ULTIMA THULE
Further Mysteries of the Arctic

By VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON

MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate I

Ancient Greek Merchantman.

PYTHEAS AND ULTIMA THULE

Introduction

Pytheas, around whom centers the question of Thule, was considered for two thousand years the champion liar of antiquity. After perhaps the most overdue of rehabilitations, he is now in our books and belief an outstanding leader in Greek science and a foremost explorer—the earliest of the known great explorers. If he appears to us less than Columbus in some ways he appears greater in others, particularly as a scientist. He has been referred to as a Columbus with a flavor of Darwin; he appears to have been more nearly a composite of James Cook and Galileo.

Pytheas, though his reputation fell to the lowest depths within three centuries after his death, was seemingly honored throughout his lifetime by his home town, the Greek colonial city of Massilia that is now Marseilles—honored primarily as a scientist but also as a truthful explorer who had a great journey to his credit, about which he wrote at least one book. He may have been similarly respected by the whole contemporary Greek world, in so far as his fame had spread, although the highbrow Greece that we think of as typified by Athens may have been skeptical about him from the start; for Athens was a stronghold of philosophy, with doctrine tending to rank as fact. And it was philosophy that robbed Pytheas of his reputation, to make his name a by-word of two millenniums.

However, the travel report of Pytheas, and not his scientific work done at home in Massilia, was what the philosophers denounced. Indeed, writers kept exclaiming for twenty centuries how strange it was that a man who had been respected by all who knew him, until he began to travel, should have developed into an egregious liar as soon as his vessels got 2 north beyond the countries familiar to the Mediterranean world.

The statements which made Pytheas a Munchausen to the Greeks are so commonplace now that we find it hard to grasp why anyone should ever have disbelieved them. He reported that as he traveled north to the extremity of Britain, and beyond its north tip for a six-day ocean voyage to Thule, he met conditions only a little different from those of Mediterranean countries. The people he saw all had two legs, instead of being unipeds. They milked and tended their farm animals somewhat as the peasants did in Greece. There was threshing of corn and a making of it into bread and into beer. The ocean was no more frozen to the bottom than the land was perpetually snow-covered; even well beyond Britain he had seen no proof that he was approaching boundaries of animal and plant life. The sun had power even in Thule to change a tolerable winter into a summer warm enough for the purposes of man.

To the Mediterranean world these allegations were patent lies. They fell between two stools. The learned had theories according to which such things could not possibly be true; the populace had lore according to which they could not be true either. Pytheas can have made friends in neither camp. We do not know just what the populace said of him, for their opinions died with them or lived vague and changed in folk memory. The opinions of the scholars were preserved in books. What they were in general we shall indicate as we follow the particular theme of our investigation, the dispute on what country, if any, Pytheas reached by a six-day ocean voyage beyond the north tip of Scotland.

As a background for solving the problem of Thule we must describe, in so far as bears on Pytheas, the Mediterranean world of 340 B.C. We must describe his city, Massilia, and bring out 3 why that Greek community was better fitted to believe in and trust Pytheas than was the rest of the Greek world. We must show why it was that later ages were even more skeptical than his own century. Finally, we must discuss Pytheas himself—villain of twenty centuries, hero to our own.

After defeating the Persians in the fifth century B.C. the Greeks developed swiftly both in real importance and in the feeling that they were important. They had become distinctly the people; the rest of the world were barbarians. They did, true enough, sometimes look up to the same people they looked down upon—in Egypt, for instance, they sensed a hoary wisdom.

Only a small tract was, properly speaking, real to the Athenian Greeks. It did not extend west materially beyond the Pillars of Hercules; it went a little way south into Africa and east into Asia. North into Europe it went scarcely beyond the Alps or beyond the hinterland of the Black Sea.

Upon the small patch of earth which they knew, and upon a great faith in the power of the human intellect, the Greek philosophers built tenets of geographical and astronomical doctrine which to them admitted no contradiction and which, therefore, made it impossible for them to believe much of what we find in their own literature and which we are frequently tempted to consider was their knowledge.

We must keep steadily in mind while working on the Pytheas question that, to the Greek philosopher, a statement which conflicted with accepted belief was not fact but folklore.

From Pythagorean times the earth had been spherical to learned Greece. Their ideas were similar to ours on how the sun warms the earth, with the important difference that, at least in earlier times, they thought it much closer to the ground. From 400, or perhaps 500 B.C., it was considered known that 4 life is impossible because of the heat if you go too near the sun, and impossible because of the cold if you go too far away from it.

