And yet, says the ancient ship expert Peter Clark:
We have archaeological evidence that contact [with Europe] took place by the early Bronze Age, so that it is generally accepted that there must have existed a capability for cross channel voyages and coastwise travel along the Atlantic seaboard, extending from Iberia, round Brittany to western England . . . the scene changes from the early Bronze Age onwards, with the discovery of the examples of plank-built boats found to be widely distributed round the British coasts. Some of these might reasonably be believed to have had the ability to travel coastwise, or when conditions were favourable to make short sea crossings.15
According to English Heritage, the boat’s conservers:
. . . The Langdon Bay hoard of bronze implements, largely of French origin, found by divers just east of Dover harbour – clearly lost in the wreck of a sea-going vessel and of middle Bronze Age date – is good enough evidence that there was routine traffic between Britain and mainland Europe at this period. The Dover boat provides convincing evidence of an actual vessel with appropriate capability.
Of course I don’t doubt for a minute that cross-Channel trade took place in the Bronze Age. Dover to Boulogne is the shortest stretch of the English Channel; and many historical sources mention various forms of commerce crossing the seas. Pytheas the Greek describes the Cornish tin trade in some detail. The first person to realise that the tides were caused by the moon, Pytheas made his journey to Britain in the 4th century BC – but judging by the way he discusses the trade, it is clear that it had already been in existence for centuries. Cornish tin would have been a valuable prize: it is cassiterite tin, which is harder than other forms and twice as shiny. Cassiterite still prompts wars in the Congo, where it is now found. Ancient Britain had so much of it that the Phoenicians named the country ‘the Cassiterides’.16
There is much more evidence of the roaring trade in tin. Bronze Age specialist Professor Barry Cunliffe describes divers recovering forty tin ingots from a wreck found at the mouth of the River Erme as it enters Bigbury Bay. Found within 26 metres (85 feet) of each other, all of the tin ingots were quite clearly cargo from a vessel which had foundered – perhaps near Portland Bill, well known as the Cape Horn of the English Channel. Several pieces of ancient timber were recovered in the same area and were carbon dated to more than 4000 BC – ‘far too early for the tin trade’, according to Cunliffe. But is 4000 BC really far too early? The dates when we assume international maritime trade was taking place are continuously being pushed back.
Whether the Bronze Age came to Britain in 4000 BC or in 2300 BC – the generally accepted date – we can say for sure that boats like this could have been carrying tin from Britain to Europe by 1500 BC, the date of the Dover Boat. But this boat had nowhere near the sophistication, strength or resilience of the Mediterranean ships shown on the Thera frescoes. The Dover ship’s weight and inflexibility also meant she could carry far less cargo than the Uluburun or Theran ships and so she must have been far less suited to ocean-going trade.
The English Channel tides are strong, which, coupled with the funnelling effect of the French coast, means that in any wind short steep waves form – they are maybe as high as 2 to 2.5 metres (6 to 8 feet). This is known as the ‘Channel Chop’, and I can’t imagine that the Dover Boat would have fared well against it.
A few short calculations gave me a picture. I imagined the Dover ship being paddled by sixteen strong sailors for five hours at 2 knots across the English Channel, with 3 tons of copper or tin on board – while four men furiously bailed out. With that amount of physical blood, sweat and tears, they could only have rowed for five hours a day. A ship like the Uluburun could have kept going for days on end, with more than four times the cargo capacity on a like for like basis: and without leaking.
The Uluburun sailors would also have lowered the ship’s centre of gravity and increased stability by placing copper and tin ingots as ballast at the bottom of the hold, beside the keel. This would have reduced roll, pitch and sagging. Placing ingots low in the hull of the Dover ship would not have had the same effect. The weight of the planks higher up her hull would have made her comparatively top-heavy.
When it came to trading, the Bronze Age Brits faced world-beating competition. Had the Minoans seized that opportunity by the horns of their deity, the bull?
