discovery of the head of the Spanish ship, thus casting ridicule on a statement which has at least the merit of being circumstantial, and which tends to confirm the general correctness of the narrative as well as the authenticity of the voyage round the Cape in the days of Pharaoh Necho, related by Herodotus.
But Strabo, to whom posterity is indebted for a vast amount of ancient geographical knowledge, was in this case merely the exponent of the ignorant prejudices of his age. Of the fact there is little doubt. Few persons who have studied the observations of Rennell, Humboldt, and Heeren, on this subject, without reference to the questionable extent of the voyages of the Carthaginians under Hanno, will doubt the accounts preserved by Herodotus and Strabo; though both these distinguished authors treat as romance the circumstances they have recorded.
Opinion of Dr. Vincent on the circumnavigation of Africa. These voyages have, however, been seriously questioned by a modern writer of no mean authority, Dr. Vincent,[1] who denies altogether any circumnavigation of Africa previously to the expedition of the Portuguese. "Nothing is more easy," he says, "than to affirm the accomplishment of these great attempts, where an author clogs himself with neither circumstances nor particulars; but whenever we obtain these, as we do in the journal of Nearchus, or the Periplus, we find, indeed, that the ancients performed great things with slender means; but we see also plainly what they could not do. We see with such vessels as they had, they could neither have got
- ↑ Periplus of the Erythræan Sea, vol. ii. p. 189 et seq.