“Too near” and “too far” became approximate mileages on the surface of the earth. At least a majority of the Greek cosmographers felt their own country was at about the right distance from the sun—the weather was sometimes too warm and sometimes too cold but, on the whole, comfortable and certainly livable. But if you went south from Greece into Africa you would come to where it was distressingly hot because of nearness to the sun; if you tried to go farther you would die from the heat. Beyond was a lifeless region where the rocks were burning hot and the water, if any, scalding. Similarly, traveling north from Greece you would arrive where it was distressingly cold because the sun was too far away; beyond that you would die.

It was, then, a fundamental of Greek thinking that just as life was impossible too near the sun because of the heat, so was it impossible too far from the sun because of the cold. At one period the philosophers believed that the southern boundary of the eternally silent and dead Frozen North would be up in Scythia, about where we now think of central Russia. Three hundred years after Pytheas, Strabo considered the northern edge of life to be just on the far side of the British Isles.

With their doctrines of symmetry and balance, and with an assumed knowledge of where the sun was, how high it was, and how its temperatures affected the temperature of the earth, there was bound to be on the south side of the Burning Tropics another Temperate Zone. It would be for all time a matter of theory to the Greeks whether this had plants, animals and people; for no one could ever cross the Burning Tropics. Similarly demonstrable, though unreachable, was another Frozen Zone in the remote south.

That approximately this was the orthodox Greek belief is clear from the record—see, for instance, J. K. Wright’s Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades. We are, then, patently wrong when we say that the Greeks knew that the Phoenicians had crossed the Torrid Zone—they knew there were such stories but they did not take them seriously; and you do not properly speaking know a thing just from hearing the truth about it unless you also believe what you hear. The yarns of African circumnavigation in their own literature were to the Greek philosophers, and to the learned men of Europe who followed them all the way down to Prince Henry the Navigator in the fifteenth century, mere folk tales. In so far as these stories implied crossing the Tropics, they were to the Greeks no more credible than Jack’s beanstalk is to us.

The world properly knowable by hearsay to the Greek philosophers was, then, restricted to those countries which they could convince themselves would lie north of the Burning Tropics and south of the Frozen Arctic. If a tale seemed to come from too far south, or from too far north, either it had to be disbelieved entirely or else it had to be adjusted by supposing that the northing or southing had been exaggerated.

However, it was only the learned who would have to disbelieve Pytheas by the compulsion of the theory about the earth being divided into five zones—one uninhabitable because of nearness to the sun, two habitable because they were at a moderate distance, and two uninhabitable because they were too far away from the sun.

To accept the truth with regard to the Far North must have been, however, nearly as difficult for the simple as for the erudite, though because of a different reason. Certain lore which was fact to them differed from the truth as much as did the philosophy of the scholars. In folk belief the cold winds blew not from a frozen zone in the north that surrounded the Pole equally in all directions, but from the Rhipaean Mountains, 6 a range only moderately far north in Europe, beyond which, if you could penetrate that far, you would find an earthly paradise with caressing airs, golden fruit, and one-legged people, the Unipeds, who had many agreeable qualities and strange ways, such as not properly growing old but just making way for the next generation by committing suicide at the right time.

We say here, perhaps unnecessarily, that our sketch does not attempt a profound analysis of Greek folklore or of Greek geographical views. In our brief statement we dispense with most of the qualifying and give, in broad strokes, merely that part of the intellectual background of the Greeks which made it hard for them to believe what Pytheas told about his northern voyage.

It should not be difficult for us to sympathize with the classic world, for there is still so much Greek philosophy in our thinking that many even today find it difficult to believe simple reports concerning the North. For instance, as recently as the summer of 1937 the man in the street was surprised at the newspaper dispatches which came from Papanin and his Soviet expedition by radio—as, for instance, that it was raining at the North Pole, that birds were flying around the camp, that bears were prowling with their young cubs, that seals were sporting between the ice floes, that the water in the leads was thick with shrimps, and that the traps and nets of the scientists brought animals and plants to the surface of the polar ocean from all depths, showing a life gradient down towards the sea bottom like that of the more southerly oceans. The difficulty we had in believing Papanin’s description of the immediate vicinity of the North Pole was of one root with the difficulty Greeks and Romans had two thousand years ago in believing the Pytheas account of the lands and seas north of Britain. These two millenniums have been continuously obsessed with the doctrine that there is a region in the Far North 7 so distant from the sun that neither plants nor animals can thrive there.

That Greek philosophy has a stronger hold upon our thinking even now than do the findings of modern science can be reinforced by many examples. Those which relate to heat and cold are specially pertinent and we develop two of them here; for in a study of the Thule problem it seems less dangerous to overemphasize than to understate this part of the evidence.