I settled down to delicious bacon and eggs in a handy ‘greasy spoon’ cafe, nose in book. It felt good to be reading the work of a Roman naval commander and author in a Roman city like Dover. I was beginning to catch up with my neglected classical education, and I was having to do that fast. There is a well-known but apparently much disputed passage in Pliny the Elder’s writings, that concerns the history of the British:
Next to be considered are the characteristics of lead, which is of two kinds, black and white. The most valuable is the white; the Greeks call it ‘Cassiteros’ and there is a fabulous story of its being searched for and carried from the Islands of Atlantis [my italics] in barks covered with lead . . .
Certainly it is obtained in Lusitania [Iberia] and Gallaecia [Brittany] on the surface of the earth, from black coloured sand. It is discovered by its great weight, and it is mixed with small pebbles in the dried bed of torrents. The miners wash those sands and that which settles out, they heat in the furnace.17
So: ‘Atlantis’ again, but this time the connection is being made by a Roman, not the Greeks. By the early years of the 1st century AD, Pliny seemed to have identified ‘Atlantis’ as both the past and the present source of the tin being shipped into the Mediterranean.
Minoan seafarers in search of those precious Bronze Age metals would have had to turn north towards Britain and cross the notorious Bay of Biscay in their markedly superior boats. One long 310-mile (500-kilometre) lee shore, the Bay stretches along the northern coast of Spain and around the western coast of France. The crews of the sailing ships of old had a great fear of being driven ashore here – or worse, wrecked – by a westerly gale. Biscay is notoriously stormy. Many mariners have run before the Atlantic’s driving currents and ferocious gales, only to founder when they struck the Bay’s vicious reefs and its shallower coastal shelf. June and July are the best months to cross: it is important for our seafarers to sail before the middle of August, to avoid the first autumn storms.
Even when sailing the relatively placid Mediterranean, it would have been foolhardy to travel before the beginning of May, after which the Mediterranean winter gales should have ceased. That should mean reaching the Straits around late August. Over-wintering in Sanlúcar, the Minoans could have repaired any broken steering oars and sails and careened the ship to remove barnacles from the hull.
Let’s imagine a sophisticated band of travellers, the Minoan seafarers. A hardy bunch of persuasive, charming and determined people, they are wily and well travelled. From what we’d seen on the frescoes, they are also lively company and extremely good-looking into the bargain. Their metallurgical know-how is unrivalled, in a society that values metals, and magic, above all things.
They have one goal in mind: riches. They need to find precious metals, make successful trade deals, and return to Phaestos, Knossos or Thera as rich men, bearing the raw materials that drove the most advanced technology of the entire age: copper and tin.
Each member of the crew is a hero. He has seen the wonders of the world, and will return to his people bearing the future in his hands – or within the hold of his ship.
CHAPTER 23
THE LAND OF RUNNING SILVER
The early Greek historian Diodorus Siculus called Britain ‘the bright country’. And indeed, Cornwall, the first part of Britain any seafarer striking from Portugal through France is likely to hit, does have a remarkable quality of light. But I think Diodorus’ description is more likely to have been inspired by the sparkling richness of the country’s metals. This was an island where the sun set in a blaze of tin, copper and gold.
After I’d gone to see the Dover Boat, and satis
fied myself that foreign traders had little to fear from native competition, Marcella and I decided to make a week of it. We hired a cottage on the Cornish coast near St Mawes. From here we could explore the Carnon River, which in the Bronze Age almost ran with sparkling, silver-coloured tin ore.
For once we found that the subject was not controversial. English people in general, and Cornishmen in particular, readily accept that in the Bronze Age foreign sailors came from the eastern Mediterranean to mine tin. The usual date being given was around 2000 BC.
In fact, all sorts of folk memories have grown up around the export of the ore. The brasswork in King Solomon’s Temple is said to have been made from Cornish tin, and an old legend has it that Christ himself visited Cornwall with his merchant uncle Joseph of Arimathea, who came to buy precious ores.
Much of Cornwall’s bedrock is granite. As this cooled many millions of years ago, fissures and cracks opened up when the granite was still molten and hot rock from the earth’s core bubbled up through the cracks. As these new rocks crystallised, they formed mineral lodes – tin, copper, zinc, lead and iron, with a little silver. Because the ore-bearing rocks came from vertical cracks, they had to be mined vertically – straight down into the earth.
