Question: how many times can Trollheart get it wrong in one journal? Answer, in this case, at least three times. Man am I stupid! Firstly, after being challenged by Batty when I created this journal originally, all the way back in 2017, to include black explorers I arrogantly and quite incorrectly and ignorantly asserted there were none in history, and of course there are. Strike one! Then I titled the journal “The MEN Who Drew the Map of the World”, thinking there had been no female explorers. Wrong again, TH! Strike two! Finally (although this is not as big an error as the other two) I mentioned in the introduction that we would be going “all the way back to the Vikings”, when in fact the first known, or at least named, explorers would have considered the Vikings not only modern but almost futuristic, and to meet them we have to go back over a thousand years before the birth of Christ!
So, a good start then. Sigh. An apology is due (well, three, but you’ll have to make do with the one) so from everyone here at Planet Trollheart, let me just say
Admitting all those mistakes, then, let’s move on and see what we can dig up from the past. From what I can see from my research so far, though the ancient Egyptians are generally agreed to have been the first people to venture out from their home country and visit other lands, neither the names nor deeds of their adventurers have survived the ravages of time, and so, while we can grant them the title of being the first, we can’t point to anyone specific, nor indeed any actual discoveries made by them, other than to say they travelled to countries such as Lebanon and Syria. Details are too sketchy, and I don’t really read hieroglyphs very well I have to admit. The Cretan Minoans are also credited with being some of the first and finest sailors on the Mediterranean, but again they neglected to leave any memoirs, logs, or other details of their journeys.
We could, I guess, consider the hero of Homer’s Iliad, the almost eponymous hero of the Odyssey, Odysseus, as an early explorer too, but while his tale makes great and exciting reading as he travels to wondrous, unknown lands, blown off-course on his way home from the Trojan War to Ithaca, there is no real geographical description of his journey, and therefore any “discoveries” he is said by Homer to have made can only be viewed through the prism of fiction, or at best embellishment. Homer, to our knowledge, was not familiar with any lands outside of the ones he knew, and which were part of the Known World at the time, so anything he described as his brave adventurer sails unknown seas can be taken as either simply made up or guesswork.
Don’t take my word for it though. Here’s what Rhys Carpenter, author of Beyond the Pillars of Heracles: The Classical World Seen Through the Eyes of its Discoverers has to say about it:
“... it follows that Homer should not be taken as a source of information on early Greek exploration of the Western Mediterranean, however likely it is that his Odyssey reflects and reproduces in fairy-tale disguise the some of the reported wonders of this hitherto unvisited world.”
This then brings us to the Phonecians, who flourished in the Mediterranean around 1500 - 300 BC, and are known to have travelled throughout the Mediterranean and Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), while some believe they may even have come as far as Britain. To rub my nose in it even further, the first example I can come across of a Phoenician explorer is a woman, and a famous and legendary one at that, written of by Greeks and Romans, who even finds herself mentioned in one of the greatest of the ancient classics, Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid, itself modelled on Homer’s Iliad.
Dido (839 BC - 759 BC) (estimated)
Name: Dido
Nationality: Lebanese (Tyre)
The Exploration Years: 825 - 814 BC (estimated)
Ship name(s): Unknown
Ship type(s): Unknown
Famous for: Founding the city of Carthage
Born in Tyre (it is claimed; hard to confirm when you’re dealing with ancient accounts) in what is now Lebanon, Dido’s father bequeathed his estates to her and her brother Pygmalion, however when he died his people took only Pygmalion as their king. Her uncle - and husband - had Pygmalion murdered, and Dido fled to escape his wrath when he would discover that she had dumped all her brother’s wealth (just bags of sand, they say, rather than the expected gold) into the sea. She took ship to North Africa, when she founded what would one day become one of the most powerful cities in the ancient world, a powerhouse opponent and constant thorn in the side of the Roman Empire. Carthage lost its founder and queen though when, rather than marry a rival warlord who had threatened to war upon her city, she took her own life, thereafter becoming a martyr and a goddess.
