by Farley Mowat
As for the vessel that had brought them there—she would become the first to bear the name Farfarer . . . a name destined to echo down the generations for more than a thousand years.
CHAPTER FOUR
PYTHEAS
ALMOST ALL OUR FIRST-HAND KNOWLEDGE OF THE life and times of the ancient inhabitants of Britain stems from a remarkable voyage undertaken around 330 B.C. by a peripatetic Greek named Pytheas.
Pytheas first caught my attention in 1938 when, as a schoolboy in landlocked Saskatchewan, I was taken to a lecture given by Canadian Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Stefansson extolled Pytheas as one of the great seafarers of all time, and thereafter I used to dream about accompanying the Greek venturer to a mysterious Arctic world more than two thousand years into the past.
Although Pytheas wrote a book about his journey, only fragments of it have been preserved, mostly in brief commentaries by later classical writers. During the nineteenth century it was fashionable in some, mainly Scandinavian, quarters to deride Pytheas and all his works as mythical creations. However, in the present century most historians have come to accept the reality of the man and his accomplishments. It is no less than his due.
What follows is my reconstruction of his epic voyage.
Six centuries before Christ was born, people from Phocaea, a small but prosperous Greek state in Asia Minor, sailed west almost the full length of the Mediterranean to found a settlement close to one of the mouths of the Rhône. They called it Massilia. Eventually it became Marseilles.
The Phocaeans were distinguished amongst their fellow Greeks for their business flair. They were fierce competitors of the Phoenicians, Semites from Lebanon who, as early as 800 B.C., had sailed westward to found Carthage on the North African coast, from which they were afterwards able to control traffic through the Strait of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar) linking the Middle Sea to the Outer Ocean.
Seafaring vessels of a bygone age.
Farfarer—50 feet
Viking Knorr—50 feet
Greek Holkas—50 feet
Armorican merchant vessel—70 feet
Roman galley—80 feet
The Phocaeans founded Massilia to prevent the Carthaginians from controlling inland trade routes between the Mediterranean and lands to the north bordering on the Atlantic. Massilia’s location allowed the Phocaeans to dominate the Seine, Loire, and Rhône river systems, and therefore the trade with far-distant regions on the western and northern verges of the known world.
By the time Massilia was established, goods had been moving between the barbarian northwest and Egypt, Crete, and Mycenae for at least two millennia. Faience beads, bronze tools and weapons, pottery, fine cloth, even wine travelled to Britain and to North Sea and Baltic ports in vessels coasting the shores of the Bay of Biscay, or in river craft ascending the Rhône then descending west-flowing rivers to the Atlantic coast. Returning traders brought back Irish gold, Baltic amber, British tin—and ivory.
As Carthage tightened her stranglehold on the Strait of Hercules, the trans-Gaul river routes grew in importance until, by 400 B.C., Massilia had become one of the foremost commercial centres in the Mediterranean world.
Grown rich, the city on the Rhône also became famous for its natural philosophers, amongst whom was Pytheas. An eminent mathematician, he was the first Greek to show that the tides were controlled by the moon and the first to devise an accurate method of determining relative latitudes.
I envisage him as a pleasantly rotund (upper-class Massiliots would have eaten well) fellow of middle height and years, dark-eyed, and decisive in his ways.
Pytheas seems to have had an insatiable curiosity. All his life he had watched exotic cargoes arriving in his home port and must have pondered the nature of the northern lands and peoples from which they came. Massilia’s merchant-rulers would certainly have shared such an interest, if only for purely practical reasons. When Pytheas decided he must go and see the hyperborean world for himself, he was provided with a stout ship, a crew, and stores for an extended voyage.
But why a ship for a river journey?
It appears that, a few decades before the turn of the fourth century, the Carthaginians briefly eased their blockade of the Strait of Hercules, and Pytheas seized the opportunity to go north by sea.
His vessel would have been a holkas, the standard Greek merchantman of the day, about seventy feet long with a twenty-foot beam, deep-bellied, bluff-bowed, and heavily built of oak and pine. Although she carried long sweeps with which she could be rowed (albeit slowly), her main driver was a big, loose-footed square sail that could give her four or five knots in a brisk, favouring breeze.
