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.