Free Atlantic by Simon Winchester Page A

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. 9 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