Arabic, a bent piece of wood. Cabouse and Davit have
disappeared from the Mediterranean, and must have been left amongst us
by the Phœnicians.
[190] See the chapter on the land trade of the Carthaginians in
Heeren’s Researches, the most valuable portion of his comprehensive
work.
[191] Strabo makes the Caspian Sea, a gulf of the Northern Ocean.
[192] “Geographical knowledge had existed and ceased before the classic
age of Greece arose.”--GROVER’S _Voice from Stonehenge_.
[193] “That Africa is clearly surrounded by the sea, except where
it borders on Asia, Necho, King of the Egyptians, was the first,
_we know_, to demonstrate. That prince, _having finished his
excavations for the canal leading out of the Nile into the Arabian
gulf_, despatched certain natives of Phœnicia on ship-board, _with
orders to sail back_ through the Pillars of Hercules into the north,
(Mediterranean) Sea, and so to return into Egypt. The Phœnicians
consequently, having departed out of the Erythræan sea, proceeded on
their voyage in the Southern Sea: when it was autumn, they would push
ashore, and, sowing the land, whatever might be the part of Lybia they
had reached, await there till the harvest time: having reaped their
corn they continued their voyage. Thus, after the lapse of two years,
and passing through the Pillars of Hercules in the third, they came
back into Egypt, and stated what is not credible to me, but may be so,
perhaps, to others,--namely, that in their circumnavigation of Libya,
_they had the sun upon the right hand_.”--HEEREN, ii. c. 44.
[194] The following passage from Heeren well illustrates, in the
incoherence of each sentence, the consciousness that the people
he described was too large for his grasp. “But, _leaving_ these
distinct voyages of _discovery_ out of the question, the extent to
which this enterprising people carried their _regular_ navigation is
truly wonderful. _Though_ voyages across the open seas have been the
_consequence_ of our _acquaintance with the new world_ beyond the
Atlantic; _yet_ their hardy and adventurous spirit led them to find
_a substitute_ for _it_, in stretching _from coast to coast_ into the
_most distant regions_. _The long series of centuries_ during which
they were exclusively the masters of the seas, gave them _sufficient
time_ to make this gradual progress, which perhaps was the more
_regular_ and _certain_ in proportion _to the time_ it occupied. The
Phœnicians carried the nautical art to the highest point of perfection
at _that time_ required, or of which it was _then_ capable.”
[195] A vessel proceeding from the Bight of Benin to any point of the
coast, northwards, has first to make and pass the equator, steering
south and west till she has done so. She then hauls up to the west and
north, and runs eastward only after she is to the northward of her port.
[196] In the north the coast is sufficiently dangerous. In my cruise
along it in 1845, I had in company, or saw only four vessels: two of
these went ashore, the other two were wrecked, the one an English
brigantine, the other a French steamer of war. Eighty souls perished.
[197] The supposed anterior discovery of the Canaries by a Norman
rover would be no argument, for these islands may be reached without
encountering the principal difficulties of the enterprise. And further
at the time of the alleged discovery, the compass may have been in
use in the north of Europe. The coins of the Baltic show the intimacy
there of the Saracens from the first century of the Hejira, and African
settlers in England are entered in Doomsday Book. The use of it in the
north, long before its employment by the Portuguese, has been asserted
by various writers, not only as derived from the Arabs, but also as
original, or derived from the Chinese.
“Il’ est certain que les marins des côtes de Normandie et de Bretagne
employaient dès le xiii siècle l’aiguille aimanée sous le nom de
_marinette_.”--_Esmenard._
“Raymondus Lullus in 1272 describes a compass used by the Basques and
Catalonians.”--_Cosmos_, vol. ii. p. 474.
“The Fins have a compass which possesses the peculiarity of indicating
the rising and setting of the sun--which must be in the figures round
it, as in the Chinese compass--in summer and winter, in a manner
that can only agree with the latitude 49° 20´.”--SALVERTE, _Occult
Sciences_, tom. ii. p. 252.
BOOK II.
THE COUNTRY OF THE ROVERS.
CHAPTER I.
OFF SALEE.
November 30.
