![]() Then, in the spring, they would head back aboard their ship and sail off again. ![]() Every autumn, the men would dock their ship wherever they were and set up farms to survive through the winter. The trip took more than two years to complete. These were the first people in all of history to circumnavigate the continent. He sent men out down the Red Sea and had them follow the coast of Africa, heading all the way down to the tip of South Africa, up along the west, and back through the Nile. Sometime in the sixth century B.C., the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho outdid Hanno’s trip. When he came home, he told the Greeks there were killer sea monsters to keep them from exploring Britain for themselves. That is the most popular theory-that Himilco thought his discoveries in Britain were so valuable that he had to keep them secret from the world. He may have struggled with some animal he had never seen before and mistaken it for a monster-or he might have just lied. It is not entirely clear what Himilco actually saw. And, he claimed, it was filled up with “numerous sea monsters.” According to Himilco, Britain was under a constant fog, with shallow waters so full of seaweed that it was nearly impossible to move a ship an inch. ![]() The strangest part, though, is how Himilco describes his trip. He set up colonies along the way and opened trade routes with the people who lived there, who he called “a vigorous tribe” that were “proud spirited, energetic and skillful.” While Hanno went south, down Africa, another Carthaginian, Himilco, traveled north, along the coastline of Europe and all the way up to modern England. For four days, we saw the coast by night full of flames.” 9Himilco and the Sea Monsters of Britain “Quickly and in fear, we sailed away from that place. “Large torrents of fire emptied into the sea, and the land was inaccessible because of the heat,” Hanno wrote. When he was back on his boat and looked back at the island, it was on fire. “In the daytime we could see nothing but the forest,” Hanno reported, “but during the night we noticed many fires alight and heard the sound of flutes, the beating of cymbals and tom-toms, and the shouts of a multitude.”Īn oracle he had brought with him urged him to leave the island and soon as possible. His most harrowing story, though, comes from his exploration of an island. He described people with almost mythic powers, claiming that there were a group of men living in caves who could run faster than horses. Nobody in his world, at this time, had any idea of what to expect in West Africa, and Hanno came back with some strange reports about the people who lived there. It is believed that he made it as far as modern Ghana-at the time, the furthest anyone had gone into the continent. 10Hanno and the Burning JungleĪround the sixth or fifth century B.C., a Carthaginian called Hanno the Navigator set out with 30,000 people in 76 ships and sailed along the western coast of Africa. Then, they had to come home and try to find a way to put the things they had seen into words. ![]() ![]() They saw parts of the world that were completely unlike anything they had ever imagined. When the first explorers set out into unknown parts of the world, they had no way of being prepared for what they saw. Even in the earliest moments of human history, when the known world was little more than what extended within sight, there were men who were sent out to explore the unknown. Man explored the world long before the days of Columbus and Magellan. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |