the legendary warnings. For them, with the limited knowledge they had and the warnings on daily offer from the seers and priests, it was as audacious as attempting to travel into outer space: full of risk, and with uncertain rewards.
And so, travelling in convoy for safety and comfort, the first brave sailors passed beneath the wrathful brows of the rock pillars - Gibraltar to the north and Jebel Musa to the south - made their halting way, without apparent incident, along the Iberian coastline, and finding matters more congenial than they imagined - for they were in sight of land all the time, and did not venture into the farther deep - they then set up the oceanic trading stations they would occupy for the next four centuries. The first was at Gades, today’s Cadiz; the second was Tartessus, long lost today, possibly mentioned in the Bible as Tarshish,10 and by Aristophanes for the quality of the local lampreys, but believed to be a little farther north than Gades, along the Spanish Atlantic coast at Huelva.
It was from these two stations that the sailors of the Phoenician merchant marine began to perfect their big-ocean sailing techniques. It was from here that they first embarked on the long and dangerous voyages that would become precedents for the following two thousand years of the oceanic exploration of these parts.
They came first for the tin. But while this trade flourished, prompting the merchantmen to sail to Brittany and Cornwall and even perhaps beyond, it was their discovery of the beautiful murex snails that took them far beyond the shores of their imagination.
The magic of murex had been discovered seven hundred years before, by the Minoans, who discerned that, with time and trouble, the molluscs could be made to secrete large quantities of a rich and indelible purple-crimson dye - of a colour so memorable the Minoan aristocracy promptly decided to dress in clothes coloured with it. The colour was costly, and there were laws that banned its use by the lower classes. The murex dye swiftly became — for the Minoans, for the Phoenicians, and most notably of all, for the Romans - the most prized colour of imperial authority. One was born to the purple: one so clad could only be part of the vast engine work of Roman rule, or as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, of the “emperors, senior magistrates, senators and members of the equestrian class of Ancient Rome”.
By the seventh century BC, the sea-borne Phoenicians were venturing out from their two Spanish entrepôts, searching for the molluscs that excreted this dye. They found little evidence of it in their searches to the north, along the Spanish coast; but once they headed southward, hugging the low sandy cliffs of the northern corner of Africa, and as the waters warmed, they found murex colonies in abundance. As they explored so they sheltered their ships in likely-looking harbours along the way — first in a town they built and called Lixus, close to Tangier and in the foothills of the Rif: there remains a poorly maintained mosaic there of the sea god Oceanus, apparently laid by the Greeks.
Then they moved on south and found goods to trade in an estuary close to today’s Rabat. They left soldiers and encampments at still-flourishing coastal towns like Azemmour, and then, in boats with high and exaggerated prows and sterns, decorated with horses’ heads and known as hippoi - they pressed farther and farther from home, coming eventually to the islands that would be named Mogador. Here the gastropods were to be found in suitably vast quantities. And so this pair of islands, sheltering the estuary of the river named the Oued Ksob, is probably as far south as they went,11 and this is where their murex trade commenced with a dominating vengeance.
What are now known as Les Îles Purpuraires, bound inside a foaming vortex of tide rips, lie in the middle of the harbour of what is today the tidy Moroccan jewel of Essaouira. This town is now best known for its gigantic eighteenth-century seaside ramparts, properly fortified with breastworks and embrasures, spiked bastions, and rows of black cannon, and which enclose a handsome cloistered medina. The walkways on top of the curtain walls are the perfect place to watch the ever-crashing surf from the Atlantic rollers, especially as the sun goes down over the sea. The Phoenicians found that the snails gathered in their thousands there, in rock crevices, and they scooped them up in weighted and baited baskets. Extracting the dye — known chemically as 6.6’-dibromoindigo, and released by the animals as a defence mechanism — was rather less easy, the process always kept secret. The animal’s tincture vein had to be removed and boiled up in lead basins, and it would take many thousands of snails to produce sufficient purple to dye a single garment. It was traded, and the trade was tightly controlled, from the home port of the sailors who harvested it: Tyre. For a thousand years, genuine Tyrian purple was worth, ounce for ounce, as much as twenty times the price of gold.
…
The Phoenicians’ now-proven aptitude for sailing the North African coast was to be the key that unlocked the Atlantic for all time. The fear of the great unknown waters beyond the Pillars of Hercules swiftly dissipated. Before long a viewer perched high on the limestone crags of Gibraltar or Jebel Musa would be able spy other craft, from other nations, European or North African or Levantine, passing from the still blue waters of the Mediterranean into the grey waves of the Atlantic — timidly at first maybe, but soon bold and undaunted, just as the Phoenicians had been.
“Multi pertransibunt, et augebitur scientia” was a phrase from the Book of Daniel that would be inscribed beneath a fanciful illustration, engraved on the title page of a book by Sir Francis Bacon, of a galleon passing outbound, between the Pillars, shattering the comforts and securities of old. “Many will pass through, and their knowledge will become ever greater,” it is probably best translated - and it was thanks to the purple-veined gastropods and the Phoenicians who were brave enough to seek them out, that such a sentiment, with its implication that learning only comes from the taking of chances and risk, would become steadily more true. It was a sentiment born at the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean.
6. WESTERINGS
The Phoenicians eventually vanished from the scene in the fourth century BC, vanquished in battle, their country absorbed by neighbours and plunderers. And as their own powers waned, so other mariners in other parts of the world would begin to press the challenge of the new-found Atlantic ever more firmly. There was Himilco the Carthaginian (who lost the Second Punic War to the Romans, despite his fleet of forty quinquiremes), and there was Pytheas from Marseilles (who sailed up to and circumnavigated Britain, and gave it its name, then pressed on up to Norway, encountered ice floes, gave us the name Thule, and found the Baltic).
Then came the Romans - a martial people never especially maritime in their mindset, and perhaps as a consequence somewhat nervous sailors at the beginning. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, some of the legionnaires involved in the Claudian invasion of Britain in AD 43 were so terrified at having to cross even so mild a body of Atlantic water as the Strait of Dover that they rebelled, sat on their spears, and refused to march, protesting that crossing the sea was “as if they had to fight beyond the inhabited earth”. In the end they did embark on their warships, and they did allow themselves to be transported to the beaches of Kent, and the empire did expand - but even at its greatest extent in AD 117, it was an empire firmly bounded by the Atlantic coast, from the Solway Firth in the north to the old Phoenician city of Lixus in Morocco to the south. They may have cast off and kept to the shallows for coastal trade, but otherwise the Romans kept a respectful distance from the real Atlantic, never to be as bold as their predecessors.
Nor as bold as their eventual successors. For after a lengthy and puzzling period of mid-Atlantic coastal inactivity, the Arabs — sailing in the eighth century from their newly acquired fiefdom in Andalusia — and later the Genoese from northern Italy began trading in the North African Atlantic. Records show that they went as far south as the coast off Wadi Nun, close to the former Spanish possession (and a philatelists’ favourite) of Ifni, where the sailors met desert caravans from Nigeria and Senegal laden with all manner of African exotica to be hurried back to customers in Barcelona