A Heaven of pale blue is reflected in the Atlantic; there is not a
speck above nor a breath below; there is nothing that tells of Atlas
or of Africa--no cloud-capped and snow-clad peaks overshadowing the
ocean, or pillaring the sky. The land is low and tame; but on nearing
it along the water’s edge, a fast-set fence of breakers appears,
which would crush in an instant the _Baron Renfrew_, or _Ptolemy
Philopator’s_ fifty-decker: in memory of such incidents, no doubt,
Antæus honoured Neptune with a temple of human heads. These horrid
fangs, now covered with foam and now left bare, might well suggest the
idea of a dragon-guarded land. Calm as it is, at a distance of three or
four miles from the shore we hear the surf like distant thunder: the
spray, on the rolling in of every wave, shoots up as if a succession of
mines were fired by a train. In this merciless fence the gaps are few
and far between, hard to find, and, when found, harder still to enter
by. Along the distance we have run, there are but three openings where
small craft might find refuge, but then only when such refuge is not
wanted; that is to say, with calm weather, a leading wind, a tranquil
sea, and a full tide. A vessel caught in a westerly gale would have a
lee-shore (and what a lee-shore!) stretching in a right line for five
or six hundred miles, without a promontory behind which to shelter,
or a port for which to make, and (towards the south) with a current
incessantly setting upon the breakers.
It would seem strange that there should be this surf, not only with
a perfect calm, but with a glass-like sea. There was, however, where
we lay, a slight heaving of the water; and these heaves, as they bore
landwards, became, within a mile of the coast, billows, and then dashed
upon it with the extremest fury, as if the Atlantic, in contact with
Africa, required not the aid of wind, but shook it with the spontaneous
heaves of its majestic breast. We lay for hours with the same marks
on--as if we had been a rock. The tide rises and falls upon the shore,
but does not run along the land. The Atlantic merely heaves up and
down, but shifts not its place. It is met in front by a straight line;
and the tidal currents of the coast of Europe are stopped at the
great indraught of the Straits of Gibraltar; so that to the southward
there extends a region of some hundred miles of dead water. Hence the
violence of the action of the waves upon the shore. With our indented
and slanting coasts, there is always a current running in front of the
land, which serves as a breakwater against the effects of the rise and
fall of the tide: here there is no such protection. In like manner may
be explained the incessant disturbance of the Bay of Biscay: the horns
break the tides along the shore, and the Atlantic surges in upon the
congested waters. Below Rabat a current begins to be sensible; it runs
south. At Mogadore it reaches the speed of three knots an hour. There
are combined to produce it, the sweep of the back eddy of the Atlantic,
and the nightly gales which blow from the sea into the interior of
Africa to supply the rarification of the Great Desert. This nightly
indraught begins only at the province of Sus; to the north the ordinary
land and sea winds prevail. In these latitudes it is calm at sun-rise
and sun-set. The breeze freshens by night from the land, by day from
the sea--the former breathing a gentle gale, the second reaching to a
top-gallant breeze.
The sand is not blown up from the sea, as some have supposed, nor down
from the Desert. In travelling over it, you would suppose that you were
crossing a rocky country.
On the coast its structure is exposed, and there it appears to be a
bank of sand, with a coast of stone. Worn by the waves, the unsupported
rock comes tumbling down, and the fragments often sticking on the edge
form the breakwater. The “conformably overlying” rock, is an induration
of the sand by oxide of iron; sand, newly exposed, immediately begins
to crust.
This bank must have been left by the waters of the deluge, escaping
westward, charged with the sand of the interior. This idea was first
suggested to me by the deposits on both sides of the rock of Gibraltar.
The sand blocks up to its very roofs a cavern which opens to the
eastward.
Thus have been estranged the land and the water, and the approach to
each is closed from the other. Such is the defence of Morocco on the
ocean side: its iron-bound coast on the Mediterranean is scarcely a
less formidable bulwark. To the east, and to the south, it is encircled
by deserts and wildernesses. I had subsequently the satisfaction to
find that this fence of rocks had not failed to fix the attention of
the ancients. An old author, quoted by Suidas, says, that “rocks,
to which the name _Harmata_,[198] was given, were strewed along the
shore by Hercules to defend it from the approach of wild beasts.” The
beasts are ships, to which the names of animals were given--from the
figure-heads this fertile source of mythological personation has given
us Pegasus, the Ram of Phryxus, the Bull of Europa.
December 1st. We are still off our port ranging up and down, and unable
to enter, although we have the most beautiful weather and the calmest
sea! We cannot enter without a leading wind, that is, from the west,
and if it blows from the west, we must run one hundred and fifty miles
for shelter. A Portuguese on board, familiar with the coast, calls the
ports of Barbary “excommunicated.” Last year a schooner was detained
seven months before it could get away, and then had to sail with only
half its cargo.
