The Story of Geographical Discovery | Page 6

drawn by a fellow-townsman of Anaximander,
HECATÆUS of Miletus, who seems to have written the first formal
geography. Only fragments of this are extant, but from them we are
able to see that it was of the nature of a periplus, or seaman's guide,
telling how many days' sail it was from one point to another, and in
what direction. We know also that he arranged his whole subject into
two books, dealing respectively with Europe and Asia, under which
latter term he included part of what we now know as Africa. From the
fragments scholars have been able to reproduce the rough outlines of
the map of the world as it presented itself to Hecatæus. From this it can
be seen that the Homeric conception of the surrounding ocean formed a
chief determining feature in Hecatæus's map. For the rest, he was

acquainted with the Mediterranean, Red, and Black Seas, and with the
great rivers Danube, Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, and Indus.
The next great name in the history of Greek geography is that of
HERODOTUS of Halicarnassus, who might indeed be equally well
called the Father of Geography as the Father of History. He travelled
much in Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, and on the shores of the Black Sea,
while he was acquainted with Greece, and passed the latter years of his
life in South Italy. On all these countries he gave his fellow-citizens
accurate and tolerably full information, and he had diligently collected
knowledge about countries in their neighbourhood. In particular he
gives full details of Scythia (or Southern Russia), and of the satrapies
and royal roads of Persia. As a rule, his information is as accurate as
could be expected at such an early date, and he rarely tells marvellous
stories, or if he does, he points out himself their untrustworthiness.
Almost the only traveller's yarn which Herodotus reports without due
scepticism is that of the ants of India that were bigger than foxes and
burrowed out gold dust for their ant-hills.
One of the stories he relates is of interest, as seeming to show an
anticipation of one of Mr. Stanley's journeys. Five young men of the
Nasamonians started from Southern Libya, W. of the Soudan, and
journeyed for many days west till they came to a grove of trees, when
they were seized by a number of men of very small stature, and
conducted through marshes to a great city of black men of the same
size, through which a large river flowed. This Herodotus identifies with
the Nile, but, from the indication of the journey given by him, it would
seem more probable that it was the Niger, and that the Nasamonians
had visited Timbuctoo! Owing to this statement of Herodotus, it was
for long thought that the Upper Nile flowed east and west.
After Herodotus, the date of whose history may be fixed at the easily
remembered number of 444 B.C., a large increase of knowledge was
obtained of the western part of Asia by the two expeditions of
Xenophon and of Alexander, which brought the familiar knowledge of
the Greeks as far as India. But besides these military expeditions we
have still extant several log-books of mariners, which might have

added considerably to Greek geography. One of these tells the tale of
an expedition of the Carthaginian admiral named Hanno, down the
western coast of Africa, as far as Sierra Leone, a voyage which was not
afterwards undertaken for sixteen hundred years. Hanno brought back
from this voyage hairy skins, which, he stated, belonged to men and
women whom he had captured, and who were known to the natives by
the name of Gorillas. Another log-book is that of a Greek named
Scylax, who gives the sailing distances between nearly all ports on the
Mediterranean and Black Seas, and the number of days required to pass
from one to another. From this it would seem that a Greek merchant
vessel could manage on the average fifty miles a day. Besides this, one
of Alexander's admirals, named Nearchus, learned to carry his ships
from the mouth of the Indus to the Arabian Gulf. Later on, a Greek
sailor, Hippalus, found out that by using the monsoons at the
appropriate times, he could sail direct from Arabia to India without
laboriously coasting along the shores of Persia and Beluchistan, and in
consequence the Greeks gave his name to the monsoon. For
information about India itself, the Greeks were, for a long time,
dependent upon the account of Megasthenes, an ambassador sent by
Seleucus, one of Alexander's generals, to the Indian king of the Punjab.
While knowledge was thus gained of the East, additional information
was obtained about the north of Europe by the travels of one
PYTHEAS, a native of Marseilles, who flourished about the time of