Perhaps the ‘wild beasts’ are the whales of the Bay of Biscay, later to become a famous whaling ground; the shallow water areas that so impressed Himlico may have been the flats alternately exposed and covered by the ebb and flow of the great tides of the French coast—a strange phenomenon to one from the almost tide-less Mediterranean. But Himlico also had ideas of the open ocean to the west, if the account of Avienus is to be trusted: ‘Farther to the west from these Pillars there is boundless sea… None has sailed ships over these waters, because propelling winds are lacking on these deeps… likewise because darkness screens the light of day with a sort of clothing, and because a fog always conceals the sea.’ Whether these descriptive details are touches of Phoenician canniness or merely the old ideas reasserting themselves it is hard to say, but much the same conceptions appear again and again in later accounts, echoing down the centuries to the very threshold of modern times.
So far as historical records are concerned, the first great voyage of marine exploration was by Pytheas of Massilia about 330 B.C. Unfortunately his writings, including one called On the Ocean, are lost and their substance is preserved for us only in fragmentary quotations passed on by later writers. We know very little of the controlling circumstances of the northward voyage of this astronomer and geographer, but probably Pytheas wished to see how far the oecumene or land world extended, to learn the position of the Arctic Circle, and to see the land of midnight sun. Some of these things he may have heard of through the merchants who brought down tin and amber from the Baltic lands by the overland trade routes.
Since Pytheas was the first to use astronomical measurements to determine the geographic location of a place and in other ways had proved his competence as an astronomer, he brought more than ordinary skill to an exploratory voyage. He seems to have sailed around Great Britain, to have reached the Shetland Islands, and then to have launched out into the open ocean to the north, coming at last to ‘Thule,’ the land of midnight sun. In this country, he is quoted as reporting, ‘the nights were very short, in some places two, in others three hours long, so that the sun rose again a short time after it had set.’ The country was inhabited by ‘barbarians’ who showed Pytheas ‘the place where the sun goes to rest.’ The location of ‘Thule’ is a point much disputed by later authorities, some believing it to have been Iceland, while others believe that Pytheas crossed the North Sea to Norway. Pytheas is also said to have described a ‘congealed sea’ lying north of Thule, which accords better with Iceland.
But the Dark Ages were settling down over the civilized world, and little of the knowledge of distant places acquired by Pytheas on his voyagings seems to have impressed the learned men who followed him. The geographer Posidonius wrote of the ocean that ‘stretched to infinity’ and from Rhodes he undertook a journey all the way to Gadir (Cadiz) to see the ocean, measure its tides, and determine the truth of the belief that the sun dropped with the hissing of a red-hot body into the great western sea.
Not for about 1200 years after Pytheas do we have another clear account of marine exploration—this time by the Norwegian Ottar. Ottar described his voyagings in northern seas to King Alfred, who recorded them in a straightforward narrative of geographic exploration strikingly free from sea monsters and other imaginary terrors. Ottar, on the basis of this account, was the first known explorer to round the North Cape, to enter the Polar or Barents Sea, and later to enter the White Sea. He found the coasts of these seas inhabited by people of whom he seems to have heard previously. According to the narrative, he went there ‘chiefly to explore the country, and for the sake of the walrus, for they have much valuable bone in their tusks.’ This voyage was probably made between A.D. 870 and 890.
Meanwhile the age of the Vikings had dawned. The beginning of their more important expeditions is usually considered to be the end of the eighth century. But long before that time they had visited other countries of northern Europe. ‘As early as the third century and until the close of the fifth century,’ wrote Fridtjof Nansen, ‘the roving Eruli sailed from Scandinavia, sometimes in company with Saxon pirates, over the seas of western Europe, ravaging the coasts of Gaul and Spain, and indeed penetrating in 455 into the Mediterranean as far as Lucca in Italy.’ As early as the sixth century the Vikings must have crossed the North Sea to the land of the Franks, and probably to southern Britain. They may have established themselves in Shetland by the beginning of the seventh century, and plundered the Hebrides and northwest Ireland about the same time. Later they sailed to the Faroes and to Iceland; in the last quarter of the tenth century they established two colonies in Greenland, and shortly thereafter they steered across the intervening Atlantic waters to North America. Of the place of these voyages in history Nansen writes:
The shipbuilding and seamanship of the Norwegians mark a new epoch in the history both of navigation and discovery, and with their voyages the knowledge of northern lands and waters was at once completely changed… We find accounts of these voyages of discovery in the old writings and sagas, a large part of which was put into writing in Iceland. A somber undercurrent runs through these narratives of voyages in unknown seas—the silent struggle of hardy men with ice, storms, cold, and want.
They had neither compass, nor astronomical instruments, nor any of the appliances of our time for finding their position at sea; they could only sail by the sun, moon, and stars, and it seems incomprehensible how for days and weeks, when these were invisible, they were able to find their course through fog and bad weather; but they found it, and in the open craft of the Norwegian Vikings, with their square sails, fared north and west over the whole ocean, from Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen to Greenland, Baffin Bay, Newfoundland, and North America…. It was not until five hundred years later that the ships of other nations were to make their way to the same regions.[29]
But only the vaguest rumors of any of these things had reached the ‘civilized world’ of the Mediterranean. While the sagas of the Norsemen were giving clear and factual directions for the passage across oceans, from known to unknown worlds, the writings of the scholars of the medieval world dealt still with that outermost encircling ocean, the dread Sea of Darkness. About the year 1154 the noted Arab geographer Edrisi wrote for the Norman king of Sicily, Roger II, a description of the earth, accompanied by 70 maps, which portrayed on the outside of all the known earth the Dark Sea, forming the limit of the world. He wrote of the sea about the British Isles that it is ‘impossible to penetrate very far into this ocean.’ He hinted at the existence of far islands but thought the approach to them difficult because of the ‘fog and deep darkness that prevails on this sea.’ The scholarly Adam of Bremen, writing in the eleventh century, knew of the existence of Greenland and Wineland as distant islands in the great ocean, but could not separate the reality from the old ideas of that sea, ‘infinite and fearful to behold, which encompasses the whole world,’ that ocean flowing ‘endlessly around the circle of the earth.’ And even the Norsemen themselves, as they discovered lands across the Atlantic, seem merely to have pushed back the boundaries of the place where still there began that outermost ocean, for the idea of the outer ocean surrounding the disc of the earth appears in such Northern chronicles as the Kings Mirror and the Heimskringla. And so over that Western Ocean into which Columbus and his men set out there hung still the legend of a dead and stagnant sea, of monsters and entrapping weeds, of fog and gloom and ever present danger.