It was a tenet, or at least an inevitable deduction, of Greek philosophy that in the ocean, as well as upon the land, animal life would decrease in quantity northward because of decreasing warmth until there came a limit where all of it disappeared. Beyond lay a vast zone of death which, as we have said, was thought by Strabo to begin just north of Scotland. Against this philosophical doctrine was placed, at least as early as Sir John Murray when he formulated the results of the Challenger voyages more than fifty years ago, the scientific conclusion that ocean animal life has the smallest tonnage per unit of water at the equator and that the quantity of animal life per unit of ocean increases on the average as you go away from the equator.

By the square contradiction which Murray posed between Greek philosophy and modern science we can determine which of the two has the stronger hold upon us. According to the Greek deduction, life was not to be expected in the ocean at the North Pole; according to the findings of the Challenger voyage, and of all subsequent studies of oceanography, life was to be expected there. Now it is within the personal knowledge of every reader of this book that practically all his friends were surprised (as we have just said) when the 1937 explorers reported from the North Pole an abundance of life. So your friends and mine were basing their thought upon ancient philosophy and not upon modern science.

For our second test between philosophy and science we pass 8 from the ocean to the land and choose from the scores of examples which are available the contradiction that according to ancient Greek View it would be surprising to find July temperatures of 100° in the shade anywhere north of the Arctic Circle, while according to the scientific view such midsummer temperatures are to be expected upon Arctic lowlands that are far from the sea. Try that one out on your friends, perhaps by telling them that the U.S. Weather Bureau has reported 100° in the shade in midsummer at Fort Yukon, Alaska, which is a few miles north of the Arctic Circle and which fulfills the condition of being on lowland, remote from the sea.

If you find most of your friends either surprised or incredulous of 100° in the shade July temperatures in Arctic Alaska you will have your own proof that the average American, more than half a century after we bought Alaska from the Russians, still pictures its climate in terms of Greek theory rather than either through reports of those who have been there or through the findings of modern science.

So it may be the reverse of strange that the Greeks, disciples if not inventors of the belief that life can exist in only two of the earth’s five zones, should find it impossible to credit Pytheas when he was telling them concerning one of these hypothetically lifeless zones not things which he had deduced from a philosophical concept but things he had seen, or had learned from dependable hearsay. For remember, the learned Greeks “knew” not merely that the sea where Pytheas claimed to have navigated a ship was frozen to the bottom and that the countries from which he had reported living things were lifeless, but also that Pytheas himself could not have stayed alive if he had gone where he claimed to have gone.

As we have said, the part of the Greek world that appears to have been least hampered in believing the reports of Pytheas was his home town. That was because of its past history and present connections.

Massilia seems to have started as a Phoenician trading post, for its name is Phoenician, meaning “Settlement.” It became Greek around 600 B.C. when it was taken over by Phocaean sailors from Asia Minor, the foremost seamen of the Greek world.

It is thought that Massilia increased in size considerably around 534 B.C. when the Persians conquered the Phocaeans and when, likely enough, a good many of their people fled to the prosperous western city which spoke their language and knew their institutions.

Communities dependent on Massilia grew into a chain along the northern Mediterranean coast, forming a kind of empire from Nice to Spain. By the fourth century B.C. she had been successful in war against the Etruscans and against the Carthaginians; she was friendly with the Celts that dwelt inland to the north, and, for the time, may have been friendly with Carthage. She was an ally of Rome.

In the time of the voyage to Thule, Massilia was trading with the entire Hellenic world. She also traded northward deep into present France, and may have colonized sporadically. Around 340 B.C., Massilia is thought to have had treaties with the nations of the interior; certainly she was receiving commodities from the north, among them, amber, tin, copper. The traffic in tin was continuous and thriving, the metal coming from the mines in Cornwall to the Breton coast and thence by river transport to Massilia. By hearsay or by personal knowledge of their commercial agents, there would have been considerable information regarding conditions round about the English Channel, and a keen desire for further details. By their overland journeys and northern trade affiliations they must also have known the Baltic coasts pretty well, directly or through hearsay, by the fourth century B.C., if not earlier. Furs were an article of trade, moving south from remote northern lands to the Mediterranean. And why not? In our own 10 day, summer furs have had a strong hold at least as far south as Rome.

Thus in the latter half of the fourth century, the time of our story, Massilia was at the zenith of her wealth and power. The town was favorably situated; its walls were strong; its harbor was excellent; the people are thought to have retained an exceptional purity of Greek culture and blood. They had brought with them from Phocaea a leadership in seafaring and had developed this not only along “practical” but also along theoretic lines—they were pioneers in the application of mathematics and astronomy to navigation. Foremost of their leaders in that field was Pytheas.

These inheritors of Phocaea also had Spartan slants to their culture. They maintained a strong army and a ready navy. Their military power bears on our case for, according to some, the exploratory voyage of Pytheas started out by running the Carthaginian blockade of the Strait of Gibraltar; or possibly the explorers had an armed convoy that accompanied them openly by the Pillars of Hercules.