The voyage began on a spring day late in the fourth century B.C. As the holkas coasted southwest along the Mediterranean shores of Spain, her crew kept a wary lookout for Carthaginian war galleys. Luck was with the Massiliots. They slipped safely through the strait, probably at night, and by dawn were headed northwest into the open ocean on a course designed to give a wide berth to Gades (now Cadiz), the most northerly Carthaginian stronghold on the Atlantic coast.
One of Pytheas’s few surviving observations for latitudes during the voyage corresponds closely to the position of modern Oporto. Continuing north, the holkas rounded Cape Finisterre, turned eastward, and coasted the Bay of Biscay to reach one of the trading posts established by Massiliots at river mouths along the Atlantic coast. Here the vessel lay at anchor for a day or two while Pytheas gathered information from his fellow countrymen about what lay ahead.
They told him that incursions by bellicose tribesmen from the northeast, whom the Greeks called Keltoi, were becoming more frequent and more disastrous for the inhabitants of the interior. However, the native coastal dwellers, known as Armoricans, were successfully holding their own. The Armoricans were noted as first-rate seamen, possessed of good ships, well-defended ports, and effective weaponry.
Pytheas continued northward. Near the western tip of France, he went ashore to take an observation on an island in Armorican territory called Uxisama, modern Ushant, for which Pytheas’s given latitude is in error by less than thirty miles.
Uxisama was the traditional point of departure for traders bound across the hundred-mile width of the Channel to the great island known to Greeks and Phoenicians alike as Alba.1 The holkas’s master set his vessel on a due-north course and the ship left the continent astern.
After a day and a night at sea, the Massiliots raised the highlands of the Cornish peninsula. They put into harbour somewhere along the southern shore, perhaps at Mount’s Bay near present-day Penzance, or a little farther east, in Falmouth Bay. Both were ports from which Cornish tin had been shipped to Mediterranean bronze makers through a millennium or more.
Pytheas went ashore and journeyed into the interior to visit some of the tin mines and satisfy his curiosity about the way of life of the local people, whom he called autochthones, which is to say, aboriginals.
Up to this point he had broken no new ground, but now unknown territory lay ahead to the north. The peoples living in Hyperborea (the land beyond the North Wind) had always brought their goods south to trade with Mediterranean merchants at the Oestrimnides, islands near the southwestern tip of Britain. The Roman poet Avienus, quoting fragments from a Carthaginian periplus (seaman’s sailing directions) dating to the sixth century B.C., described this rendezvous as follows:
To the Oestrimnides come many enterprising people who occupy themselves with commerce and who navigate the monster-filled ocean far and wide in small ships. They do not understand how to build wooden ships in the usual way. Believe it or not, they make their boats by sewing hides together and carry out deep-sea voyages in them. Two days farther north [from the Oestrimnides] lies the great island formerly called Holy Island [Ireland] where the Hierne people live adjacent to the island of Alba [mainland Britain].
It was to the Oestrimnides (now the Scilly Isles) that Pytheas sailed after his excursion ashore in Cornwall. Here he met native traders from
Hyperborea who had come south in their big, hide-covered vessels. They welcomed him, for not only did the Greeks provide a market for northern goods such as walrus ivory, they were major suppliers of muchdesired southern products, including wine.
Pytheas mingled with the men from the north at what was, in effect, a trade fair on the Scilly Isles. When he let it be known he would dearly love to visit their homelands, some of the northern Albans invited him to sail north in their company.
So one summer day a squadron of skin vessels made its way into the Irish Sea, with a Massiliot holkas in its midst.
A problem soon arose. Despite the best efforts of her crew, the holkas could not keep station. In any sort of breeze she fell astern of the swift skin vessels. The Albans politely shortened sail.
Pytheas’s next surviving observation places him near the Isle of Man. Thereafter the ships passed out of the Irish Sea into the Minches. Here they began meeting fishermen and sea-hunters from islands whose name Pytheas recorded as Ebudae—the Ebud Islands. Today they are the Hebrides.
