A GREEK OF MARSEILLES FINDS THE AMBER COAST

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23507, 18 November 1939, Page 1 (Supplement)

A GREEK OF MARSEILLES FINDS THE AMBER COAST

By GRAMMATICUS

F the shades of ancient mariners haunt; the seaways and scan the shippings news, old Pytheas laughed last week. • The City of Flint, said they, coilld not navigate to a Baltic port for want of charts. Pytheas had.no charts. He took a chance, and, if indeed his tale be true, he made a voyage in his little wooden ship which ranks him with Hanno, Eric the Red, Columbus and Abel Tasman. Pytheas lived at Marseilles, a colony of the übiquitous Greeks, and his great chance came just 300' years before Christ. In that year the Phoenicians, who lived in trading splendour right opposite on the African Coast, in the Carthage they had built, were busy—too busy to watch the Straits of Gibraltar. These canny Semites had control of the tin trade of - Cornwall, whose coast they reached by standing straight out from Conmna, and they were jealous of competitors. It was a tacit but tight blockade which Pytheas had to slip. Hence our choice of date, for in the closing years of the century Cartilage was fighting for her life. Through the Straits Agathocles of Syracuse was the cause of it all. His was the audacious scheme which is his sole title to fame. He was a born condottiere, and when Hamilenr, Marshal of Carthage, was advancing on his city, lie coolly crossed to

Pytheas Had No Baltic Charts

Africa and marched on the Phoenician capital. And the skipper from Marseilles was through the Straits. And long afterwards, like Marco Polo, he came back with a traveller's tale, which few believed. Thanks to the sceptics, we have very little information about a great voyage, but details from a dozen sources, and a touch of imagination to help out our dead reckoning,, enable us to reconstruct it. We hear of Cadiz, and then the Breton coast. Did he cut across the Bay ~of Biscay, now that he knew those tremendous Atlantic tides which terrified Julius Caesar's Romans 250 years later?' Gentle Miners < ! Strabo, the ancient geographer, savs that Pytheas coasted Spain and France, but Strabo is sceptical throughout. Next he made for Cornwall. -After all, he was out to pry into the tin trade. He gives the distance from Ushant to : Land's End. and describes the Cornish, 'miners as "gentle in their manner." This must be one of the first references to the inhabitants of our islands. Let us add the statement of the Roman Tacitus that the Britons "cheerfully submit to taxes," and conclude that there is something in the air of Albion which makes, us meek. Here Pytheas was hit-ten by the bug and, like Hanno, sent down Africa to found trading posts, he went off exploring. He appears to have circumnavigated Britain from Land's End to Land's End. He describes the island as

ri triangle. From the Mull of Galloway he must have sighted Ireland, and it is significant that Eratosthenes. in the next century locates the land correctly in relation to Britain. We cannot imagine that a person of such lively curiosity failed to go ashore. In Polvbius we find a sarcastic comment that Pytheas, according to his story, "walked all over Britain." But Pytheas states that the Britons were simple folk, who fotight with chariots in their infrequent wars, and that they stacked their corn in underground silos. The information must have been gathered on land. Sea-Lung Doubtless with British corn aboard, Pytheas made his most mysterious digression in the north. Terrifying things happened up there. He saw the sea in one place running 80 cubits high. It. is a fact that gales in the Pentland Firth running against the tide lift solid billows 60 feet high, with columns of spray hundreds of feet above them. And north of Scotland, "six days' sail away and one day's journey fiom the frozen sea" Pytheas heard of the end of the world, the "Island of Thule." ' Round Thule itself "there is neither sea nor air, but a mixture like sea-lung, in which earth and air are suspended; the sea-lung binds everything together." Pytheas did not make a landFall. The "sea-lung" beat him, hut lie gives the midsummer elevation of the sun in the strange island, he states that its inhabitants grow millet, gather honey and drink mead. _ There is enough detail here to en-' able us to assume some regular traffic between Scotland and some northern land. Was Thule Iceland or Norway? Probablv the latter. Bees do not live in Iceland, and the "sea-lung" excellently describes Norwegian coastal fogs. We. assume that the daring Greek made some attempt to reach this last edge of the world, from what happened next. He came back to the Channel coast, crossed to the continental side and followed it "beyond the Rhine to Scythia as far the river Tanais." This is the Don. It sounds incredible. Pvtheas, like the City of Flint, "had no Baltic charts." But, remember, he circumnavigated Britain. "Off a Great Estuary" He passed the land of the Gutones, and if we identify these with the Goths, we have the historical fact to face that this tribe lived east of the Baltic in those days. The fact that the Tanais, or Don, flows south, is not a final veto on the story. He may have meant the Vistula. Then there is the amber. Pytheas found an island where the natives gathered it and used it for fuel. The island was called Balcia, perhaps the modern Bornholm. The German Baltic coast was rich in amber. An adventurous Roman once reached it overland, and brought back enough amber to decorate all the posts in the circus. Or was the island Heligoland? It was "off a great estuary," which may be the Frisian Bight. Bursting with tales of adventure. Pvtheas came back to Marseilles. Perhaps they believed him in his native town. The unkind historians came later. But the tale is too circumstantial to be quite untrue. It is a fascinating picture, the men of the sunny south wide-eyed, in the grey misty seas of the northern lands. Where a spell is laid upon life and lust. And the rain is changed to a silver dust. And the sea to a great ureen stoue. The grim cliff of Gibraltar, the Pillars of Hercules, must have been a welcome sight. Marseilles was still a long way for a tired 'prow sluggish with Baltic barnacles. But within was the friendly sea of home. And what a tale was there now for salty sailors in the taverns of Marseilles!