Carthage had long been able to maintain a firm control of the Strait, bottling up the seafarers of the Mediterranean so they had no access to Atlantic commerce. Important in this commerce was the tin trade with the Cassiterides, which route Carthage exploited steadily and wished to keep for herself alone. Then there would be the further motive of reserving for exploitation the Celtic and African coasts that were known to the Carthaginians from the Himilco, Hanno and doubtless other voyages the results of which had been kept secret from the Greeks.

But Carthage did not rely solely on her blockade of the Strait of Gibraltar; she sought to discourage attempts to evade or force the blockade by circulating terrifying stories of impassable seas, filled with horrifying monsters. These tales doubtless had some effect upon the Greeks, but they must also have 11 stirred in them curiosity and skepticism—they had heard rumors of certain Phoenician voyages and would be prepared to discount the alleged terrors at least to that extent. Besides, Malye thinks, the Massilians were on good terms with the Spanish populations, from whom they must have picked up considerable information about the ports of the western coast of Spain, and this would help them further towards discounting the fearsome Carthaginian tales. Such information as the Massilians received would have made those enterprising sailors long for more, and they would be eager to explore the whole maritime route from Massilia to the Cassiterides. They would chafe at a blockade which kept them prisoners within the Mediterranean. So there may have been attempts before Pytheas to force a way to the Atlantic. However, if any succeeded, the records have been lost.

Then, says Malye, one suddenly hears “that a Massilian navigator, Pytheas, has doubled the famous Pillars of Hercules, has made without obstruction the longest voyage yet known from antiquity and then has returned to Marseilles without difficulty. . . . What had happened?”

It has been suggested, as for instance by Malye, that perhaps there was in just the Pythean span of years no blockade to run, no need for an armed convoy. He believes there is evidence to make it probable that the spectacular rise of the Macedonians to power over the Greek and adjacent lands, and the reverses suffered by the more easterly Phoenician cities, hypnotized Carthage into believing that Greek domination, as represented by Alexander the Great, was inevitable. Perhaps just for this reason, and perhaps in addition because Massilia had refrained from supporting the Sicilian Greek communities in their struggle with Carthage, there may have been a special indulgence from Carthage towards the Massilian Greeks, so that to them was now available not merely a permitted exit through the Strait of Gibraltar but also a series of friendly introductions 12 to the string of Phoenician, or Phoenician-influenced, cities north along the west coasts of Europe all the way up to the tin mines of Cornwall.

It is certainly true that there is in the preserved records no indication that Pytheas met hostility at the Strait or anywhere along the whole European west coast, either going or returning.

We know there was a rigorous Carthaginian blockade of the western mouth of the Mediterranean just before Pytheas, and also just after him. The blockade which followed after will be among the causes for the discredit which fell on his memory. For had the Greeks been free to repeat his voyage they would have found substantial truth in his narrative. Thus, except for the Carthaginian barrier which fenced off the Atlantic from the Greek world during a long time after Pytheas, he would have been a Columbus to the Greeks, having opened to them a new world.

Deprived of the chance to make voyages which would have confirmed the findings of the Thule explorers, the Greeks relied upon their system of philosophy which, as we have seen, contradicted the narrative and descriptions of Pytheas.

We can now recognize it as the hard luck of the Greeks, and one of the serious handicaps which their philosophy placed upon the development of Europe, that neither the third century, nor many centuries thereafter, doubted the necessary truth of principles which made it necessary to consider Pytheas a liar.

But, of course, we are not saying that Greek philosophy, as a whole, was a handicap to Europe. We are merely saying that those paragraphs of it which made a belief in Pytheas impossible were bars to progress.

By the time of Massilia’s western preeminence the cited theories of climate had crystallized in Greece proper into philosophical doctrines according to which, among other 13 things, the ocean to the north of France was frozen and lifeless. Knowledge by the Massilians that this doctrine was not true for the Baltic Sea, a by-product of their overland commerce with northerly France, may have been the moving cause that sent Pytheas north.

What we have just said about Massilia is a blend of known facts and reasonable conjecture. What we are about to write on Pytheas is similarly composed.

The great military overland journey of the Macedonians to the east and south was made about the time of the great Massilian sea voyage to the west and north. We think, however, that Pytheas may have been ten, twenty or even thirty years older than Alexander—who, after all, was scarce beyond his youth when he died. Pytheas can not well have been young at the time of his voyage; he already had too many achievements to his credit.

Had Pytheas not led the first known great expedition of geographical discovery, had he never left home, he would still have been one of the world’s greatest geographers. For it was he who first marked places on the earth by dependable signs from heaven.

