tially necessary to studious retirement, were unknown to that state, either of letters or government, at least in Greece. Homer therefore had only the great book of Nature to peruse, and was original from necessity, as well as by genius.

Few countries of the same extent have so much sea-coast as Greece. The intercourse of its inhabitants with other countries, or with one another, was mostly kept up by water. There is no land-journey regularly described, either in the Iliad or Odyssey, except that short one of Telemachus from Pylos to Sparta; and even there Nestor submits to the choice of his guest the alternative of going by sea, though much the longest way.

In this state of things, and considering how much the various occupations of high and low life were then confined to one rank and order of men, it is not extraordinary that we should find the poet so conversant in the language and manners of the sea, and so knowing, as well in the business of the shipwright as of the sailor. Indeed, it is only by following him through each of those arts, that history is furnished with the earliest account of them. Let us therefore first examine his method of building, and next his manner of navigating a ship.

If we compare the naval force of the different states of Greece at the time of the Trojan war with that of the same countries afterwards when Agina, Corinth, and Athens, had turned their thoughts to trade and navigation; we shall find that their progress, as maritime powers, did not correspond with the account of their shipping, as it is accurately stated in Homer. It is

natural to suppose that Corinth, from its advantageous situation, should be among the first cities on the continent of Greece, after that country began to have a settled government, which would enrich itself by commerce; and it was undoubtely a great maritime power. But this was long after the heroic, or, which is the same thing, the mystical age of Grecce. When Corinth furnished her quota under Agamemnon, who from the extent of sea-coast, and from the islands under his command, was by far the greatest naval power of that time, she is barely mentioned, without any distinction to point out the consideration which she afterwards acquired in maritime affairs, The fleet, which assembled at Aulis, consisted of open half decked boats, a sort of galleys with one mast, fit for rowing or sailing. They were launched, and drawn up on the beach occasionally, or fastened on shore, and served as mere transports for soldiers who were at the samę tune mariners. There is nothing in Homer that alludes to a regular sea-engagement; or that conveys any idea of that manner of carrying on war. Those poles of an extraordinary length, which he mentions, seem to have been used as an offensive weapon against boarding; and may have been of service in landing. When Achilles or Ulysses talk of commanding naval expeditions, and destroying cities with a fleet: or when Hercules is said to have taken Troy with six ships only; the allusion is to the numbers, which they carried to act on shore. Their boats had a rudder, and ballast, but no anchor. The name of it does not occur in Homer; nor was the use of that

4

instru

instrument known. If, we may form a judgment from the raft of Ulysses, there was no metal em ployed; the timbers being fastened by pegs. In short, we know, from good authority, that ship-building had not made any great progress in Greece before the expedition of Xerxes. The best accounts that we can collect of the naval engage ments of those times, is a proof of this.

It is, no doubt, difficult to describe and understand accounts of battles. But whoever places himself on the spot where the Persian monarch is said to have viewed the battle of Salamis, and at the same time reads the account, which Herodotus, or that which Eschylus, an eye-witness, gives in his Persæ, of that action; and considers the shoalness of the water, and the small space into which so many ships were crowded, must think contemptibly of the marine engagements in those days.

Agreeably to this account of an. cient ships and ship-building, we see, that though Homer's seamen are expert in their manœuvre, yet they are confined to the precautions of that timid coasting navigation, which is at this day practised in the Mediterranean, in slight undecked vessels, unfit to resist the open sea. Their first care is, to venture as little as possible out of sight of land, to run along shore, and to be ready to put in, and draw up their ships on the beach, if there is no port, on the first appearance of foul weather.

We find Nestor, Diomedes, and Menelaus, consulting at Lesbos upon a doubt which this imperfect state of the art alone could suggest. The question was, Whether, in their

return to Greece, they should keep the Asiatic coast till they past Chios, which was the most secure, but the most tedious way home; or venture directly across the open sea, which was the shortest, but the most dangerous?

I was present at a consultation on the same sort of question, near the same place, and under the same circumstances, as far as they con cern the illustration of our present inquiry. It was in the year 1742, that I happened to be on board his Majesty's ship the Chatham, then escorting the Turkey trade from Constantinople to Scanderoon. When we were between Mytelene and Scio, and due north of the latter, in a dark night, with a brisk gale at north-west, our Greek pilot proposed pushing through the channel of Scio; but our officers, not caring to engage so much with the land in that narrow passage, preferred the broad course, and, hawling close up to the wind, left the island of Scio on the larboard side.

If we compare our situation with that of Nestor, Diomede, and Menelaus, who had the ablest pilot of that age on board, we see, that though our destinations were diffe rent, our point under deliberation was so far precisely the same, that we both doubted between the shortest and the surest way. They ventured to sea though it was most dangerous; we chose it because it was most safe; and this constitutes one of the great differences between ancient and modern navigation.

