The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  There were also smaller vessels that were strong enough to withstand the waves. At the end of the nineteenth century an Irish farmer ploughing his field at Broighter in County Derry turned up a hoard of gold artefacts dating from around the time of Caesar’s wars in Gaul, or maybe a little later. The most remarkable piece the farmer found was a miniature boat, twenty centimetres long, and modelled in gold with loving detail. The model contains nine benches for oarsmen, and eighteen delicate oars, as well as a steering oar at the stern, a mast and an anchor (or grappling hook). It has been estimated that a boat built to this specification would have been 12–15 metres long.12 Boats of this type were constructed out of wickerwork that was fitted around a wooden frame; all this was then covered with skins and coated with animal fat to create a solid waterproof vessel. They have been constructed around the world from prehistoric times to the present day, and include circular Mesopotamian rivercraft, Welsh coracles (also circular) and Irish currachs, of which the gold model is a very ancient example.13 Caesar’s description of the sturdy Venetic ships offers powerful evidence that the Atlantic coastline was indeed connected by sea. And to the evidence of Caesar can be added that of Greek travellers, notably the intrepid Pytheas of Marseilles.

  II

  It is no surprise that the Greek travellers who became interested in the Atlantic should have had close links to Massalia, the port now known as Marseilles that had been founded by migrants and merchants from Phokaia in Asia Minor. They had, according to rather dubious accounts, fled from the conquering army of the Persian Great King, and then from a colony they had established in Corsica, out of which the Etruscans and Carthaginians flushed them in a great naval battle in 541 BC. Southern France was already the target of Etruscan traders, who made contact with the Gauls in the interior, selling them prodigious amounts of wine from the mid-seventh century onwards. Massalia experienced a golden age in the sixth century, because it was able to service demand in central France for wine and other Mediterranean goods, in the lands characterized by the so-called Hallstatt culture, which was dominated by powerful princes wealthy enough to acquire Mediterranean goods, long seen as a great marker of status. But then the focus of economic activity, and presumably political power, shifted eastwards within central Europe towards the scattered villages of the La Tène culture, around 500 BC, and Massalia lost its special advantage, though it has never ceased being a significant centre of trade.14 While the Massalians certainly exploited the land routes across Gaul and the river route up the Rhône, their skill at navigation made them curious about the lands that lay beyond the Strait of Gibraltar and the Phoenician base at Gadir; and what attracted them above all was the possibility of gaining privileged access to tin, which was required for the production of bronze goods – bearing in mind that the coming of iron had in no way depleted demand for bronze, as can be seen from the large number of bronze figurines and utensils being produced at this time within the Mediterranean (such as the massive Greek crater which arrived at Vix on the Seine in central France, perhaps as early as 530 BC).

  Around this time an unnamed Greek sailor compiled a sailing manual, or Periplous, that described the coasts of Spain from Galicia through the Strait of Gibraltar along the coast all the way to Massalia. Today, it is a major source of information about Greek knowledge of the Atlantic, just as in its own day it was evidently treasured for its account of both Atlantic and western Mediterranean waters. Indeed, it was still being read in the late fourth century AD, when Avienus, a very indifferent pagan poet living in north Africa, based much of his work entitled The Maritime Shores (Ora Maritima) on this Periplous; and without Avienus, whose work was published by a Venetian printer in 1488, the text would now be lost.15 It is a sort of palimpsest, as one has to scrape beneath the clumsy Latin to ascertain the views of the ancient Greek traveller. This is not too difficult, as he omitted several places that later became important, which inspires confidence in the very early dating; at the same time, his insistence that several ports were already in decay provides evidence, confirmed by archaeology, that the Phoenician network in the Atlantic had already passed its apogee.16

  The original Greek author’s account of the lands where tin could be obtained was especially precious to the inhabitants of Massalia in the sixth century BC.17 Avienus spoke at length about Tartessos, which had also passed its peak by the fifth century BC, and confidently and incorrectly identified it with Cádiz (‘here is the city Gadir, formerly called Tartessos’), while insisting that ‘now it is small, now it is abandoned, now a heap of ruins’;18 he described how the Tartessians traded with their neighbours, and how the Carthaginians reached these waters; he pointed out a glittering mountain rich in tin which would have greatly interested early traders.19