Now mostly forested lands lay astern, and the Massiliots found themselves entering a most unfamiliar world. Lifeless-looking peat bogs and heather moors rolled inland from rocky shores to barren peaks. However, if the land seemed desolate, the waters seethed with fishes, seals, and whales. Perhaps, somewhere in the North Minch, Pytheas was lucky enough to glimpse the ivory-tusked sea monster of which he had heard so much.
His next recorded observation was made in the latitude of Loch Broom, where the ships sheltered from a storm. Their arrival attracted people from all the nearby crofting and fishing communities. When the visitors sailed on again, they were accompanied by a flock of small local craft, whose crews were as fascinated by the holkas and her people as the Massiliots were by them.
Although very different in their dress, equipment, and many aspects of their way of life, the two peoples were not dissimilar in physical appearance. Both were rather slightly built, yet strong and supple. Both were dark-haired, dark-eyed, and olive-skinned. Both possessed lively and vivacious natures. In truth, it seemed to Pytheas that the Albans could have been distant cousins had it not been for their language, which was so alien that all communication with them had to be conducted through interpreters.
Now the vessels rounded Cape Wrath and sailed into the roiling waters of Pentland Firth. Mainland Alba lay to the south. To the north sprawled twin archipelagos to which Pytheas gave one name—Orcadies—Islands of the Orcas. According to Diodorus Siculus, a Greek writer of the first century B.C., Pytheas also identified the northeastern corner of mainland Britain (now Caithness) as the Orcadian Peninsula.2
One by one, the Alban ships began to haul away for their own home ports, which were now close at hand. With a diminishing escort, the holkas continued threading her way northward through straits and channels between the many islands.
The visitors were piloted past the towering cliffs of Hoy Island into Hoy Sound. On the croft-strewn lowlands surrounding the Loch of Stenness stood an assemblage of monumental structures which even the worldly Massiliots found impressive. Foremost was Maeshowe, a mighty mound raised over a corbelled vault whose size and workmanship are unsurpassed by any other megalithic structure of its kind. Within a mile or so of Maeshowe were ceremonial circles outlined by stone pillars, some being eighteen feet tall and weighing several tons. Although built two thousand years before Pytheas’s time, the Ring of Brogdar, the nearby Ring of Bookan, and the Standing Stones of Stenness were still hallowed places when he visited the Orcadies.
As the holkas voyaged on amongst the islands, the Massiliots admired the varied and skilful ways the Islanders used the layered red sandstone that underlay much of their land. Trees and timber being virtually lacking, sandstone was made to serve instead. Not only did it provide the stuff from which almost all buildings were constructed, sandstone slabs were neatly formed into bureaus, cupboards, bed frames, benches, and tables. Drystone field walls, so well constructed they seemed to have been moulded, ran over the treeless slopes and moors in all directions. Harbour works, ship haul-outs, sheep folds—the list was endless—were all made of skilfully laid-up sandstone. Even the skin-covered boats and ships were ballasted with shaped tablets of red sandstone. So accomplished were the masons that they seldom needed mortar, of which they made what small amount was required by burning seashells to obtain slaked lime. The Northern Islanders were artisans in stone par excellence.
They had no towns, living instead in scattered crofts or in clan clusters of fewer than a dozen stone-walled, sod-thatched buildings. For the most part, their small and shaggy cattle, horses, sheep, and goats remained out of doors year round.
The chill winters and cool summers that then prevailed had caused sequential crop failures and consequent massive population shifts on the Continent, but had wrought few hardships on the Northern Islanders. If their free-ranging domestic animals were unable to feed them, they could turn to an ever-generous sea. Nor were they entirely dependent on what land and sea could provide directly. The cargoes of valuta they sent south each summer were as readily transmutable into grain and meal as into hard goods.
The Mediterranean visitors found these islands bleak, windswept, and chill, but noted that those who dwelt upon them not only lived in peace and freedom but, by the standards of the times, lived well.