Even those scholars of antiquity who ridiculed the travel reports of Pytheas usually admitted that he was a great astronomer. In that field a sample of his independent and keen observation is that he corrected Eudoxus who believed that there is a real Pole Star in the heavens—the one which we still call the Pole Star. Pytheas determined that this star is not at the Pole, and that there is in fact no star located precisely there. But he did find three stars in that vicinity so placed that if you were to imagine a fourth to complete the rectangle, then this imaginary star would be approximately at the North Pole.

Had Pytheas been just the typical philosopher of his day, he would have been satisfied with the determination of the North Pole by his predecessors. He was instead the true scientist who 14 proves all things and holds fast only to that which survives the most rigorous checking. He was, too, a Leonardo da Vinci in coordinating the power of his brain with the skill of his hands. He could build scientific instruments from the descriptions of others. He devised new tools of precision. When he became the first in known history to measure accurately the distance of a place from the equator, he was fixing the latitude of Massilia by instruments of which he was the inventor.

Not merely was Pytheas, on his “practical” side, a man who did not rest until he had made the best instruments that were possible with the means at his command; for then he did not rest, as the Pole Star instance shows, until his measurements with these instruments were as close as their precision and his faculties allowed.

Britannica, more temperate in laudation of Pytheas than several recent works, names many accomplishments and then says in addition that he was “first among the Greeks to arrive at any correct notion of the tides, and to note their connection with the moon, and their periodic fluctuations.”

Had Pytheas been just a rough and tumble seaman like Erik the Red or Francis Drake, the Pole Star would have been nearly enough true north for him. He would have spent little of his thought on problems of the rise and fall of tides.

It is central to the greatness of Pytheas that scholarship made no mere schoolman of him; it did not bind him to his precise instruments and to written and spoken disputations, after the style of the philosophy then current. In the true manner of Erik and of Drake he steered for open and unknown seas. It is today the considered verdict of the students of exploration and of navigation that “in spite of” being a true scientist he deserves to rank as high among the practical sailors of the fourth century B.C. as ever any sailor has ranked in his own time.

The eminence of Pytheas in the field of discovery, as shown 15 by his Thule voyage, has never been questioned by anyone who did not first doubt whether the voyage had been made at all. Today we are agreed that Pytheas really made the journeys which he claimed to have made—our doubts are no longer of him but only concern the adequacy of the record that has been preserved to us.

The Navigator and his Journey—the Background

What we know of Pytheas has come to us in fragments and garbled. We have not the precise years of his birth, of his voyage, or of his death. Aristotle does not mention him but his pupil Dicaearchus does, from which some scholars infer that the explorations must be placed after the death of Aristotle in 322 B.C. Malye says it was some time between 340-306. About the latest date seriously mentioned is 285. Broche, the most recent of the voluminous contributors, thinks the voyage fell within the period 333-323, justifying the earlier date by literary allusions and by reasoning that it would require ten years for Pytheas to write up his results and for the news of his work and of his writings to become familiar enough to the scholars for quotation.

For the political reasons which we have mentioned, several scholars have placed the voyage later than 322 B.C. Cary gives 310-306 as the likeliest years, for at that time Carthage was defending herself against Syracuse and would no doubt have been forced to relax the vigilance of the Strait of Gibraltar blockade. There was no blockade around 300, upon which circumstance those writers have relied who set the date of the Pytheas voyage as late as 285.

From the titles On the Ocean and Description of the Earth 16 (which may refer to the same work), it would appear that Pytheas wrote a scientific and philosophical report rather than a narrative of his explorations. In any case, his own book is lost and we are dependent upon short extracts which have come to us through the borrowings of one contemporary and of two later scholars whose works are also lost. The historian Timaeus is believed to have used a good deal of information direct from Pytheas; and the astronomers Eratosthenes and Hipparchus relied on his statements, as we know from the criticism of Polybius two centuries after Pytheas.

Not only are the writings of Timaeus, Eratosthenes and Hipparchus missing, but so are, too, those books of Polybius which had the comments on Pytheas. Most of our information, therefore, is from Strabo, three hundred years after Pytheas, who used extracts from his predecessors. But Strabo was often careless and inaccurate in his quotations; moreover, he adopted the prejudices of Polybius against Pytheas, adding to them his own general prejudices and his special dislike, of the Massilian.

Most of the glimpses we catch of Pytheas, then, are through the eyes of a man who had distrust and contempt for him, and who refers to his work chiefly for the purpose of showing how fraudulent and unsound he was as a geographer—he did acknowledge Pytheas’s soundness as a mathematician and astronomer.

The mystery which surrounds the Massilian yields fertile ground to discussion and conjecture. We summarize the points on which there is general agreement, and then discuss more fully the part of the explorations of Pytheas which is most controversial—the voyage to Thule.