  Tin and lead, Avienus related, were also the great asset of a group of widely scattered islands known as the Oestrymenides that lay beyond a great promontory and that some commentators have identified with Great Britain and Ireland. However, a good case can be made for identifying this place with Galicia, which is surrounded by a number of offshore islands and was, it has been pointed out, ‘the most prolific tin-producing region in Europe’.20 Most probably, Avienus was drawing together disparate material and, having heard about tin supplies coming from Cornwall, Brittany and Galicia, was conflating all these into the Oestrymenic islands and mainland. Avienus’ traveller was impressed by the inhabitants:

  There is much hardiness in the people here, a proud spirit, an efficient industriousness. They are all constantly concerned with commerce. They ply the widely troubled sea and swell of monster-filled Ocean with skiffs made of skin. For these men do not know how to fashion keels with pine or maple wood. They do not hollow out sailing vessels, as the custom is, from fir trees. Rather they always marvellously fit out boats with joined skins and often run through the vast salt water on leather.21

  The poem also described how the ‘holy island’ inhabited by the Hierni lay a two-day journey from the tin islands, while ‘the island of the Albioni’ stood close by as well – these were evidently references to Ireland and Great Britain, and Avienus believed that the Carthaginians and the Tartessians used to trade as far as the Oestrymenides.22 Particularly mysterious is what then follows, an account of the wider spaces of the Atlantic Ocean that had supposedly been explored by a Carthaginian navigator, Himilco; Avienus described sluggish seas and windless days, as well as waters blocked with masses of seaweed. In general, though, Avienus’ account of the Atlantic, as one might expect from a Mediterranean author, emphasized the high waves, the strong winds and the marine monsters that would be encountered by anyone daring to venture into the ocean. There were inhospitable islands and there were miraculous places such as the isle of Saturn, which was thickly covered in grass but possessed a strange natural force: if any ship approached, the island and the sea around it would quake violently.23

  Avienus did know of a route down the coast of Portugal, past Cape St Vincent: ‘rising high where the starlight sets, this extremity of rich Europe extends out into beast-filled Ocean’s salt water.’24 ‘That’, Avienus said, ‘is the Ocean which pounds the far-flung world. That is the great deep, this is the swell that encircles the shores. This is the supplier of the inner salt water, this the parent of our sea.’25 This was a Mediterranean perspective on the stormy, tidal Atlantic. The sailor from whom Avienus derived his material had evidently experienced a frightening but highly educative voyage towards the lands of tin. He deserves the title pioneer at least as much as the better-known, but not much better-recorded, fourth-century Massalian who followed in his footsteps and then ventured even further, Pytheas of Marseilles.

  III

  Pytheas was both an explorer and a writer. Since they had to rely on his own words, composed around 320 BC, later Greek authors whose description of the world ventured into the Atlantic felt themselves free to scorn what he said; they included Polybios, a serious historian who wrote in the second century BC, and Strabo, an equally serious geographer, who wr
ote in the early first century AD. Much that needs to be said about Pytheas has to be filtered through their hostile comments, and through remarks by Pliny the Elder, active a little later than Strabo.26 In the face of his classical critics, two modern historians of ancient exploration have boldly claimed that Pytheas ‘has the best claim among ancient travellers to rank with the great discoverers of modern times’.27 He has even been described as ‘the man who discovered Britain’, though Avienus’ traveller knew about Britain centuries earlier.28 The problem is that Pytheas’ own writings have vanished; too many people simply refused to take him seriously. He was accused of ‘errant deception’.29 Strabo and Polybios agreed that Pytheas’ voyage was simply implausible: ‘how could it happen that a private individual, and a poor man at that, could cover such distances by ship and by foot?’ Pytheas claimed to have reached the ‘limits of the cosmos, which a person would not believe if Hermes himself were speaking’.30

