Free Atlantic by Simon Winchester Page B

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, 10 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, 11 and this is where their murex trade commenced with a dominating vengeance.
    What are now