Streams often ran across the tin deposits and sometimes sliced through them. Tin, being so heavy, was often left on the stream bed. In this part of Cornwall evidence of Bronze Age mining is everywhere, even to the body of a poor Bronze Age miner found at Perranarworthal.
The richest area of all in those days was the Fal Estuary (see map) and particularly the rivers to the west of it; notably the Carnon River, which was navigable throughout the Bronze Age, upstream as far as Twelveheads.
Another crucial factor that would have made Britain highly attractive to the Minoans was its incredible woodlands – as well as the type of wood that grew. From the air, Britain would have looked almost as the Amazon jungle does today: a mass of vital, living green, punctuated with the chattering rivers that shone with glittering grains of tin ore.
The mighty hornbeams, feathery oaks and majestic beeches and willows of Britain all respond well to pollarding and coppicing (cutting off young tree stems close to the ground). Much like a good haircut, cutting the wood short does two things. Firstly, it makes the tree healthier, so it lives longer. Secondly, it makes it grow more branches and produce more wood, a substance that is vital, as we already know, for the smelting process. Wood, as the Epic of Gilgamesh implies, was already becoming a scarce resource in the wider Mediterranean.
Why should we believe it was the Minoans, rather than the Phoenicians of a later time, who reached Britain and began to exploit its resources? Partly because of the great Akkadian Emperor Sargon I, ‘the Magnificent’, who lived around 2333–2279 BC. He commissioned a ‘road-tablet’, which recorded the mileage and geography of the roads through his vast Mesopotamian empire. A copy of it, made by an official scribe in 8 BC, was found at the Assyrian capital of Assur.
The tablet details ‘The land of Gutium’ and ‘tin-land country, which lies beyond the upper sea (or Mediterranean) . . . ’.18
This latter reference was translated slightly differently by a former Oxford professor of Assyrian studies, Professor Sayce. His version reads: ‘To the tin-land (Kuga-Ki) and Kaptara (Caphtor, Crete), countries beyond the upper sea (the Mediterranean).’ In other words, his translation links the ‘tin land’ and ancient Crete together.19
There’s another link in the evidence we should bear in mind. Why was there a sudden switch in Britain from copper axes to bronze ones between 2800 and 2500 BC? And why, around 2200 BC, did the tin content of British axes suddenly leap from virtually zero to 10 or 11 per cent? This date coincides neatly with the height of the Minoan trading empire, which I now propose was well under way. As Professor Cyrus Gordon wrote: ‘The existence of an ancient formidable commercial network of which the Mediterranean Sea was the epicentre is being revealed.’20 The Minoans had the technology: fast, sail-driven, ocean-going ships and the knowledge to navigate them. They also had the all-important know-how, when it came to smelting and processing their finds, and the advanced technical and design skills necessary to forge beautiful objects in metal. They had an insatiable thirst for bronze, the wondrous material that was helping their culture become the world’s most advanced, in the process turning the Minoans of the ancient Mediterranean into some of the wealthiest and most powerful citizens of the known world.
The Minoans would have been drawn to Britain by the lure of rivers running with tin. They would have been unlikely to meet with much local competition. Imagine their jubilation when they discovered that another great prize was also here: copper.
CHAPTER 24
A LABYRINTH IN DRAGON COUNTRY
Any ship sailing north from Cornwall’s tin mines up the St George’s Channel would have noticed a handsome group of mountain peaks near what we now call Caernarvon (Caernarfon), in northwest Wales. The curious mariner might then have turned eastwards into Colwyn Bay on reaching Carmel Head (see map), to investigate. This is what I believe happened in the Middle Bronze Age around 2500 BC, when the first Minoan explorers, having gathered a load of Cornish tin, pushed north to explore further.