  Pytheas’ motives for travelling as far as Britain, and maybe still further, might seem obvious. He shared a curiosity about the shape of the habitable world with his later rivals Eratosthenes and Strabo. This was the age of the great Alexandrian cosmographers. Even in faraway Massalia some of the major Greek works of historia (meaning ‘enquiry’) must have been known and read, not least Herodotos’ account of the Persian Wars, which also contained rich descriptions of barbarian lands, such as the territories of the Skythians to the north of the Black Sea. Then there is the possibility that Pytheas was keen to promote trade, or at any rate to identify places where useful trading connections could be made. It has been seen that, with the rise of the La Tène culture north of the Alps, trade routes carrying Greek and Etruscan goods through southern France had shifted eastwards, to the advantage of Etruscan and Greek towns in northern Italy and the upper reaches of the Adriatic. There was still strong demand for their goods in continental Europe, but the problem was that it was the wrong part of continental Europe from the perspective of Massalia. It has therefore been suggested that Pytheas set out with a grand fleet to break the Carthaginian monopoly on the Atlantic tin trade; but it seems much more likely that he was a lone traveller, and it was precisely because he was alone that he could range so far and wide and collect information about places, distances and products that would be precious to his compatriots.31 Moreover, there was always a question about where to turn for supplies of tin. The rocky promontories of northern Europe, in Brittany and Cornwall, beckoned.32

  Despite the chorus of disapproval led by Polybios and Strabo, there is no reason to doubt Pytheas’ claim to have travelled at least as far as the British Isles during the fourth century BC, setting out from Marseilles. Nor is there reason to doubt that he made use of local ships rather than fitting ships out at his own expense. Ships powered by sail and oar were well suited to coastal navigation in the Mediterranean; but it is impossible to imagine a trireme battling against the high seas of the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel without it being rapidly swamped and sunk.33 A further complication was that during the fourth century BC the Carthaginians controlled key points along the coastline of Mediterranean Spain, and it is unlikely they would have waved a Greek ship past the great rock of Kalpe, later known as Gibraltar.34 Although Pytheas apparently knew about Kalpe and Cádiz/Gadir, whose existence was common knowledge in Massalia, it is much more likely that he followed a mainly overland route from Massalia to the Atlantic coast of Gaul, and went on board a Gaulish vessel there. After all, these land routes out of southern France were as much a part of Massalia’s rationale as the sea routes linking the city to Italy, Spain and the Mediterranean islands. Barry Cunliffe has suggested that he did indeed set out by sea from his home town, but only travelled a short distance: in his view, he passed the Greek settlement at Agde in what is now southern Languedoc and then arrived at Narbo (Narbonne), a ‘native port’; from there he would have headed to the river system that debouches into the ocean near the Gaulish settlement of Burdigala, or Bordeaux. The journey this far might only have taken a week.35

  After three days at sea he reached Ouexisame, or Ushant, off the western tip of Brittany, but what he did there, or even whether he stayed for any length of time there, is pure speculation. Cunliffe places him on the north shore of Brittany, in the handsomely defended Iron Age port of Le Yaudet, at the point where the River Léguer joins the sea; this was a centre for trade across the Channel to southern Britain.36 There is no evidence Pytheas ever went there, but, if he had done, he would have experienced a strong contrast between his bustling home city of Massalia, with its imposing stone temple façades and its grand covered marketplaces, and any port along the coast of northern Gaul or southern Britain. This puzzlement at the more primitive life of the northern peoples is reflected in a romantic account of the simple lives of the early Britons, written by the Greek author Diodoros the Sicilian in the first century AD and possibly derived from Pytheas’ own book, On the Ocean. ‘Far removed from the cunning and knavishness of modern man’, they lived in wattle-and-daub huts and ate a thick gruel made from the ears of the grain they grew. Diodoros’ image of simple innocence formed part of a great literary tradition celebrating poverty rather than the corruptions of wealth that survived into the Middle Ages and Renaissance.37 The peoples encountered on these Atlantic travels were not derided for their simplicity, which was, rather, seen as very praiseworthy.

