This was a method of exchange still being used by Arabs on African shores a thousand years later. Hanno is said to have founded cities, to have seen volcanoes erupting lava into the ocean, to have met hairy people on the coast of Africa and to have captured three of their women; but they were so ungovernable they were put to death, skinned and their pelts taken back to Carthage where they were exhibited in the temple of Tanit. The word he uses to describe these putative women has entered our language: gorilla.
Some detail is added by later authors. In the first century of our era Pliny the Elder wrote that When the power of Carthage flourished, Hanno sailed round from Cádiz to the extremity of Arabia, and published a memoir of his voyage; and, slightly later, Arrian of Nicodemia: The Libyan Hanno left Carthage and sailed beyond the Pillars of Herakles on the Atlantic Ocean, keeping Libya on his left hand. He sailed eastwards for thirty-five days. But when he turned to the south, he encountered many problems: lack of water, burning heat and rivers of fire flowing into the sea … Hanno’s inscription says they did not sail any further after capturing the gorillas because they were running short of provisions. Perhaps they had reached as far south as Libreville in present-day Gabon. Alexander, with his compulsion to exceed past exploits, himself planned to circumnavigate Africa and had begun building a fleet with which to do so when he died of fever – if he was not poisoned – after a magnificent debauch in Babylon.
IN THE SECOND or first century BCE, Eudoxus of Cyzicus, as reported by Strabo, became the first Greek to cross the Indian Ocean. Eudoxus was in the service of Ptolemy VIII of Egypt, who on his return confiscated the cargo of perfumes and gemstones the navigator brought back. After the Pharaoh’s death Eudoxus made the voyage again, but once more the precious cargo was confiscated, this time by Ptolemy IX. On the coast of East Africa Eudoxus found what he thought was the wreckage of a ship from Spain, which he took to be evidence that the continent could indeed be circumnavigated. He made two attempts to do so. The first time, after outfitting a fleet in Cádiz, his crew mutinied off Morocco and he was forced to turn back. The second time he is rumoured to have travelled further down the west coast of Africa but, after going on into the south, was never heard from again.
Hippalus was a Greek navigator of the first century BCE; legend has it that he was the captain of one of Eudoxus’ ships on that epochal first west-to-east crossing of the Indian Ocean. Like the Arab and Indian peoples before and after them, Western sailors used the monsoon winds to navigate the ocean; but Hippalus, by observing the locations of the ports and the condition of the seas, pioneered a new route, sailing for the coast of India with the southwest, or winter, monsoon on a rough but direct passage that may have taken as little as forty days. Previously Greek ships sailed in summer, hugging the coasts of Arabia and of Sind, while the northeast monsoon blew. Incidentally, landfalls in southern India, at present-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu, suggested that the coast of India tended north–south not, as most Greek geographers then believed, east–west. The direct route to the south of India inaugurated a rich trade, from Red Sea ports such as Berenice, between Ptolemaic Egypt and India.
By about 70 CE the routes, ports and trade goods along the coasts of Africa and India were well enough known to be summarised by a nameless Greek-speaking merchant in Roman Egypt. His Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is a sailing guide to the Indian Ocean; and, given the vivid depiction of the places mentioned, probably compiled from direct experience. The first section of the work details the maritime trade routes south from Egypt down the coast of East Africa as far as modern-day Tanzania, called Azania; the merchants of Egypt traded textiles, metals, skins, wine, olive oil and wheat for tortoise-shell, rhinoceros tusks, cinnamon, obsidian, frankincense, myrrh, gold and slaves, among other things.