Herodotus (485 - 425 BC)
Name: Herodotus
Nationality: Greek
The Exploration Years: n/a
Ship name(s): n/a
Ship type(s): n/a
Famous for: Cataloguing and collating information about foreign lands and peoples; known as “the father of history”
He was not an explorer but a writer, a chronicler, and a very important one. For it was he who spent much of his life talking to mariners and sailors from foreign lands, questioning them on their customs, languages, trade, religion, traditions, geography, everything he could find out about them, and in so doing managed to be perhaps the first in the ancient world to amass enough information to be able to write about, among other things, Greek exploration in his Historia (440 BC). A caveat which must always be understood about these writings is that the accounts taken by Herodotus were oral, and could not be checked (no Wiki or Google in those days kids!) so he had to take them on faith. Sailors were and kind of still are notoriously known for stretching the truth, telling “tall tales”, and some may have wanted to seem more knowledgeable or more interesting or important than they were, so some of the details should be taken with the traditional grain. However, given that, what we can then glean from Herodotus’s writings are these facts:
The Phocaeans (ancient Greeks from what is now Turkey) sailed to Adria, the northeastern coast of Italy, Adria’s name now enshrined in the name of the Adriatic Sea, and then northwest to Tyrrhenia (again, commemorated in the naming of the Tyrrhenian Sea), the homeland of the Etruscans, becoming perhaps one of the first peoples to encounter the forebears of the Romans, and continuing southward to found the port of Marseilles in France in about 600 BC. On into Iberia they went (Spain and Portugal today, still bearing the name Iberian Peninsula) and thence to Tartessos, near Andalucia, Spain.
Almost as important as the details of the lands they visited was the fact Herodotus learned that the Phocaeans did not travel in normal, five to seven-oar flat-bottomed ships, but in what were referred to as “penteconters”, sleeker, longer and faster vessels which carried up to fifty oars. In the book already referred to above, one of many such I am using for research for this project, Rhys Carpenter posits that the substitution of the slower ships for the new penteconters was as important a move forward for marine navigation and exploration as was the conversion from sailing ships to steam. Penteconters could travel further, faster and more easily, and were easily superior to the ships being used by other Greek and Roman fleets at the time. In historical terms, it wasn’t long before penteconters were in general service, supplanting the older, slower and less reliable ships.
An interesting quirk of fate here: fleeing the persecution of the Persians, the Phocaeans settled in Sicily, but after attacking raids into Italy they ended up in a war with the Etruscans, who called on Carthage for aid. Carthage would in time, as I already noted, become the most implacable enemy of the Roman Empire, which would assimilate the Etruscans, until it finally fell and was destoyed. The idea of the two future enemies joining forces against a common one is certainly not new, nor unique, but it does sort of put me in mind of Hitler and Stalin, in around 1940. Ah, if you only could see ahead…
In the end, it was a pyrrhic victory for the Phocaeans, who found they couldn’t maintain their settlement at Corsica and buggered off down the Mediterranean, into the Bay of Naples and on to Sardinia, where they learned of land to the south, and headed down to Spain, taking the island of Majorca. Later, their old enemies the Carthaginians would take Iviza, which seems to be the old holiday rave favourite Ibiza.
Out of Africa (or rather, into it)
Name: Unknown
Nationality: Egyptian/Phonecian
The Exploration Years: 600 BC approx
Ship name(s): Unknown
Ship type(s): penteconter
Famous for: Exploring and circumnavigating Africa
Around 600BC the pharoh Necho declared that a fleet of Phonecian sailors should set out to voyage around the coast of Africa, expecting to come to Spain and back around to Egypt, however everyone had miscalculated just how long the coast was, and how far it ran for. They were to find out, as one of them related to Herodotus later: “Africa proves to be completely surrounded by water except for as much of it as borders on Asia.” Their circumnavigation of the continent ended up taking them two full years, passing through or exploring lands such as Mozambique, Biafra (now Cambodia), the Ivory Coast and Liberia, then Morocco on their way back to Egypt. A longer and harder voyage than had been anticipated it may have been, certainly, but a very important one which showed the Phonecians probably for the first time exactly how huge the country they knew so little about, the continent on which they lived, actually was. It would, however, be another hundred years before anyone else would attempt the journey.
