THE PERIPLUS OF HANNO.

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But the document recording this voyage is of an interest so unique, being the one relic of Carthaginian literature which has come down to us entire, that we must dwell for a moment on its contents. It was posted up by the admiral himself, as a thank-offering, in the temple of Baal, on his return from his adventurous voyage, the first attempt, and possibly the successful attempt, made by the Phoenicians to reach the equator from the north-west of Africa. It is preserved to us in a Greek translation only,1 the work probably of some inquisitive Greek traveller, some nameless Herodotus who went wandering over the world, like his matchless fellow-countryman, his note-book always in his hand, and always jotting down everything which was of interest to himself, or might be of importance to posterity. Hanno passed, so he himself tells us, the Pillars of Hercules and deposited his living freight at various points along the coast of Morocco and the great desert beyond it; at last he reached an island to which he gave the name of Cerne, and which we may perhaps identify with Arguin, 10° north of the equator, since his crew calculated that it lay as far beyond the Pillars of Hercules as the Pillars of Hercules themselves were from Carthage. Here he landed the remainder of his Libyphoenicians, and from this point he began his great voyage of discovery. He had already taken interpreters on board, and he now struck out once more towards the south. He passed the mouth of the Senegal River, a river abounding, then as now, with crocodiles and river-horses. Near its banks dwelt a race of savages, no longer the brown men of the Barbary States, or of the Sahara, with whom he must have been familiar enough, but the ebony Negroes of the Soudan. They were clothed in skins of wild beasts, and spoke a language unintelliglble even to the interpreters. "They drove us away," says Hanno pathatically, “by throwing stones at us." But on went the explorers. They passed

2

It will be found printed in Hudson's Geographi Minores. See Heeren's Appendix.

2 See Lenormant, Manuel d'histoire ancienne p. 201.

forests of odoriferous trees, they saw the natives burning down, as they do at the present day, the withered grass on the hill-sides, and they heard by night the sound of pipes and cymbals, drums and confused shouts, the favourite amusements, then as ever, of the Negro race. On they went, till they reached what was, very possibly, the Camaroons Mountain itself, only 5° above the equator.1 At all events, there is no other volcano on the west African coast, and none therefore answering to the description given by Hanno. The voyagers arrived by night. The country around seemed full of fire, and in the middle of it were flames far higher than the rest which seemed to touch the stars. When day came they found it was a large mountain, which they well named the "Chariot of the Gods." Passing once more onwards still, they reached a gulf called the Southern Horn, which contained an island with a lagoon. It was inhabited by savage people, the greater part of them women, covered with hair. "Though we pursued the men," says the logbook, we could not catch any of them; they all fled from us, leaping over the precipices and defending themselves with stones. We caught three of the women, but they attacked us with tooth and nail, and could not be persuaded to return with us; accordingly we killed and flayed them and took their skins with us to Carthage." These strange creatures were called by the interpreters Gorillas ; a name not destined to be heard again till its strange revival two thousand years later, when the mysterious half-human ape of equatorial Africa, then discovered or rediscovered, took its name, not unnaturally, from its equally mysterious prototype in the Periplus of Hanno. From this point, "Hanno's farthest," as it might well be called by subsequent explorers,

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The numerous commentaries on the Periplus of Hanno differ, as was to be expected, very widely as to the farthest point reached by him. They range between 28° and 5° N. latitude; but the known length of other Carthaginian voyages, and the "hairy men and women and "the burning mountain" taken together, perhaps entitle us to prefer the more southern limit

the admiral returned; for, as the record ends with eloquent brevity, "here our provisions failed us."

What was the general nature of the Carthaginian trade in the distant regions thus thrown open to them we happen to know from another ancient writer whose authority is beyond dispute. There was in Libya-so the Carthaginians told Herodotus-beyond the Pillars of Hercules, an inhabited region where they used to unload their cargoes, and leave them on the beach. After they had returned to their ships and kindled a fire there, the natives, seeing the rising column of smoke, ventured down to the beach, and depositing by the merchandise what they considered to be its equivalent in gold, withdrew in their turn to their homes. Once more the Carthaginians disembarked, and if they were satisfied with the gold they found, they carried it off with them, and the dumb bargain was complete. If not, they returned a second time to their ships to give the natives the chance of offering more. The law of honour was strictly observed by both parties; for neither would the Carthaginians touch the gold till it amounted, in their opinion, to the full value of the merchandise; nor would the natives touch the merchandise till the Carthaginians had clinched the transaction by carrying off the gold.1