The remainder of the Periplus is a much longer report upon the sea roads around the Arabian Peninsula, past the Persian Gulf and on to the west coast of India, then down that coast as far as the island Palaesimundu, called by the ancients Taprobane. A sample chapter, concerning a port called Barygaza (Bharuch in Gujarat), gives an idea of the Indian trade:
There are imported into this market-town, wine, Italian preferred, also Laodicean and Arabian; copper, tin, and lead; coral and topaz; thin clothing and inferior sorts of all kinds; bright-colored girdles a cubit wide; storax, sweet clover, flint glass, realgar, antimony, gold and silver coin, on which there is a profit when exchanged for the money of the country; and ointment, but not very costly and not much. And for the King there are brought into those places very costly vessels of silver, singing boys, beautiful maidens for the harem, fine wines, thin clothing of the finest weaves, and the choicest ointments. There are exported from these places spikenard, costus, bdellium, ivory, agate and carnelian, lycium, cotton cloth of all kinds, silk cloth, mallow cloth, yarn, long pepper and such other things as are brought here from the various market-towns. Those bound for this market-town from Egypt make the voyage favorably about the month of July, that is Epiphi.
The unknown author also writes, not at great length and probably not from experience, of the east coast of India as far north as the mouth of the Ganges, with rumours of the uncharted lands beyond: After this region under the very north, the sea outside ending in a land called This, there is a very great inland city called Thinae [i.e. China], from which raw silk and silk yarn and silk cloth are brought on foot through Bactria to Barygaza … The regions beyond these places are either difficult of access because of their excessive winters and great cold, or else cannot be sought out because of some divine influence of the gods.
THE KNOWLEDGE THESE travellers – Eudoxus, Hippalus, the unknown merchant of the Periplus – brought back to Roman Egypt fed directly into the compilation of the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria in the first and second centuries CE. Ptolemy’s world, in both its known and unknown dimensions, would persist as the standard description until well into the second millenium CE. His other sources include an earlier geographer, Marinos of Tyre (the man who coined the word Antarctica) and the gazetteers of the Roman and ancient Persian empires. He also inherited a Greek philosophical tradition that was already some hundreds of years old.
Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BCE may have been the first to catch a glimpse of the immense size of the universe. He thought the stars were infinitely far away and argued that the sun itself was twenty times the distance of the moon from the earth. A consequence of this calculation was the suggestion that the earth was probably moving around the sun, not vice versa. Although several astronomers, for example Seleucus of Babylon, agreed, Ptolemy did not – in the same way perhaps that he did not believe it was possible to circumnavigate Africa. His geographic view prevailed until Vasco da Gama showed incontrovertibly that it was wrong; while Aristarchus’ insight had to wait longer, for Copernicus, before it was confirmed.
Eratosthenes of Cyrene, librarian at Alexandria, also in the third century BCE, invented a new method to reckon prime numbers, drew a world map, catalogued several hundred stars and is most famous for his calculation of the circumference of the earth. It was based on the angle of the shadow that the sun made falling at noon across a vertical pole at Alexandria, as compared to the fact that at the same time, at Syene (Aswan) in southern Egypt, the sunlight fell directly into a well. Eratosthenes’ earth was about one sixth too large, just as Ptolemy’s own computation, based on that of Strabo, was too small by the same proportion.
A direct result of Eratosthenes’ insight was the invention of the antipodes. Crates of Mallus, a Stoic, a grammarian and head of the library at Pergamum in Anatolia, plotted the known world on to a globe and realised it covered only about a quarter of the surface as estimated by Eratosthenes. This lack of symmetry bothered him so he compensated for the anomaly by adding three unknown continents in the three vacant quarters of his globe. There were, he said, four land masses: the Ecumene, that is, Europe, Asia and that part of Africa known at the time; south of this, the land of the Antoikoi or dw
ellers opposite; west of them, the Perioikoi, dwellers round; and, south of the Perioikoi, the Antipodes, with the feet opposite. It is perhaps appropriate that these were essentially literary inventions. Crates was a Homeric scholar and thought (wrongly) that Homer’s works were complex allegories. His Antipodes, though not his Antoikoi and Perioikoi, persisted; they appeared on Ptolemy’s world map, were restored in the Middle Ages and, re-imagined as a Great South Land, became both a perplexity and a provocation for all subsequent voyages, both real and imaginary, into southern waters.
