The Phoenicians were the first to build proper ships and to
brave the rough waters of the Atlantic.
To be sure, the Minoans before them traded with great vigor
and defended their Mediterranean trade routes with swift and vicious naval
force. Their ships—built with tools of sharp-edged bronze—were elegant and
strong: they were made of cypress trees, sawn in half and lapped together, with
white-painted and sized linen stretched across the planks, and with a sail
suspended from a mast of oak, and oars to supplement their speed. But they
worked only by day, and they voyaged only between the islands within a few
days’ sailing of Crete; never once did any Minoan dare venture beyond the
Pillars of Hercules, into the crashing waves of the Sea of Perpetual Gloom.
The Minoans, like most of their rival thalassocracies,
accepted without demur the legends that enfolded the Atlantic, the stories and
the sagas that conspired to keep even the boldest away. The waters beyond the
Pillars, beyond the known world, beyond what the Greeks called the oekumen, the
inhabited earth, were simply too fantastic and frightful to even think of
braving. There might have been some engaging marvels: close inshore, the
Gardens of the Hesperides, and somewhat farther beyond, that greatest of all
Greek philosophical wonderlands, Atlantis. But otherwise the ocean was a place
wreathed in terror: I can find no way whatever of getting out of this gray
surf, Odysseus might well have complained, no way out of this gray sea. The
winds howled too fiercely, the storms blew up without warning, the waves were
of a scale and ferocity never seen in the Mediterranean.
Nevertheless, the relatively peaceable inland sea of the
classical world was to prove a training ground, a nursery school, for those
sailors who in time, and as an inevitable part of human progress, would prove
infinitely more daring and commercially ambitious than the Minoans. At just
about the time that Santorini erupted and, as many believe, gave the final
fatal blow to Minoan ambitions, so the more mercantile of the Levantines awoke.
From their sliver of coastal land—a sliver that, in time, would become Lebanon,
Palestine, and Israel, and can be described as a land with an innate tendency
toward ambition—the big Phoenician ships ventured out and sailed westward,
trading, battling, dominating.
When they came to the Pillars of Hercules, some time around
the seventh century B.C., they, unlike all of their predecessors, decided not
to stop. Their captains, no doubt bold men and true, decided to sail right
through, into the onrushing waves and storms, and see before all other men just
what lay beyond.
The men from the port of Tyre appear to have been the first
to do so. Their boats, broad-beamed, sickle-shaped “round ships” or galloi—so
called because of the sinuous fat curves of the hulls, and often with two sails
suspended from hefty masts, one at midships and one close to the forepeak—were
made of locally felled and surprisingly skillfully machined cedar planks, fixed
throughout with mortise and tenon joints and sealed with tar. Most of the
long-haul vessels from Tyre, Byblos, and Sidon had oarsmen, too—seven on each
side for the smaller trading vessels, double banks of thirteen on either side
of the larger ships, which gave them a formidable accelerative edge. Their
decorations were grand and often deliberately intimidating—enormous painted
eyes on the prow, many-toothed dragons and roaring tigers tipped with metal
ram-blades, in contrast to the ample-bosomed wenches later beloved by Western
sailors.
Phoenician ships were built for business. The famous Bronze
Age wreck discovered at Uluburun in southern Turkey by a sponge diver in 1982
(and which, while not definitely Phoenician, was certainly typical of the
period) displayed both the magnificent choice of trade goods available in the
Mediterranean and the vast range of journeys to be undertaken. The crew on this
particular voyage had evidently taken her to Egypt, to Cyprus, to Crete, to the
mainland of Greece, and possibly even as far as Spain. When they sank,
presumably when the cargo shifted in a sudden storm, the holds of the
forty-five-foot-long galloi contained a bewildering and fatally heavy amassment
of delights, far more than John Masefield could ever have fancied. There were
ingots of copper and tin, blue glass and ebony, amber, ostrich eggs, an Italian
sword, a Bulgarian axe, figs, pomegranates, a gold scarab with the image of
Nefertiti, a set of bronze tools that most probably belonged to the ship’s
carpenter, a ton of terebinth resin, hosts of jugs and vases and Greek storage
jars known as pithoi, silver and gold earrings, innumerable lamps, and a large
cache of hippopotamus ivory.
The possibility that the Uluburun ship journeyed as far as
Spain suggests the traders’ ultimate navigational ambitions. The forty ingots
of tin included in the cargo hints at their commercial motive. Tin was an
essential component of bronze, and since the introduction of metal coinage in
the seventh century B.C., the demand for it had vastly increased. It was known
anecdotally to the Levantines that alluvial tin was to be found in several of
the rivers that cascaded down from the hills of central southern Spain—the
Guadalquivir and the Guadalete most notably, but also the Tinto, the Odiel, and
the Guadiana—and so the Phoenicians, at around this time, decided to move, and
disregard the legendary warnings. For them, with the limited knowledge they had
and the jeremiads on daily offer from the seers and priests, it was as
audacious as attempting to travel into outer space: full of risk, and with
uncertain rewards.