One other aspect of island life that impressed the Massiliots, although not necessarily favourably, was that here were no castles, mansions, or great houses; no high and mighty lords; and, in fact, little visible difference between men. It was essentially an egalitarian society.
Cruising leisurely north, with frequent visits ashore, the crew of the holkas reached the northernmost tip of the twin archipelagos—an islet now called Muckle Flugga, which Pytheas correctly located at the Massiliot latitudinal equivalent of 60° 52’.
He had now reached a point much farther north than any previous Mediterranean traveller; yet he was not content. Although he was told that thousands of orcas—the creatures he most wished to observe—had once swarmed in these waters, they were now all but vanished. Only windrows of bleaching bones, half-hidden by beach grass, remained to speak of the cargoes of ivory that had once been harvested here.
Yet ivory still flowed south, and in quantity.
In response to Pytheas’s inquiries, the Islanders told him of Tilli. It was a great land, they said, lying in the grey sweep of ocean five or six days’ sail to the northwest.3 Not only did it harbour multitudes of orcas, it was home to many other exotic creatures. These included narwhals, whose single tusks of spiralled ivory were even more valuable than walrus tusks; white water bears; white and smoky-blue foxes; majestic gyrfalcons; flightless auks the size of geese; and ducks and other waterfowl beyond counting.
Map of Iceland. Known as “Tilli” by the Albans, the island is northwest of what is now known as Britain.
Tilli was a rocky world, the Albans explained, partly covered by vast ice mountains and sometimes riven by thundering volcanoes. Each spring ships from the Northern Islands made their way to it. Some few even overwintered. When they sailed for home again they no longer skimmed the waves but wallowed, deep-laden with valuta destined for the trade fair at the Oestrimnides.
Pytheas was determined to see Tilli for himself. The Islanders concluded that time enough remained for a voyage there and back before autumnal gales would render such a venture perilous. However, they rejected any notion that the Massiliots attempt the voyage in the holkas. This, they said, barely concealing their disdain for the unwieldy wooden ship, would be madness. Instead, they offered to take Pytheas to Tilli in one of their own vessels.
They sailed first to the Bird Islands—now the Faeroes. Three days after leaving those stark pinnacles astern, a lookout picked up the loom of the ice mountains of Tilli. Closing with the land, they coasted the southern shore, and the Massiliots wondered at the majestic, glacier-covered mountains; the black cliffs and sands; and, most of all, at the legions of tuskers in the
water and on the endless beaches.
Perhaps they landed on what are now called the Westman Islands in order that Pytheas might view a smoking crater at close range. Then the Albans steered their ship back to the mainland shore to show their guests the verdant sweep of meadowlands and birch woods in the south coast river valleys.
Pytheas reported in his now lost book that he went a day’s sail beyond Tilli, and there encountered a “sluggish and congealed sea” that could be traversed neither on foot nor by boat. The Albans had piloted the insatiably curious Greek far enough north and west of Tilli to show him the disintegrating ice (called slob by those familiar with it) drifting south on the East Greenland Current. They may also have given him a glimpse of yet another and even vaster western land crowned by the stupendous Greenland icecap.
Putting back, the vessel rounded Tilli’s northwestern promontory and sailed along the north shore, completing a circuit of the island before setting course for the Orcadies.
On his return to those islands, and to his holkas, Pytheas said his grateful farewells to his Alban hosts and guides, then sailed into the North Sea and so home to Massilia, having first made a venture into the Baltic to satisfy his curiosity about the origins of amber.
But we will not follow him; for now, as singers of the old songs used to say, he is out of the story.
CHAPTER FIVE
ALBANS AND CELTS
ALTHOUGH IN ANCIENT TIMES BRITAIN BORE THE name of Alba, she was by no means alone in doing so. Tens of scores of place names derived from alb were scattered all the way from the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan to the Atlantic Ocean. A surprising number of these have endured into our times. I had no trouble assembling a list of more than three hundred contemporary place names containing an alb component, and many more are to be found in Asia Minor and in northern Africa.