[Illustration]
We have viewed at our leisure the city of Salee and Rabat, and their
environs. It is a strange place and country. The land is a series of
long, gentle, bare, sweeping drives, at the edge cut out into cliffs
and cones as if with a pastry cutter. About three miles north of Salee
we descried, through the mists of spray, a magnificent palace. It
changed to a gaunt ruin. A little further on there is a _kubbe_, or
saint’s tomb, surmounted by a dome, like the tombs of Judæa and India.
Next comes the point of Salee, and over it flutters the red flag of
the “Rovers.” Gardens surround the town, and a few palm trees are seen
among them. Between Salee and Rabat the river enters the sea over the
bar. Rabat is imposing with its fortresses. The great tower stands on
elevated ground at the bottom of the harbour. Rabat was built at the
close of the twelfth century to facilitate--though the Moors were in
possession of Ceuta and all the northern coast--the best expedition
then directed against Spain. Across this bar was launched a large part
of those hordes which followed Jacob Almanzor, and of that expedition
under his successor, of half a million of men, which have immortalised
the Navas de Tolosa.
The Moorish empire then extended in Africa above a thousand miles from
east to west; and five hundred and fifty, in its broadest part, from
north to south. It included also one half of Spain, and menaced the
remainder. It embellished Africa as well as Seville and Cordova, with
some of the noblest structures that any age has produced. It caused
arts and science to flourish amidst the ravages of war. Rabat outshone
the “court” of Morocco,--merchants gathered to share in its commerce,
and professors to teach in its schools.
A Roman-like aqueduct still strides along the plain, and from the
tower, raised to supply the want of mountains, the fleets of foes, or
the convoys of friends, could be descried for twenty leagues at sea.
This meteor capital of the “west” was seen, and then vanished. It was
laid low in the wars of the Almohadis and the Benemerines.
Further to the south, there are long lines of low white walls connected
with a small building, where the Sultan was residing. In the rear there
was a large encampment of cavalry in a square, as if it had been a
Roman legion. We calculated their force at ten thousand.
The last intelligence we had received before sailing from Gibraltar,
was that an insurrection had broken out at Morocco, and another on the
borders of Algiers, in favour of Abd-el-Kadir. The French steamer, that
was recently here, came to press an answer from the unfortunate monarch
to an _ultimatum_ from the French government, giving him the option of
war with France or Abd-el-Kadir.
It was painful to reflect how much the fortunes of Europe, and the
internal condition and ultimate government of France, were dependent
upon the weakness or caprice of the descendants of the “_Rovers of
Salee_.” For a step involving the entrance of French troops into
Morocco, by changing the position of Algeria into a basis of operation
against Africa, would have similarly changed France in respect to
Europe. It would have subjugated the policy of the metropolis to
the conduct of the colony. It was no object of the cabinet of the
Tuilleries to drive the Sultan into a false and untenable position at
home, or to compromise him with France. The Government of Algiers had
got the management of the negotiation, and had this purpose. My trip
had reference to this matter, and was not uninvited by the Moorish
Government, otherwise I should not have risked presenting myself at
so unfrequented an entrance to this inhospitable land. Adverse winds,
however, detained me in the Gut, whilst steam carried the French--that
is, the Algerine--emissary to his destination. Nothing could be more
tantalizing than thus to hover above the country, and in sight of its
assembled multitudes, in utter ignorance of what was passing, and with
the contingency before my eyes of being even yet unable to set foot on
it.
In pursuance of the importance of the resolves of the Council Chamber
of this African state, I reverted to the circumstances of the last war,
and the great struggle of England and France, of which another African
state, at the other extremity of the Mediterranean, had been the first
cause and the original field; and the question naturally arose, “Was
it possible that Napoleon,--who, after an attempt on, and a failure in
Egypt, planned the conquest of Spain,--should have neglected a country
identified with the language, manners, and institutions of the one, and
available for the injury or the protection of the other?” The opinion of
Lord Nelson as to the importance to England of the friendship of the
Moor, proves that Morocco was a piece in the great European game, and
one which even his antagonists understood. But Napoleon’s moves were
beyond their reach. His game was lost by his own faults; their merit
(I speak not of mere battles, or even of campaigns) consisted only in
turning to account the incidents of his fortunes.
The siege of Gibraltar was promised by him to the Spaniards, when the
French troops crossed the Pyrenees; and such a measure would have
powerfully contributed to the success of his project. Gibraltar, in
that case, would have been the point of the operations of the war. But
this course could scarcely be taken without some chance of success, and
that depended entirely on the dispositions of Morocco. Napoleon having
foregone all the political advantages to be secured by this siege, it
may not be too much to assume, that he made the mistake in respect to
Morocco which he did in respect to Spain, and perceived that the Moors
were beyond his power to secure, or his reach to coerce. At St. Helena
he recognised the identity of the position, and the similarity of
character of the two people.