We have dealt with Pytheas as mathematician, astronomer, inventor, close observer and just reasoner. He is the first known scientific explorer. Markham says of him: “It is probable that there was no other man, in the days of Alexander the Great, 17 who could have prepared for a voyage of discovery by fixing the exact latitude of his point of departure, and selecting correctly the star by which he should shape his course.”

Thus prepared by his own studies and furnished with the knowledge of his time, Pytheas set out on his voyage just about when his countryman Alexander was marching east towards India on that military expedition which, of all chronicled military ventures, most nearly becomes an exploratory expedition. Pytheas sailed west past the Pillars of Hercules, felt his way north along the various coasts of Europe, and returned to the Mediterranean in something between eight months and three years (the scholars differ).

Polybius says the Massilian was a poor man and scoffs at his having been able to carry out so great an undertaking. But in the light of the history of exploration since his time it would be more surprising to be told that he was rich, for almost without exception the leaders of great exploratory ventures have been men without personal fortunes. The usual modern opinion is that Pytheas was the commander of a government expedition—likely enough an expedition financed, partly or wholly, by the city of Massilia.

At this time Massilia was a powerful city which carried on trade with many and distant places. The Massilians were good sailors. They were keen about the tin and amber that were brought to them down the Rhone and were reported to have been secured in countries far to the north. Their commercial instincts, their nautical prowess and their curiosity would incline them to want to know more about these products and the lands from which they came.

Then, too, there was the question of prestige, for it was a time of great undertakings; and Massilia, proud of her might, would desire a share in the glory of commercial and scientific exploration. Pytheas, after his years of philosophical study and preparation, would no doubt be eager to put his theories to a 18 practical test and to see for himself the wonders of northern regions. It does not strain the imagination to picture him enlisting the support of various groups, spurring his countrymen on to this great adventure.

If it was a government expedition, the city of Massilia would have had no difficulty in furnishing Pytheas with an adequate vessel, or vessels, and with the needed equipment. Some consider the ship would be a trireme, as best adapted to a long voyage. Further, a trireme would inspire respect among the distant peoples whom the expedition might visit. Others contend that biremes were more seaworthy and would have been chosen.

Markham says: “A large Massilian ship was a good sea-boat, and well able to make a voyage into the northern ocean. She would be from 150 to 170 feet long—the beam of a merchant ship being a quarter, and of a war-ship one-eighth the length—a depth of hold of 25 or 26 feet, and a draught of 10 to 12. Her tonnage would be 400 to 500, so that the ship of Pytheas was larger and more seaworthy than the crazy little Santa Maria with which, eighteen hundred years afterwards, Columbus discovered the New World.”

Such ships were equipped with square sails. Through the auxiliary power of their oars they escaped complete dependence on the wind.

Markham tells us that “The rowing power of ancient galleys, supplementary to the sails, has been looked upon as the equivalent to the [auxiliary] steam-power of modern times. [Markham was writing in 1893.] In the Grecian ship there was a narrow gangway on both sides, . . . lower than the upper deck, and just above the rowlocks for the upper tier of oars. The rowing apparatus . . . was in the centre part of the ship. . . . In a large trireme there were fifty-four . . . bottom rowers, fifty-eight . . . middle, and sixty-two . . . upper rowers, making one hundred and seventy-four all told. . . . 19 The sailors or rowers were of course much more numerous than the . . . marines. The . . . officer in command of the rowers had a lieutenant, and not the least important person on board was the . . . piper, by whose music the rowers kept time.”

Pytheas then probably set out in one or more biremes or triremes, each with a crew of from one hundred to two hundred men. Some students have considered that the expedition sailed in midwinter; Broche argues that this would not have been good sense and thinks that the departure was in April.

Leaving Massilia, Pytheas emerged from the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar and proceeded to the Sacred Promontory (now Cape St. Vincent, Portugal), then the western limit of the districts properly known to the Greeks. He coasted northward along the shore of Portugal, and made his first recorded time observation for a place where the longest day was fifteen hours—therefore off Oporto.

Usually the scholars agree upon the course of Pytheas as far as Cape Ortega. Then there is argument on whether he cut boldly across the Bay of Biscay or whether he cautiously followed the long shore route, for he is not definitely heard from till he reached the island of Ushant, which he called Uxisama, off the Breton coast. Thence he sailed for England.

