A Wind From the North by Ernle Bradford

that you could see the edge of the world running away downhill. It dropped down in a great shimmering curve, and if you went too far south, the hill would grow steeper and you could never sail back. Then the eternally rushing water would catch you and sweep you away, into the darkness.
    Yet men had not always been so superstitious or so ignorant. Centuries earlier, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Carthaginians had known as much, or more, than the early fifteenth-century navigators. The coasts of Asia Minor, Europe, and North Africa had all been explored by these early sailors. Greek astronomers and cartographers had plotted the general configuration and position of most of Europe and some, if not all, of its off-lying islands. Most astonishing of all, the fact that Africa could be circumnavigated had been known to the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.
    “Libya [Africa] shows itself to be surrounded by water, except so much of it as borders upon Asia. Neco, King of Egypt, was the first whom we know of, to prove this … he sent certain Phoenicians in ships, with orders to sail back through the Pillars of Hercules into the northern sea [the Mediterranean] and so return to Egypt. The Phoenicians accordingly, setting out from the Red Sea, navigated the Southern Sea [Indian Ocean] ; when autumn came, they went ashore, and sowed the land, by whatever part of Libya they happened to be sailing and waited for harvest; than having reaped the com, they put to sea again. When two years had thus passed, in the third, having doubled the Pillars of Hercules, they arrived in Egypt, and related what to me does not seem credible, but may to others, that as they sailed round Libya, they had the sun on their right hand.”
    This voyage was undertaken by the Phoenicians, those master mariners of the ancient world, about 600 B.C. The fact that even the “Father of History” disbelieved their report may have been the reason for the discovery’s being buried in obscurity. Prince Henry may possibly have heard this story from the scholars and savants whom he later collected at Sagres. If so, it must have reinforced his determination not to rest until the extent of Africa was known. Curiously enough, the fact that made the report suspect to Herodotus proves that the Phoenicians really did circumnavigate Africa. When rounding the Cape of Good Hope, in the latitude of about 35 degrees south of the equator, it would indeed have seemed to sailors used to the northern latitude of the Mediterranean that the sun at midday was “on their right hand.”
    In these early years of Prince Henry’s life we know that he was concerned only with the western Atlantic coast of Morocco. The time had not yet come when men could say of him that he thought in continents and not in islands. He had some knowledge of the burning, barren coast that stretched beyond Tangier. He had met Arabs in Ceuta, and later he was to employ some of them among his cartographers, navigators, and astronomers. The Arabs knew that there were islands in the Atlantic; they knew at any rate about the Canaries. So did Prince Henry, for the Castilians, the French, and many others had made voyages to the Canaries. Only thirteen years before the capture of Ceuta, a Norman baron, Jean de Bethencourt, had colonized part of the islands and built churches there. The Canaries had even been known to the ancients as the Fortunate Islands. Standing at the outermost limits of the known world, they had been poeticized as the Elysian Fields, the Isles of the Blest—the land, in fact, “where it was always afternoon.” At this period of history, Arabic knowledge of geography and astronomy was superior to that of Europe. As traders and merchants they were in contact with Arabia and India by sea, and with the interior of Africa by overland routes. As early as the twelfth century the Xerife Idrisi had written a book of geography for King Roger II of Sicily, which was far in advance of any