I now recalled the incidents which, in early life, fixed my attention
first upon such subjects. Sir Sydney Smith had taken the trouble to
detail to me his plan for counteracting Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.
It was to occupy Morocco. He described it as a country of inexhaustible
resources, once the granary of the world; it had lost nothing of its
fertility, and contained vast accumulated treasures. The people had
been long oppressed, and would gladly hail an invader. England with
ten thousand men, might make herself mistress of it, and gain in it
more than India, and save India by frustrating Napoleon in the rear.
We had begun a great mistake, by driving the French out of Egypt.
By Morocco we should have restored the balance in Europe, prevented
a great war, and have joined France in introducing civilization and
Christianity into Africa. Well do I recollect the perplexity into which
I was thrown by these ideas: fortunately, it was not to a European
that I had recourse to discriminate between right and wrong, but to an
African--Hassam d’ Ghieo. He told me to make the case my own, and see
what I should think of France invading England, because Russia had
invaded Turkey.
He showed me, that if England had so involved herself, it would have
been left open for France to establish herself in Egypt, and thence act
against India; that England had triumphed in that war, because France
had unjustly attacked other states, and England had espoused the just
side.
_Rabat, Dec. 2nd._--This morning the bar was comparatively quiet, and
seemed passable; there was also a light wind from the westward. The day
was lovely, the ledges of the rock and fortresses were crowded with
Moors in their haïks squatting down, and they looked like rows of large
gulls. A little after one P.M., it being high tide, a large row-boat
appeared behind the bar; presently it came dancing over the surf. We
had in company an English and a Portuguese schooner. The English took
the lead; we followed. It was like going into action, and in presence
of an audience: every horizontal piece of rock, wall, and ground,
was covered with the strange squatting figures assembled to witness
our prowess, or mischance. There was great outcry and confusion, and
we might have thought there was more noise than danger, had our two
companions fared as well as ourselves. They both got on shore inside,
but the wind falling, and the tide ebbing, they were cleared of their
cargoes, and got off at full tide during the night.
The English consular agent came off to give us _pratique_. It was the
first time he had performed his functions as quarantine master. His
commission was not from the Moorish Government, but from the consular
body at Tangier. After receiving in his hand the health patent, he
hastily transferred it to a pair of kitchen tongs, prepared for its
unexpected office by having the knobs painted red. On the shore we
saw a new building, with arches, in process of erection: it was a
_custom-house_.
Before the custom-house we found the governor of the town seated, and
received from him a most courteous welcome. The consular agent kindly
offered the shelter of his roof, the only one we could have got at
Rabat; and a messenger from the minister soon after came to invite me
to the royal abode.
This is the first Mussulman country in which I have had my baggage
opened at a custom-house. I was too indignant to be present. I was told
that the officer took care to show that it should be only a ceremony,
for he sat at a distance, and was earnestly engaged in conversation
when the packages were unloosed. I found, however, that designs
had been formed upon my wardrobe. The Sultan had sent an emissary,
Mustafa Ducaly, to France and England. On his return, amongst other
surprising things, he had to tell that on landing in England, at the
port of Southampton, duty had been charged on the clothes he wore. The
minister, Ben Edris, intimated to him that he might now make reprisals.
The travelled Moor proceeded, by way of _revanche_, to be far too
accurate and amusing on the subjects of English hotel hospitality,
strict morality, workhouse benevolence, and waiter manners, than I
liked at such a moment to commend, or had disposition to listen to.
_Dec. 3rd._--I spent the morning on the top of the consul’s house, from
which there is a good view of the town, and the ruins of the Alcazaba
on the one side, and the great town on the other: the river ran in
front--beyond it, the long white lines of the walls of the terrible
Salee, between which and the river the governor of El Garb had his
encampment in the form of the letter Q.
I received a visit on the roof from the father of Mustafa Ducaly, who
was a striking likeness of Sir Francis Palgrave, and as active and
merry. Every Arab is a living record.
A guard having been procured, we walked through the town, which
was thronged. We met, however, with no incivility. Our guards were
careful in keeping us out of the way of the troops encamped in the
neighbourhood. I returned from the excursion filled with two objects;
the gate of the Alcazaba, and the Caïd, or governor of the town.