“It’s as if an editor has slashed a red line across a text without actually considering the flow of the narrative,” Jack said. “It doesn’t ring true.”
“Maybe there was a complete account, but it never made it into the official version,” Rebecca said.
“What do you mean?” Jeremy asked.
“Trade secrets. If you’ve found something good and want to put people off discovering it themselves, you write an account that does just that.”
“Pliny mentions that Hanno made it round to Arabia,” Jack said. “He’s a pretty reliable source, and may himself have seen that fuller account.”
“And Himilco?” Rebecca asked.
“Much less clear,” Jeremy said. “The first mention of him is by Pliny, who says that when Hanno went around Africa, Himilco was dispatched north to explore the outer coasts of Europe. A number of historians have speculated that they were brothers. He crops up again in Avienus, a Roman author of the fourth century AD, who mentions him as having made a voyage to the Oestrumnides, the Western Isles, his term for a land known to the early Greek and Phoenician explorers as the Cassiterides, the Tin Isles. The voyage was fraught with dangers, full of sea monsters and fog. Avienus has us believe that his source is a lost account by Himilco himself, something also implied by Pliny. But there’s no indication of tablets with that account having been set up in Carthage as well, odd because circumnavigating the British Isles would have been just as noteworthy an achievement as Hanno’s.”
“Maybe the trade secret was too valuable for any of the voyage to be made widely known, with British tin being in such high demand,” Rebecca suggested.
“Or maybe Himilco never lived to trumpet his success,” Jack said. “A sparse account, maybe only half believed, may have come down through others in his fleet who did survive, assuming that his was not the only vessel to set out. But without the great man to sell his story, without the Columbus or the Cabot or the Vasco da Gama, even the most compelling claims of exploration could fall flat.”
“So it could be that Himilco perished in a shipwreck,” Rebecca said, eyeing Jack. “A shipwreck off Cornwall.”
“The thought has crossed my mind.”
A familiar voice shouted greetings to the divers outside, and a few moments later Costas appeared at the tent flap, clutching a huge sandwich and wearing a battered straw sombrero, his signature Hawaiian shirt, and baggy technicolor shorts. He waved, took an enormous bite of the sandwich, and made his way round the table. He had the rolling gait that Jack had seen among his cousins on the Greek island where he had been born, bred into them over the generations from working on small boats as fishermen and sponge divers. He pulled up a plastic chair between Jeremy and Rebecca and sat down. He looked particularly grizzled today, Jack thought, with at least a week’s worth of stubble, but he had the contented look he always had after a few uninterrupted days in the engineering lab at IMU. He took another bite and inspected the oily stains on his forearms. “Sorry,” he said between mouthfuls. “Changed into my beach gear, but forgot to wash.”
“Nice sandwich,” Rebecca said. “New York deli in Cornwall. Always good to sample the local cuisine.”
“She always does them for me at the café,” he said, swallowing. “I call ahead the day before, she gets the stuff in. I spear her fresh fish from the steamship wreck as payment. It works.”
“Better watch out for the shark,” Jack said.
“He doesn’t like flatfish, I do. I leave him the rest. It’s called working with nature.”
“That something you learned on the mean streets of the Bronx?” Jeremy said.
Costas took another bite. “Spearfishing with my uncles as a boy when we went back home to Greece on vacation.”
“When you weren’t sipping gin and tonic by the pool on the deck of your father’s two-hundred-foot yacht?”
“That was a different kind of learning. Learning how to enjoy myself. Speaking of which, barbecue on the beach tonight?”
“Depends how we get on here,” Jack said. “Might have to head off this afternoon.”
Costas grunted, pushed the final part of the sandwich into his mouth and wiped his hands on his shorts, staring at Jeremy’s laptop showing the transcript of Hanno’s Periplus. He read it while he finished munching, and nearly choked. He stared again, swallowing hard. “Check this out,” he said, and read out a passage.
“‘In this gulf was an island, resembling the first, with a lagoon, within which was another island, full of savages. Most of them were women with hairy bodies, whom our interpreters called “gorillas.” Although we chased them, we could not catch any males; they all escaped, being good climbers who defended themselves with stones. However, we caught three women, who refused to follow those who carried them off, biting and clawing them. So we killed and flayed them and brought their skins back to Carthage. For we did not sail any further, because our provisions were running short.’”
He looked up, his expression deadpan. “Hairy women who bit and scratched? How long had these guys been at sea? They must have been desperate.”
“That was probably in the region of Senegal, so maybe several months after leaving the Strait of Gibraltar, longer if they’d stopped to trade and establish outposts as the text implies,” Jack said. “This is the Periplus of Hanno the Carthaginian, sailing down the west coast of Africa.”
“Gorillas? Really?”
“That’s the actual word, in Greek,” Jeremy said. “In fact it’s one of the reasons for believing in the authenticity of this document. What we have here is a Greek translation of the original Phoenician inscription set up in Carthage by Hanno after his return, in the early sixth century BC. The Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC knew of Hanno’s Periplus, as he describes a method of bartering along the West African coast that closely mimics an earlier passage in the Periplus and for which he could have had no other source, as there had been no further exploration along that coast after Hanno. Perhaps a Greek traveler who had been in Carthage made a copy and showed him. The word ‘gorilla’ would have been otherwise unknown to the Greeks and must have been copied from the original Punic inscription. It’s a rendering of the Kikongo word ngo diida, meaning a powerful animal that beats itself violently, so Hanno must have got the word from the Africans he met.”
“Not so nice of him to kill and flay them,” Rebecca said.
“It’s fascinating, because it’s actually the first recorded instance we have of a natural history specimen being brought back from a voyage of discovery,” Jack said. “Men like Joseph Banks on HMS Endeavor and Charles Darwin on the Beagle would have approved. Pliny tells us that the gorilla hides were still on display in Carthage when the Romans sacked the city in 146 BC.”
Costas dug a can of Coke out of his shorts pocket and popped it noisily, taking a deep drink. “Okay, the gorilla story may be real, but I don’t believe that final sentence, about turning back.”
“We were just talking about that,” Jeremy said. “It doesn’t fit the narrative.”
“I don’t know about that,” Costas said. “But when I was in the US Navy we deployed along that coast, and I do know about wind and currents. The Phoenicians were supposed to be great navigators, right? Trying to battle back against the Canary current and the prevailing northwesterlies would have made no sense at all. Hanno would have carried on, rounded the Cape and gone up the east coast of Africa.”