PTOLEMY’S GEOGRAPHIA IS in two parts: a discussion of the data and of the methods used; and an atlas. The original work included maps, lost over time. Arabic writer al-Mas’udi, around 956, mentioned a coloured map in the Geographia that showed 4530 cities and more than 200 mountains. Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes found a copy of the Geographia in 1295 and since there were no maps in it, drew his own based on the co-ordinates found in the text. In 1397 a copy was given by Manuel Chrysoloras to Palla Strozzi in Florence. The first Latin translation was made in 1406 by the Florentine Jacobus Angelus – a century too late for Dante to have read it.
As with the model of the solar system in his equally influential Almagest, Ptolemy assigned the geographic information he had gathered to a grand scheme. All of the places and features he knew were logged upon a global grid. Zero latitude was at the equator, as it is today, but the increments were reckoned in terms of the length of the longest day rather than as degrees of an arc. The meridian of zero longitude was at the Canary Islands; although some have disputed this identification of Las Islas Fortunatas, saying they were actually the Cape Verde Islands. Either way, the tradition of placing zero longitude at Las Islas Fortunatas out in the Atlantic would persist, like Ptolemy’s geography, throughout the Middle Ages.
Ptolemy’s world map as restored from the copies of his Geographia preserved by Arab scholars and copied in Byzantium essentially shows Crates’ Ecumene, the known world: Europe, North Africa and parts of Asia. To the west there is a narrow sliver of the Atlantic Ocean, terminating at Las Islas Fortunatas. At its eastern extremity is a long coast running north-south, perhaps a continuation of the termination of the Asian land mass at China, Korea or even Siberia. At top and bottom, more land, so that the Indian Ocean is, like the Mediterranean, a mare clausum, an enclosed sea. There is no detail beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, only the long delusive coastline, decorated with the extravagant curlicues of imaginary peninsulas, of Crates’ Antipodes, the Great South Land.
Europe is, by and large, accurately represented; North Africa looks like a great oblong wedge relieved only by the Horn at its eastern extremity. The Nile is shown, and the Niger, but even the northern, or Mediterranean, coast is oddly flattened in the same way that the west or Atlantic coast is. The Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf are all represented, perhaps larger than they should be, but in their correct locations. The Indian Ocean, vaster than all the other seas combined, stretches from Africa to that illusory coast east of China. The Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the coast of Sind as far as the Indus Valley are marked in some detail but after that things go badly awry. The Indian subcontinent, in keeping with older ideas, tends in an east-west direction, with a couple of promontories, one east of the Indus Delta, the other west of the delta of the Ganges. Below, enormously, is the great island the ancients knew as Taprobane, called since by many names, among them Palaesimundu, Serendip, Ceylon and now Sri Lanka.
Taprobane means Garden of Delights and in many ways it was the eastern equivalent of Las Islas Fortunatas out west in the Atlantic. There was some debate in antiquity as to whether Taprobane was a part of our reality at all or indeed another world. Then there is its great size; the author of the Periplus reports: The northern part is a day’s journey distant, and the southern part trends gradually toward the west, and almost touches the opposite shore of Azania. Was this because it represented peninsula India, somehow detached below the Himalaya? Or was it confused with Madagascar, which is shown on some reconstructions of Ptolemy’s map, small and way off to the southwest, but not on others? Or was it mistaken for, or conflated with, another great island – that is, Sumatra?
East of Taprobane a large promontory tending southwest and shaped a bit like the Malay Peninsula extends into the sea; this is called by another delusive, or elusive, name that would haunt the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: the Golden Chersonese. (Golden in contradistinction to the known Chersonese, which we now call Gallipoli.) This large peninsula might be a representation of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, joined together; beyond is a corner of land which is probably the heel of Indo-China; and beyond that, to the north, is the Gulf of Tonkin figured as a great semi-circular bay enclosed on its eastern end by what may be the island of Hainan. There is no sign of the Philippines or of Japan. The Indian Ocean is scattered with a profligate array of islands, some of which may be real places such as Mauritius, the Seychelles, the Maldives, the Andamans, the Nicobars; or they may be rumours of fabled locations whose names are lost or yet to be invented.