As the most respectable commentators on Homer have, by their different constructions of part of the passage here alluded to, deviated from that plain sense of the

poet,

This journal of four days navigation is so entirely Homer, and Homer only, the circumstances of time and distance correspond so exactly with one another, and bore so scrupulous an examination, when we made the same voyage, that I shall not trouble the reader with any other confutation, either of Eustathius or Madam Dacier's sense of this passage. The first was led into an error by mistaking the meaning of one word, and the last, by mistaking the distance from Lesbos to Eubœa; but both by attending more to grammatical criticism than to the genius and character of the poet, and of the age when he

wrote..

Though, from the general character, by which Homer constantly distinguishes the Phoenicians as a commercial, sea-faring people, it has been naturally supposed, that he was indebted to that nation for much of his information with regard to distant voyages: yet I think we cannot be at a loss to account for the poet's acquiring at home all the knowledge of this kind, which we meet with in his works. We know the Ionians were among the earliest navigators, particularly the

Phocæans and Milesians. The former are expressly called the discoverers of Adria, Iberia, Tuscany, and Tartessus. They are said to be the first among the Greeks, who undertook long voyages; and we find they had established an intercourse, and even formed close and friendly connections, on the ocean, as early as the time of Cyrus the Great. The Milesians were so remarkable for colonization, that they had founded above seventy cities in different parts of the world, and were respectable at sea long before the Persian invasion. Nor can we, except from the resources of their navigation and commerce, account for their being a match for the Lydian monarchy, as early as the reign of Gyges; up to which period, from that of Croesus, we can trace these two nations almost constantly at war.

When we consider how far back this leads us, upon explicit historical authority, and without the equivocal and suspicious aid of etymology, upon which Phoenician colonization is so much extended; it does not seem probable, that Homer's countrymen should have arrived at so flourishing a state of navigation, so soon after his age, without having made some progress towards it before his time.

To what extent navigation was known to him, either from his own experience or the information of others, is rendered difficult to ascertain, by the constant method he follows of preserving some reality in his wildest fictions. The history of the Cimmerians seems to have furnished some of his ideas with regard to the gloomy infernal shades, and the distinguishing features in the Phascian character are

Phœnician,"

Phoenician, Even where he is most fabulous, he takes the hint from tales propagated before his time, and embroiders his own variations on that extravagance, which had already the sanction of popular credulity. Thus the poet's genius, though impatient of the limited knowledge of his age, is unwilling to abandon nature; and when he seems to desert her, it is in favour of some pleasing irregularity, which vulgar opinion had substituted in her place. This mixture of something, that was either true, or commonly believed to be so, with regard to the scene of his fabulous narration, is observable in his description of the islands of Circe, Aolus, and, above all, in that of Calypso.

His knowledge of the sun setting in the ocean might fall within the observation even of that confined state of navigation. which we may reasonably allow to his age; for it is probable, that not only the Phonicians, but the Poet's countrymen, had passed the Pillars of Hercules, and of course could, as eye witnesses, report such an appearance. But how he could learn that the sun rises out of the ocean, or that the globe is entirely surrounded by water, was so much beyond my idea of his experience, that I continued to attribute this knowledge to guess and conjecture; till upon further consideration I was induced to think, that this account of the ocean, upon which so much of his geographical science is founded, will, if rightly understood, rather convince us of his ignorance upon that head; and that the ocean in his time had a very different meaning from that

which it now conveys. Nor am I surprised that, so much later, Herodotus should treat this idea of an ocean, where the sun rises, as a poetical fiction.

HOMER'S WINDS.

Under the article of Homer's country, we have anticipated some observations on the winds of that climate; but his navigation naturally engages us in a further consideration of this subject. We find only those which blow from the four cardinal points expressly men-tioned in the Iliad and Odyssey. In the storm which Neptune prepares against Ulysses, sailing from Calypso's island, they are all introduced in the following order, Eurus, Notus, Zephyrus, and Boreas,

So imperfect a list of winds corresponds with the coasting navigation of those times, and forbids us to expect more than a general idea of their nature and qualities. Some of the ancients imagined, that the Poet meant to express a subdivision of those principal winds by certain epithets; which they understood to convey the idea (for which it should seem the Greek language had not yet found a name), it is rather to be discovered where he employs two of them together, as in the instances already taken notice of, where Boreas and Zephyrus blow from the Thracian mountains on the Ægean sea; for if we translate them literally, the North-west, we shall bring that description still nearer to nature and truth*.

Taking those winds in the order in which the Poet has placed them,

we

It