Name: Sataspes
Nationality: Persian
The Exploration Years: 500 BC approx
Ship name(s): Unknown
Ship type(s): penteconter
Famous for: Being ordered to circumnavigate Africa but failing
Oddly enough, the voyage was a punishment, though I suppose it could also be viewed as an escape. Basically the Persian, Sataspes, had raped the king’s daughter, so to save her son from the rage of Xerxes, the Persian king, his mother proposed to send Sataspes on a voyage around Africa. Not quite sure why the king agreed to this, but he did. Maybe he was thinking of the glory and riches Sataspes would bring back to him, or the strategic advantage gaining new lands would have for his military campaign. Or maybe he just wanted the rapist out of the sight of his daughter. Whatever the reason, he was more than disappointed and annoyed when Sataspes came back without having accomplished his task, blaming his lack of progress and his having had to turn around and come home on the poor quality of his ships. Unimpressed, Xerxes had him impaled, which just goes to prove, I guess, that you should always do what your mother tells you to do!
Hanno (500 BC approx)
Name: Hanno the Navigator
Nationality: Carthaginian
The Exploration Years: 500 BC approx
Ship name(s): Unknown
Ship type(s): penteconters (believed a fleet of sixty)
Famous for: Exploring the coast of Africa as far as Morocco and Senegal, as well as (though disputed) Gabon, Gambia, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, Algeria, Liberia. Discovering elephants and gorillas, and bringing back the skins of the latter.
Named “the Navigator”, Hanno was the first after the Phonecians sponsored by Pharoh Necho a hundred years earlier to explore the wesern coast of Africa, and he visited Morocco and Senegal, though opinion is divided on whether this is as far as he got. Other scholars and commentators believe variously that he may have made it to countries such as Gabon, Gambia, Sierra Leone and Cameroon. Whatever the truth, it was a triumphant voyage for Carthage and established them as one of the most powerful empires of the ancient world.
On his voyage, Hanno discovered strange and exotic animals such as elephants and gorillas, the latter of which he killed and took their pelts home to be displayed in the temple, presumably as both proof of his journey and a symbol of Carthaginian bravery and daring, as well as a sacrifice to the goddess Juno.
To give you an idea of how thrilling, terrifying and exhilarating it must have been to have done a Captain Kirk back in those days and gone “where no man had gone before” (and also because I’m a lazy ****er!) here is the translation of the account, verbatim, of Hanno’s voyage.
1. The Carthaginians decreed that Hanno should make a
Voyage sixty penteconters, with a multitude of men and women to the
number of 30,000 and with provisions and other equipment.
2. After having put to sea, when we had passed the Pillars
and voyaged two days outside them, we founded our first city,
which we named Thymiaterion. Below it was a broad plain.
3. Thereafter we set out to sea toward the west and assembled
at Soloeis, an African headland overgrown with trees.
4. After dedicating thereon a sanctuary of Poseidon, we
reembarked and proceeded half a day toward the sunrise until
we came upon a lagoon situated close to the sea and full of tall
reedbeds. In these there were elephants feeding and many other
sorts of wild animals.
5. After voyaging past this lagoon about a day’s run we
stationed colonies along the coast, naming them Carian Fort,
Gytte, The Heights, Melitta, and Arambys.
6. Thence we again set sail and came to the Lixos, a large
river flowing from [the interior of] Africa. Along it the Lixite
nomads were pasturing their herds; and among them we re-
mained for some considerable time, making friends of them.
7. Beyond them higher up there dwelt inhospitable Ethi-
opians, tending a country infested by wild beasts and hemmed
in by great mountains, out of which the Lixos is said to flow.
Peculiar races inhabit the mountains, cave dwellers, whom the
Lixites declared to be fleeter of foot than horses.
8. From these Lixites we took aboard interpreters and con-
tinued our voyage southward past the desert for *nine* 5 days,
whereupon we turned again toward the sunrise for a day’s run.
And there in the recesses of a gulf we discovered a small island
with a circuit of about ^fifteen* stades. This we occupied,
giving it the name Kerne. We conjectured that in terms of
our voyage it lay on a direct line with Carthage, inasmuch as
the journey from Carthage to the Straits was about the same
length as that from the Straits to Kerne.