This strange story, long looked upon as fabulous, has, like many other strange stories in Herodotus, been proved by the concurrent testimony of modern travellers to be an accurate account of the dumb trade which still exists in many parts of Africa, and which, traversing even the Great Desert, brings the Marroquin into close commercial relations with the Negro, and supplies the great Mohammedan kingdoms of the Soudan with the products of the Mediterranean. It proves also that the gold-fields of the Niger, so imperfectly known to us even now, were well known to the Carthaginians, and that the gold-dust with which the natives of Ashanti lately purchased the retreat of the European invader was

I Herod. vi. 196.

the recognised medium of exchange in the days of the father of history.

Nor was Hanno, the hero of the Periplus, an exceptional specimen of Carthaginian daring. If only we knew Carthage as we know Athens or Rome, from the Carthaginians themselves, we should probably have abundant proof that Hanno was only one example of a numerous class of bold explorers, whose services the great colonising and commercial republic was always able to command. At all events, we hear from Pliny of another expedition which was sent in this same fifth century, under the command of another admiral, Himilco, to explore the western coasts of Europe. A fragmentary account of this voyage also has come down to us in the shape of a metrical Latin paraphrase of the document which originally recorded it, and Englishmen and Irishmen, at all events, will be interested to hear what we are told of its destination. In a four months' voyage, keeping to his left the great shoreless ocean on which no ship had ever ventured, where the breeze blows not, but eternal fogs rest upon its lifeless waters, Himilco reached the Æstrymnides (Scilly Isles). "Rich are they in metals, tin, and lead; spirited and industrious are the race which inhabit them; fond, too, are they of trade, and they traverse the boisterous sea, not on barks of pine or oak, but on coracles made of skins sewn together. At the distance of two days' sail from these is the Holy Island, with its abundant emerald pastures, inhabited by the Hibernians; hard by lies also the wide Isle of Albion."

One other link connecting indirectly Great Britain with ancient Carthage may, perhaps, be pointed out here. The island of Minorca was early colonised by the Phoenicians, and afterwards passed into the hands of the Carthaginians.

1 The Ora Maritima of Festus Avienus. It is to be found in the Poeta Latini Minores. See Heeren's Appendix and Comments.

2 Cf. Herod. iv. 43, where Sataspes says the same of the sea to the west of Africa. Stories of this kind seem to have been industriously propagated by the jealous Carthaginian mariners as a means of retaining the commerce o the Atlantic exclusively in their own hands.

It contains the finest harbour in the Mediterranean. Within it a large fleet of line-of-battle ships can lie in seven fathoms of water safe from every wind that blows. This harbour was called "Portus Magonis," either after some early Carthaginian explorer of that name, or, as seems more probable, after the younger brother of Hannibal himself, who, when he was ejected from Spain by the Romans, passed over to Minorca and spent the winter there.1 The name has now been softened into Port Mahon. The Spaniards have a saying about it that "the ports of the Mediterranean are June, July, August, and Port Mahon." The possession of the harbour made the island of Minorca a bone of contention among all the maritime powers of Europe throughout the last century. In 1708 it was attacked by General Stanhope, who, it is said, by shooting arrows into it, to which were attached papers threatening the garrison with labour in the mines. unless they instantly surrendered, induced them to capitulate just before a relieving Spanish force arrived. To commemorate this event, General Stanhope, when he was afterwards raised to the peerage, received the title of Lord Mahon; and thus, in the strange vicissitudes of human fortune, an English nobleman bears the name of the brother of Hannibal, and also of the reputed founder of the Carthaginian empire itself.

To defray the expenses of this vast system of exploration and colonisation, as well as of their enormous armies, the most ruinous tribute was imposed and exacted with unsparing rigour from the subject native states, and no slight one either from the cognate Phoenician cities. The taxes paid by the natives sometimes amounted to a half of their whole produce, and among the Phoenician dependent cities themselves we know that the lesser Leptis alone paid

I Livy, xxviii. 37 and 46.

See Justin, xviii. 7: Mago.. cum primus omnium ordinatâ disciplinâ imperium Ponorum condidisset."

3 Polybius, i. 72. 2.