And so, traveling in convoy for safety and comfort, the
first brave sailors passed beneath the wrathful brows of the rock
pillars—Gibraltar to the north and Jebel Musa to the south—made their halting
way, without apparent incident, along the Iberian coastline, and finding
matters more congenial than they imagined—for they were in sight of land all
the time, and did not venture into the farther deep—they then set up the
oceanic trading stations they would occupy for the next four centuries. The
first was at Gades, today’s Cádiz; the second was Tartessus, long lost today,
possibly mentioned in the Bible as Tharshish, and by Aristophanes for the
quality of the local lampreys, but believed to be a little farther north than
Gades, along the Spanish Atlantic coast at Huelva.
It was from these two stations that the sailors of the
Phoenician merchant marine began to perfect their big-ocean sailing techniques.
It was from here that they first embarked on the long and dangerous voyages
that would become precedents for the following two thousand years of the
oceanic exploration of these parts.
They came first for the tin. But while this trade
flourished, prompting the merchantmen to sail to Brittany and Cornwall and even
perhaps beyond, it was their discovery of the beautiful murex snails that took
them far beyond the shores of their imagination.
The magic of murex had been discovered seven hundred years
before, by the Minoans, who discerned that, with time and trouble, the mollusks
could be made to secrete large quantities of a rich and indelible
purple-crimson dye—of a color so memorable the Minoan aristocracy promptly
decided to dress in clothes colored with it. The color was costly, and there
were laws that banned its use by the lower classes. The murex dye swiftly
became—for the Minoans, for the Phoenicians, and most notably of all, for the
Romans—the most prized color of imperial authority. One was born to the purple:
only one so clad could be part of the vast engine work of Roman rule, or as the
Oxford English Dictionary has it, of the “emperors, senior magistrates,
senators and members of the equestrian class of Ancient Rome.”
By the seventh century B.C., the seaborne Phoenicians were
venturing out from their two Spanish entrepôts, searching for the mollusks that
excreted this dye. They found little evidence of it in their searches to the
north, along the Spanish coast; but once they headed southward, hugging the low
sandy cliffs of the northern corner of Africa, and as the waters warmed, they
found murex colonies in abundance. As they explored, so they sheltered their
ships in likely-looking harbors along the way—first in a town they built and
called Lixus, close to Tangier and in the foothills of the Rif: there remains a
poorly maintained mosaic there of the sea god Oceanus, apparently laid by the
Greeks.
Then they moved on south and found goods to trade in an
estuary close to today’s Rabat. They left soldiers and encampments at
still-flourishing coastal towns like Azemmour, and then, in boats with high and
exaggerated prows and sterns, decorated with horses’ heads and known as hippoi,
they pressed farther and farther from home, coming eventually to the islands
that would be named Mogador. Here the gastropods were to be found in suitably
vast quantities. And so this pair of islands, sheltering the estuary of the
river named the Oued Ksob, is probably as far south as they went, and this is
where their murex trade commenced with a dominating vengeance.
What are now known as Les Îles Purpuraires, bound inside a
foaming vortex of tide rips, lie in the middle of the harbor of what is now the
tidy Moroccan jewel of Essaouira. This town is now best known for its gigantic
eighteenth-century seaside ramparts, properly fortified with breastworks and
embrasures, spiked bastions, and rows of black cannon, and which enclose a
handsome cloistered medina. The walkways on top of the curtain walls are the
perfect place to watch the ever-crashing surf from the Atlantic rollers,
especially as the sun goes down over the sea. The Phoenicians found that the
snails gathered in the thousands there, in rock crevices, and they scooped them
up in weighted and baited baskets. Extracting the dye—known chemically as
6.6′-dibromoindigo, and released by the animals as a defense mechanism—was
rather less easy, the process always kept secret. The animal’s tincture vein
had to be removed and boiled up in lead basins, and it would take many
thousands of snails to produce sufficient purple to dye a single garment. It
was traded, and the trade was tightly controlled, from the home port of the
sailors who harvested it: Tyre. For a thousand years, genuine Tyrian purple was
worth, ounce for ounce, as much as twenty times the price of gold.
The Phoenicians’ now-proven aptitude for sailing the North
African coast was to be the key that unlocked the Atlantic for all time. The
fear of the great unknown waters beyond the Pillars of Hercules swiftly
dissipated. Before long a viewer perched high on the limestone crags of
Gibraltar or Jebel Musa would be able spy other craft, from other nations,
European or North African or Levantine, passing from the still blue waters of
the Mediterranean into the gray waves of the Atlantic—timidly at first maybe,
but soon bold and undaunted, just as the Phoenicians had been.
“Multi pertransibunt, et augebitur scientia” was a phrase
from the Book of Daniel that would be inscribed beneath a fanciful
illustration, engraved on the title page of a book by Sir Francis Bacon, of a
galleon passing outbound, between the Pillars, shattering the comforts and
securities of old. “Many will pass through, and their knowledge will become
ever greater,” it is probably best translated—and it was thanks to the
purple-veined gastropods and the Phoenicians who were brave enough to seek them
out that such a sentiment, with its implication that learning comes only from
the taking of chances and risk, would become steadily more true. It was a
sentiment born at the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean.
