knowledge of the monsoons, which the Arabian who
lived on it must have had from time immemorial,
presenting far less difficulty. Hippalus has the credit
of introducing the monsoons to Western mvilisation,
but surely a seafaring race like the Arabians, who
lived on the spot, must have known all about them
long before his day; and just as they were reticent on
the subject of their voyages, so were they reticent on
the subject of the localities from which their merchandise
came. The knowledge given us by Marinus
of Tyre, by the anonymous author of the ‘ Periplus
of the Eed Sea,’ by Ptolemy, by Pliny, and others,
was obviously not the knowledge possessed by the
traders of the world, for they do not even attempt to
elucidate the question of where the precious commodities
came from which they enumerate.
Ptolemy’s information is provokingly vague, and
he candidly admits in his first chapter that it was
obtained from a merchant of Arabia Felix : he gives
us such names as Cape Aromata, supposed to be
Guardafui, outside the straits, the inland province
of Azania and Ehapta. The only thing we gather
from him is that they were trade emporia, and therefore
places of considerable importance.
The ‘Periplus’ enters into further details, and
mentions that the Arab settlement at Ehapta was
subject to the sovereign of Maphartes, a dependency
of Sabsea or Yemen. Dean Vincent imagines Ehapta
to have been 10° south of the equator, that is to say,
near Quiloa, where again an Arab settlement continued
right down into the middle ages. The. ‘ Periplus ’
further tells how Muza, Aden, and other points near
the mouth of the Eed Sea were emporia for the
goods brought from outside by the Arabians and
then transferred to Egyptian and Phoenician trading
vessels.
Further south the ‘ Periplus ’ mentions Prasum as
the farthest point known to the author; and here he
says 6 an ocean curves towards sunset and, stretching
along the southern extremities of Ethiopia, Libya,
and Africa, amalgamates with the western sea/ All
this probably the author of the ‘ Periplus ’ got from
the Arabs, just as the Portuguese got all their information
from the same source thirteen centuries
later, and just as Herodotus got his vague story of the
circumnavigation of Africa six centuries before, when
he tells us how the Phoenicians in the service of
Pharaoh Necho, B.C. 600, ‘ as they sailed.round Africa
had the sun on their right hand.’
From these and other statements in Marinus of
Tyre, Pliny, and others, it is obvious that the waters
of East Africa were known only to the Greeks and
Eomans vaguely through a Phoenician and Arabian
source. The early legendary stories of Greece tell of
a voyage fraught with every danger in search of gold.
The celebrated Argonautic expedition has given commentators
an immense amount of trouble to reconcile
its conflicting statements—namely, that it went
to the extremities of the Euxine, entered the great
stream ocean that went round the world, and returned
by the Nile and Libya. It certainly appears to me
simple to suppose that it is merely the mutilation of