Before the age of the dinosaurs this rocky foreshore was a tropical seabed. The huge carboniferous limestone headland of today began forming about 300 million years ago. Stone Age man would almost certainly have shared the Orme with mammoth, lions and the woolly rhinoceros, but archaeologists don’t know for certain when Homo sapiens first arrived on the headland.
Many thousands of years later, two mining enthusiasts were investigating 19th-century mine workings. Wales is famous for mineral exploitation on an industrial scale in that century. But what Andy Lewis and Eric Roberts came across instead was a spectacular warren of copper mines that didn’t conform to either 18th- or 19th-century mining practices.
Worried about exploring too far underground without taking safety precautions, they managed to get the local council to agree to do a survey. What that survey found shocked everyone, including themselves. A labyrinth.
Beneath their feet was a maze of prehistoric mine workings that extended into a dense warren of shafts, tunnels and side-chambers. The dark, buried passages and chambers were immeasurably old, not at all like the shallow-cast pre-Victorian mining the Welshmen had been expecting. Quite by accident, Lewis and Roberts had unearthed the enormous Great Orme Bronze Age copper mine.
The Great Orme Exploration Society meets every Thursday night in the King’s Head in Llandudno. So today you can visit them and drink a fine pint of bitter to Lewis and Roberts and those ancient pioneers who opened up the land, and the world, to a shining past: a technological age we had scarcely dreamed of.
I visited the site in late spring. It is an easy journey from London: first flat out to Warrington and then taking a leisurely local train westwards along the beautiful Flint and Denbigh coasts for another hour and a half. To the south lay the intriguing snow-capped peaks our Minoan mariners would have sighted; to the north a succession of shallow bays where they could have beached their craft. Today the coastline is a mixture of caravan sites, oil refineries and field upon field of Wales’ ubiquitous sheep.
The terminus for my journey was the genteel yachting town of Llandudno. The Great Orme mine is halfway up Llandudno’s ‘peak’, which is reached by a cable car and a tram that connects the town to the summit. It would be a spectacular and healthy walk up to the very top, where the Telegraph Inn was once the vital communications link between Holyhead and the busy global trading port of Liverpool, advising of the imminent arrival of sailing ships laden with valuable cargo. Still, I cheat and take the charming, stubby little blue-painted tram, which drops me off at an unassuming group of low, white-walled buildings – and puddles of grit and mud.
Inside the Great Orme mine one’s first reaction is incredulity. If you were to draw a cut-through diagram of this place, its tunnels would look like the branches of a vast spreading oak
tree, stretching right through the entire hill. The complex is different to anything I have ever seen – it’s almost as if you are entering a huge subterranean sponge or ants’ nest, where humans would have crawled down into the tunnels, crevices and fissures, steep shafts and side chambers. Some of the tunnels are so narrow that it seems that all those thousands of years ago only children could have excavated them. What a Herculean task it must have been.
Judging by the archaeological evidence, the first miners used antlers and shoulder blades to scoop out the ore before it was hauled to the surface by a system of ladders and windings. Once above ground, the copper ore was pulverised with stones. They were the shape and size of ostrich eggs. Usually coloured a rich cobalt blue, the ore was smashed out and then heated in a heaped crucible, using a pair of bellows surmounted by a pile of charcoal.
The liquid copper could then simply be poured into the mould as required – the process was as easy as that. When cooled, the copper could be worked in its own right, or it could be mixed with molten Cornish tin to create the all-important alloy of hard bronze. The end product – whether axe, knife or sword – was either hand-beaten or shaped by clay moulds. Sharp weapons and tools could be made stronger and more flexible by beating them after the initial moulding.
So here in north Wales we have the first industrial process in Britain, which started 4,500 years ago – a date determined by the carbon found in the charcoal residue here. Could this operation possibly have reached this level of sophistication so fast without the input of outsiders?
The origin of the word ‘Orme’ is lost to history, although we do know that many centuries later the Norsemen often used the term to refer to dragons, or ‘worms’. From the sea, the great headland could indeed have looked like a sea serpent as it stretched its neck out into the waters. Perhaps the idea reflected exactly how much treasure lay guarded in the bowels of the earth.
The Lost Empire of Atlantis Page 20