9. Thence sailing along a great river called Chretes we
reached a lake that contained three islands larger than Kerne.
From these, by completing a daylong voyage, we came to the
head of the lake, beyond which there extended some very high
hills full of savages clad in wildbeast hides. These drove us
off by hurling stones at us and would not let us land.
10. Proceeding thence we came to a second river, great and
wide, and swarming with crocodiles and hippopotamuses. So we
turned back again and retraced our course to Kerne.
11. From there we sailed south for twelve days, holding to
the land, all of which was inhabited by Negroes who fled and
would not abide us. They uttered words unintelligible to the
Lixites in our company.
12. And so, on the final day, we moored by great forest-clad
hills. And the wood of their trees was odorous sweet and of
great variety.
13. Past these we journeyed for two days and found ourselves
in an enormous inlet of the sea. On the landward side was a
level plain, from which at night we beheld fires leaping up
everywhere at varying distances, now greater and now less.
14. We took on water and proceeded thence along the coast
for five days until we came to a large gulf that our interpreters
said was called “Horn of the West.” Therein there was a large
island; within the island there was a sea-like body of water
containing a second island. Here we landed. And from it by
daytime we saw nothing except forest; but at night we beheld
many blazing fires and heard a sound of pipes and the rattle
of cymbals and drums and an endless shouting. Thereupon
fear seized on us and our soothsayers advised us to quit the
island.
15. At once putting out to sea we coasted past a blazing land
filled with the odor of aromatic shrubs. And from it fiery torrents
cascaded into the sea. The earth was so hot that we could not
land.
16. From there too, fear-stricken, we quickly sailed away,
and for four days were carried along, beholding the countryside
aflame by night and in the midst thereof a heaven-high fire
greater than the rest, that seemed to touch the stars. By day
this showed as a lofty mountain that was called “The Chariot
of the Gods.”
17. Two days later, having passed these fiery torrents, we
reached a bay called “Horn of the South.” In a corner of this
there was an island like the former one, enclosing a body of
water in which there was a second island. This was full of
savages. Far the most of these were women with hairy bodies,
whom our interpreters called “Gorillas.” Although we pursued
the men, we were unable to capture these, as all of them eluded
us by climbing cliffs and warding us off with rocks; but we
caught three of the women, who bit and scratched their captors
and would not come along. So we slew and flayed them and
brought their skins back to Carthage.
18. Provisions failing, we sailed no farther.
Map of Hanno’s voyage, reprinted without permission.
For the next four hundred years or so Carthage was embroiled in wars with the Greeks of Syracuse and later with the emergent Roman Empire, who eventually defeated it, and was a little busy with attacking its enemies and defending its borders to bother with any more exploration, so the next record we have of a sea voyage of discovery is in either 118 or 116 BC.
Eudoxus of Cyzicus
Name: Eudoxus
Nationality: Greek
The Exploration Years: 118-116 BC
Shp Name(s): Unknown
Ship type(s): Penteconters
Famous for: Travelling to India
A Greek navigator, he seems to have been unique in many ways. Firstly, he’s the first example I’ve come across in my research of the sailors of the ancient world whom you could truthfully call an entrepreneur. Although he had undertaken trading voyages to India for Ptolemy of Egypt, he was upset at the amount of his booty that he had to hand over to the Egyptian ruler, and determined instead to finance his own expedition to India. I haven’t seen any account of anyone who did this before him - even Christopher Columbus, sailing over a thousand years later, needed the court of Spain to bankroll his voyage. He sold everything he had to pay for his ships, then seems to have offered passage aboard those ships to anyone who wished to travel to India, possibly (though I can’t verify) making him the first domestic passenger service on the seas.
Having been blown off-course and run aground, he then gave up the idea and in new ships sailed to Morocco, where he tried to interest the king in stumping up the cash to allow him to renew his voyage to India, but the hilariously-named King Bogus (I kid you not!) was worried that showing foreigners the way to his country might leave him open to attack, and so declined the offer. Here his story ends sadly, and nobody seems to know what happened to him.