  The Channel ports were a vital link in the tin trade that reached all the way from Britain to the Mediterranean. An account of the tin trade in south-western Britain also survives, once again from the hand of Diodoros, and possibly echoing the lost words of Pytheas.38 Diodoros described a promontory called Belerion where seams of tin could easily be quarried. The tin was worked into the shape of knucklebones, and then it was carried to an offshore island named Ictis that was linked to the mainland by a natural causeway which flooded at high tide. Whole wagonloads of tin were taken across to Ictis at low tide and the tin was sold to merchants, who brought it first across the Channel to Gaul, and then overland all the way to the mouth of the River Rhône, whence it would presumably have been ferried to Massalia. Pliny provided slightly different information, calling the island Mictis, and stating that the Britons took their goods there in wicker boats covered in skins rather than across a causeway. One possible location for Ictis is St Michael’s Mount, off the coast of Cornwall, though no remains from that period have been found that might confirm the story.39

  Even more speculative is Pytheas’ route northwards along the coasts of Britain as he island-hopped his way towards the edges of the known world on British boats. In trying to work out where he went, everything depends on measurements of the height of the sun at midday, cited (often scathingly) by his later readers such as Strabo. Strabo himself misjudged the orientation of the north European lands, even placing Ireland to the north of Great Britain, whose east coast in his view lay parallel to northern France and the Netherlands; but Strabo had an eccentric view of Ireland, which he saw as the very edge of the world, ‘just barely habitable’.40 The difference between Pytheas and Strabo, of which Strabo was keenly aware, was that Pytheas had visited most of the lands he described, while Strabo was an armchair traveller. One good candidate for a stop on Pytheas’ route is the Isle of Lewis, off the north-west shore of Scotland; and Pliny offered a very brief description of the Orcades, or Orkney archipelago, which he perhaps derived from Pytheas.41 But the big question is how far he travelled beyond that. Pliny repeated Pytheas’ claim that an island called Tyle lay six days’ voyage north of Britain, in a part of the world where the sun was hidden from view for half the year and continuously in view for the other six months (rather an overstatement of the phenomenon of the Midnight Sun).42 No part of Pytheas’ journey has attracted as much attention as his visit to what the dramatist and thinker Seneca would later call ‘Ultima Thule’, conjuring up the image of a remote and uninhabited land at the very edge of the world. Strabo refuted the claim that Pytheas had reached this place, declaring that this
was a tissue of lies.43 On the other hand, early medieval writers such as the Irish monk Dicuil would associate ‘Thule’ with Iceland; Dicuil was a keen cosmographer and he wrote his On the Measurement of the Globe of the Earth in the early ninth century at the court of the Frankish emperor, Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son. By this time, his fellow monks from Ireland were visiting Iceland, where some of them were found by the first Norse settlers in the ninth century.44 However, there are other good candidates for Thule, such as Shetland or the Faroe islands, for there is no indication that Pytheas’ Thule is an island on the scale of Iceland.

  More significant, really, is the question whether Pytheas circumnavigated Britain and entered the North Sea. All this depends on glancing references – one that may concern Kent, which would suggest he passed through the Channel from the east. There is Pliny’s striking description, derived from Pytheas, of an island called Abalus where amber dumped by waters flowing out of a great estuary accumulated. The inhabitants had no interest in amber and used it in place of firewood; still, the Teutoni who lived a day’s journey away on the mainland valued it, and were happy to buy it from them.45 Pliny understood that amber was a resin and that it was found washed up on the shores of parts of northern Europe.46 At this point, speculation is once again let loose, and debates rage as to whether this was Baltic amber or Jutish amber, which certainly seems more likely, and whether the great river was the Rhine or, more probably, a number of rivers that all flow into the North Sea along the coast between the Low Countries and Denmark. It appears that by Pytheas’ time supplies of Jutish amber were diminishing; and, just as he searched for sources of tin, he may have intended to gather information about sources of amber. Baltic amber, which is still strongly dominant, was already filtering southwards in payment for bronze goods from as far away as the Etruscan cities of the Mediterranean. Some of it reached modern Slovenia, suggesting that the routes carrying amber were overland ones and that they lay well to the east of the routes to which Massalia had access. It was the old problem of the displacement of the centres of demand for Mediterranean products eastwards, leaving Massalia high and dry.47