Here again the authorities differ. Some think Pytheas went first to Kent, others consider it more probable that he followed the well established route to Land’s End, Cornwall. Certain it is that he visited both places, for he gave descriptions of the inhabitants and their manner of living. We quote his Impressions of Cornwall in a passage which Diodorus likely got from Timaeus:

“The natives of Britain by the headland of Belerium are unusually hospitable, and thanks to their intercourse with foreign traders have grown gentle in their manner. They extract the tin from its bed by a cunning process. The bed is of rock, but contains earthy interstices, along which they cut a gallery. Having smelted the tin and refined it, they hammer it into knuckle-bone shape and convey it to an adjacent island named Ictis. They wait till the ebb-tide has drained the intervening firth, and then transport whole loads of tin on wagons.”

Plate II

The world according to Herodotus, fifth century, B.C.

Plate III

Supposed itinerary of Pytheas, based on the reconstruction of his “periplus” by Prof. Gaston-E. Broche, according to the various texts.

Pytheas apparently circumnavigated Britain, for he describes the land as being triangular in shape and he gives measurements of its three sides, which measurements, however, exaggerate the size of the island. On this point Cary says:

“The most serious charge against Pytheas is his habitual overstatement of distances. . . . But the real crux of this question lies in the dimensions which he gave to Britain. Reckoning its sides as 7,500, 15,000 and 20,000 stades (825, 1,650 and 2,200 miles) in length, he computed that Britain had a perimeter of 42,500 stades (4,675 miles), i.e., more than double its actual circumference. It has been suggested in Pytheas’ defence that his own estimates of distance were given in days’ sailings, and that some later Greek writer applied a false scale in converting days into stades. But what conceivable scale could have given double value to Pytheas’ measurements? At best, Pytheas must have grossly overstated the size of Britain. But before we discredit Pytheas on this charge, let us remember that ancient seafarers had not even a tolerably accurate device for reckoning naval distances. Herodotus exaggerated the length of the Black Sea, Pliny the Sea of Azov, and Nearchus the distance from the Indus to the Persian Gulf, in much the same proportion as Pytheas swelled out Britain. Yet nobody would maintain that the Greeks had not explored the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, or that Nearchus burnt his boats and sneaked home by land.”

Leaving Belerium, Pytheas likely followed an anti-clockwise course, stopping in Kent and at other places along the shores of Britain. He traveled inland sufficiently to get an idea of the customs of the people, as shown by his description of the 23 farming methods of Cantion. Polybius said that Pytheas claimed to “have walked all over Britain.” He was scoffing, but there are now students who maintain seriously that Pytheas crossed Britain on foot.

As Pytheas goes northerly from Cantion, various points on his route can be checked by remarks on the length of the day. The observation of a longest day of seventeen hours places him in the neighborhood of Flamborough Head. He gave the longest day in the most northern part of Britain as eighteen hours, and says that there was a longest day of nineteen hours in an inhabited country to the north of Britain, which would be the Shetlands. One or other of these places Pytheas called Orcas, for he mentions it as being the northermost point of the triangular-shaped Britain. Some authorities therefore argue that by this he meant the mainland of Britain, hence Scotland; while others think it is the place of the nineteen-hour longest day, therefore on Unst Island, the northernmost of the Shetlands.

It would be gratifying if we could fix definitely upon the location of Orcas, for it is important in the story of Pytheas. From Orcas, according to some scholars, he set out on his voyage to Thule; it was Orcas, according to others, which was his farthest north and where he received at second hand his information concerning Thule.

After completing the circumnavigation of Britain (whether interrupted by a voyage to Thule or not), Pytheas recrossed the Channel, sailing thence, according to some, to the mouth of the Elbe and to the island of Heligoland, the source of amber; according to others he reached the Baltic.

Among those who believe that Thule was Norway, and that Pytheas visited Norway, there are two subdivisions. It was formerly commonest with these scholars to have Pytheas sail east from northern Scotland to the Bergen vicinity; of late 24 years several have contended that after leaving England southbound and following the north shore of the continent east, he reached Norway from the south, by way of Denmark.

Probably there was just one expedition, but there are those who maintain that Pytheas returned to Massilia from Britain and that he visited the amber country on a second voyage. With that we need not concern ourselves here. So we return instead to Orcas, and to the problem of Thule. That troublesome question is usually discussed under three possibilities:

1. Pytheas made the voyage to Thule; most of his information is first hand; Thule is Iceland.

2. Pytheas made the voyage to Thule; most of his information is first hand; Thule is Norway.

3. Pytheas did not visit Thule; the information which he gives concerning it is based on what he learned at Orcas, beyond which he did not go.

While those have been the main views debated, a fourth is also worth considering. It may be that the Scots of Orcas told Pytheas about an island in the ocean to the north and told him also about another land to the east. Then, through some ambiguity in the writing of Pytheas himself, through an inadvertent or designed ambiguity by a later writer, or through mere loss of connecting information, it may have come about that some of the description of the land to the cast was assigned to the island in the north.