To look at Ptolemy’s map now is to be reminded of something both arcane and a jeu: the Surrealist Map of the World of 1929 – not in detail but in intent and in reminiscence of the consciousness that made and believed in it. Ptolemy’s map was not meant as a fiction and it was not thought to be one; yet anyone who looked at it knew that at its margins it shaded off into a territory of wonder, both in the sense of the marvellous and of the unknown. Ptolemy’s Geographia and his world map were, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, lost from the consciousness of the West for a huge span of time – about a millennium. During this period Rome fell, Greek was forgotten as the language of learning, Islam rose, while sailors from Africa, Arabia, India and the archipelagos of South East Asia and the Pacific continued to sail and trade throughout those southern seas. Meanwhile in Europe, the dream that the ancients knew all there was to be known of the world persisted so that when the Geographia was recovered, it was revered in much the same way that the gospels or the Old Testament of the Bible were: as an authority with divine sanction, a source of knowledge that simply could not be wrong.
Dante located Mount Purgatory in the midst of a vast ocean at the antipodes of Jerusalem, somewhere in the southwest Pacific; curiously, sources for his most Christian poem are to be found in the writings of Islam. Marco Polo’s book about his travels seemed to confirm that the other side of the globe was a place of wonder; yet today some doubt he ever visited the lands he wrote about. Most of the readers of the wildly popular Travels of Sir John Mandeville thought every word of that artful confection to be true, rather than the series of inventions we now believe it to be. A whole genre of what might be called false travel writing derives from these early models. Mandeville’s book, however, contained the information that the world was round and could thus be circumnavigated; and was as influential among explorers as it was among writers who preferred to stay at home and imagine the terrors and wonders of the antipodes.
II
MOUNT PURGATORY
IN CANTO XXVI OF DANTE’S INFERNO, AS THE POET AND his guide, Virgil, climb down into the eighth circle of hell, they see below a myriad of flames like fireflies in a valley at dusk. This beautiful image conceals a dreadful reality: these are the false counsellors immured within flames, where they will burn through all eternity for their sin of spiritual theft. One, a divided flame, comes closer as if to speak. Dante asks if this is possible, whereupon Virgil intercedes and says that he will address the ghosts and ask one or other of them to tell the manner of his death:
The greater horn of the ancient flames was stirred
to shudder and make a murmur, like a fire
when in the wind it struggles …
Within the double flame are the souls of Greek heroes Ulysses and Diomedes. It is Ulysses who speaks and the tale he tells is one that is unknown in any of the Classical sources: it may be Dante’s invention. After leaving Circe’s island with hi
s crew, Ulysses says, they did not turn towards Ithaka but sailed instead through the Pillars of Herakles and out into the Atlantic. He exhorted his rowers thus: O brothers, who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the West, deny not, to this brief vigil of your senses that remains, experience of that unpeopled world behind the sun. They journey west by south for five months until they see a vast mountain rising out of the sea. Ulysses is determined to land upon it and explore; but a storm came out of that strange land, the ship is caught in a whirlpool, spun round three times and on the fourth turn sinks, drowning all aboard. Thus Ulysses is punished again, this time for believing he could find out for himself knowledge that can only be got through God.
The mountain is Mount Purgatory, at the antipodes of Jerusalem and is, in Dante’s cosmogony, constructed out of the earth removed when Hell was excavated. For to the medieval mind Hell lay directly beneath Jerusalem, a stepped cone receding to the centre of the earth at the bottom of which lay Satan chained in a lake of ice, devouring with his three heads Judas, Brutus and Cassius. When Dante and Virgil leave Satan’s domain they do so by climbing down his hairy pelt, reorienting themselves, then making their way up through the other side of the earth to the antipodes which are, apart from Mount Purgatory itself, all ocean. In a modern atlas the antipodes of Jerusalem do turn out to be in the wildest ocean: at 31°47′s, 164°47′w, in the South West Pacific Basin, east of the Louisville Ridge, there is a featureless expanse of blue water between the Chatham and Austral Islands where the abyssal depth sometimes exceeds 5000 metres.
Zone of the Marvellous Page 4