We have come upon no writer who states this last view explicitly, but it is implicit in such books as The History of Iceland by Knut Gjerset. For in one part of his treatment Gjerset says that the island in the ocean north of Britain, called Thule, probably was Iceland; but in another place he says that certain of Pytheas’ descriptions of Thule fit Norway, do not fit Iceland. If those two sections of the Gjerset presentation are brought together they amount to the view which we have just stated.

Before discussing the voyage to Thule we might talk about the origin and meaning of the word. There are several interpretations; every one of them has been questioned.

First is the claim that, irrespective of meaning and derivation, the name Thule did not originate with Pytheas, but was already old with the Greeks of his time. Benediktsson would trace it at least as far back as Ctesias of Cnidus (fifth century B.C.) whose now lost work containing the reference is quoted by the grammarian Servius of the fourth century after Christ. Well before Pytheas, then, Thule was a name for a place remote and fabulous to the Greeks.

Burton, in his discussion of the etymology of Thule and its sundry variants—Thula, Thyle, Thile, Thila, Tyle, Tila—quotes Sibbald: “Some derive the name Thule from the Arabic word Tule . . . which signified ‘afar off,’ and, as it were with allusion to this, the poets usually call it ‘Ultima Thule;’ but I rather prefer the reason of the name given by the learned Bochartus, who makes it to be Phoenician, and affirms that it signifies ‘darkness’ in that language. Thule . . . in the Tyrian tongue was ‘a shadow,’ whence it is commonly used to signify ‘darkness,’ and the island Thule is as much as to say, an ‘island of darkness’ . . .” Others, according to Burton, have traced Thule to the Carthaginian word for “obscurity,” which resembles closely words having the same meaning in Hebrew and Arabic.

The school which believes that Thule is a word of Germanic origin has many representatives, of whom we mention a few.

Professor Björn Collinder, the Swedish philologist, thinks it probable that Thule is of the same stem, or is the same word, as Old Norse thaul, as in thaularvágr, a bay in which one can easily get locked up. So Thule would mean “land of the narrow bays,” a name descriptive of parts of the Norwegian coast.

When Nansen was writing his great work, In Northern Mists, he requested an opinion on the various Thule derivation 26 suggestions from a leading student of the applicable languages, Professor Alf Torp. Torp examined claims of several proposed derivations, both Germanic and Celtic, and found in most cases that the word from which Thule has been supposedly derived did not exist at all in the ancient forms of these languages.

About the only constructive suggestion which Torp made was that a Germanic derivation is more likely than a Celtic, in that the Celtic tongues of the period did not have words that began with the sound of “th”, but that the Germanic languages then did have such words.

Knut Gjerset, in his History of Iceland, goes into no learned philological reasoning about the name, and rests on common sense. He says that:

“. . . since the name was applied [in A.D. 825] to Iceland by Dicuil after he had spoken with Irish monks who had been there, it is not unlikely that it was the old Irish name of the island which Pytheas had learned from the Britons, and that Iceland was known to them when he made his expedition to the North in 330 B.C.”

There are two groups of contenders that Pytheas made no voyage to Thule. The first just call the Massilian a fictionist, writer of imaginary voyages. The second group think Pytheas went to Orcas, the north tip of Scotland, but not beyond, and that he learned there about Thule, reporting in his original book as hearsay what later scholars, after the disappearance of the fundamental work, misunderstood to be eyewitness reports.

Those who discredited Pytheas successfully through two millenniums are in their turn so thoroughly discredited now that it is no longer worth while discussing whether Thule was an imaginary land. That he did not make a voyage to Thule but gave information about it as hearsay is, however, worth considering. We shall go into that (treating it by implication 27 in our discussion of possibilities of discovery before Pytheas) after we have first examined the various identifications of Thule.

Thule has been identified with the Orkneys, with the Shetlands, with Iceland and with Norway.

There is in our brief discussion room only for saying that the identification of the Orkney group with Thule, though made occasionally through nineteen hundred years, now has few serious defenders.

Some still treat gravely the claim that one of the Shetlands was Thule. This is in part because it had for advocate one of the great scholars of the nineteenth century, Müllenhoff.

A cornerstone of the Shetlands contention was that to Tacitus, famous as a writer on Europe north of the Alps, Thule was one of the Shetland group. The Roman fleet under Agricola, sailing up the east coast of Britain, was said by him to have sighted Thule (dispecta est et Thule). Broche explains this upon alternative views—Tacitus was just not very well up on this part of the subject; or else he knew better, but was trying further to magnify the reputation of his father-in-law, Julius Agricola, by seeming to bring him into a close relation with much-discussed Thule.

ULTIMA THULE Further Mysteries of the Arctic

CONTENTS