The Atlantic

Paul Butel, Iain Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134843046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From Antiquity to modern times, the Atlantic has been the subject of myths and legends. The Atlantic by Paul Butel offers a global history of the ocean encompassing the exploits of adventurers, Vikings, explorers such as Christopher Columbus, emigrants, fishermen, and modern traders. The book also highlights the importance of the growth of ports such as New York and Liverpool and the battles of the Atlantic in the world wars of the twentieth century.
The author offers an examination of the legends of the ocean, beginning with the Phoenicians and Carthaginians navigating beyong the Pillars of Hercules, and details the exploitation and power struggles of the Atlantic through the centuries.
The book surveys the important events in the Atlantic's rich history and comprehensively analyses the changing fortunes of sea-going nations, including Britain, the United States and Germany.

Chapter 1: Atlantic legends and Atlantic reality before the Iberian discoveries

The legendary Atlantic

There will come an age, in the far-off years, when Ocean shall unloose the bonds of things, when the whole, broad earth shall be revealed, when Tethys shall disclose new worlds and Thule will not be the limit of the land.¹

The prediction made by Seneca’s hero in the Medea would be realized with the explorations of the North Atlantic by the Irish monks and the Vikings, followed some years later by Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean. His prediction was written in the world of the ancients, for whom the idea of the Atlantic ocean was still swathed in legend. The very term ‘Atlantic’ reminds us of this, since it could have been derived from the name of the continent of Atlantis, sunk beneath the real ocean. Even the legend of Atlas and his brother Hesperus, spirit of the evening star, has helped to sustain the belief in a sunken Atlantis. Hesperus climbed onto his brother’s shoulders in order to scan the horizon, but fell headlong into the sea, taking a piece of his brother’s flesh with him; and Atlantis was born.

Atlas the giant, father of the Hesperides, had taken the side of the Titans in their struggle with the gods and was condemned by Zeus to bear the heavens on his shoulders. The ancients thought of him as residing to the west, in the lands of the Hesperides. To Homer, it was ‘the malevolent Atlas, who knows the sea in all its depths and with his own shoulders supports the great columns that hold earth and sky apart’ and whose daughter Calypso, the ‘powerful nymph’, kept the unfortunate Ulysses from his home.²

Again, we find the same images of a strange, foreign Atlantic in Virgil: at the edges of the ocean and the setting of the sun is the home of the Ethiopians. At the most distant part of the earth, mightiest Atlas turns on his shoulders the axis of the sky, studded with its burning stars. On the Mediterranean side, these borders can be represented by the Pillars of Hercules marking the entrance to the straits of Gibraltar, Mount Calpe to the north, and the rock of Abylla to the south. Here we find what is claimed to be the conclusion of Heracles’ labours, the point at which he set the limits of the known world. The legend of Heracles is added to that of Atlas, underlining the simultaneous attractions and repulsions of the unknown, beyond the oekumen, the civilized world. The Hesperides, nymphs of the western sky, were three sisters who maintained a vigil over the golden apples that the Earth (Ge) had given to Hera upon her marriage (to Zeus). Thanks to their help, Heracles was able to take the fantastic apples with him and thus to gain immortality. The ancients pictured the Hesperides’ garden lying at the farthest reaches of the western world, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. A sculpture such as the one at the Olympian Temple shows Atlas helping Heracles: relieving Atlas from his daily labour, Heracles received the golden apples from Atlas in return. The Hesperides are none other than Atlas’s own daughters, and are sometimes called the Atlantides. They may be taken for the Isles of the West, or the Fortunate Isles, becoming identified with the Cape Verde Islands, or the Canaries. Rising out of the heart of the ocean, these islands, the imaginary fruit of the reality of the tales of the first Phoenician adventurers in the Atlantic, are transformed in Plato’s Timaeus into a powerful and wondrous empire, named Atlantis, which, by sinking, gave its name to the ocean: ‘On the island of Atlantis, kings built a powerful and wondrous empire. This empire was master of the whole island, along with many others and parts of the Continent’. To reach it, one had to go by way of the real sea, containing a great many other islands, and the land that surrounded it, ‘that may be called a continent’.³

The collapse of this continent creates the legend: ‘The island of Atlantis disappeared into the depths of the sea. Hence to this day, exploring this ocean is an arduous, almost impossible task, due to the obstacle of the deep silt deposits that the swallowed island displaced’. Already presented by Plato, the image of the earthly paradise of Atlantis reappeared in a great many ancient authors. For Diodorus of Sicily, the island, found at high sea and situated in the west, has

fertile, mountainous soil, with a flat area of great beauty; the island is irrigated by navigable rivers, from which one can see numerous gardens planted with all kinds of trees and orchards, latticed with springs of gentle water. The mountainous region is covered in dense forest, and even the air is so temperate that the fruit of the trees and other produce grow here in abundance throughout the greater part of the year.⁴

In the Middle Ages, a similar imagery came down from the Arab geographers, who believed in the truth of the legend, combining it with other traditions of the isles of the western seas, such as Thule, the isle glimpsed by Pytheas the Massalian amid the northern fogs; the Portuguese Antilia, or the Island of the Seven Cities; and the island of St Brendan and his Irish companions. Each had created their own legends. Antilia was the Island of the Seven Cities, founded in the Atlantic in the eighth century by Portuguese bishops fleeing the Arab invasion with their flocks. The isle was only to be rediscovered when the last infidel had been vanquished and, after the capture of Granada, Columbus could leave on his search in 1492. The Celtic legends were perhaps the most popular. Besides St Brendan’s odyssey, his initiatory quest through the lonely Atlantic in search of a refuge favourable to prayer, and his celebrating Easter Day Mass on the back of a whale, there were numerous Breton legends. There was, for instance, the legend about the 100 monks setting sail over the Atlantic ‘in order to contemplate the innumerable wonders of the ocean’. After three years of drifting, a statue in the form of the Virgin Mary appeared twice and pointed them in the right direction; a third apparition, this time of Moses, showed them an island with a golden mountain and a town also entirely of gold. This was the Heavenly Jerusalem, ‘as resplendent as one of the most precious stones, like a crystal of jasper’.⁵ After a meal of the food of angels, the monks left the island and returned after a few days to Brittany, where they found the world had since completely changed: while they had spent three years on their voyage, 300 had passed on the mainland.

‘And the sea gave up the dead in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead in them’ (Revelations 20, 13). Celtic myth has it that the Atlantic is the land of the dead, where the souls of the deceased rest before reaching the biblical paradise of Eden, lying in the east, in Mesopotamia. In this land of the dead that is the Atlantic, these lost, paradisiacal isles of contentment can equally represent the ascetic idea of purgatory, offering a step prior to the ascent to paradise proper.⁶ There has always been, however, a certain ambiguity in this image, since the ‘Fortunate Isles’ may also constitute a hedonist paradise, where the sun generates gold and where existence is easy, painless and without labour, since nature provides everything. These isles offer marvels, mirabilia, that have fuelled dreams of the Atlantic.

There is also an ambiguity here, taking the form of a seductive vision that might vanish to reveal the threatening dangers which the sea brings down upon those who venture upon it. The theme of the siren, inherited from antiquity, reappears on the heads of columns on the Portuguese churches between the Douro and Minho rivers, where it constitutes a sort of exorcism against danger.

All these islands were drawn on maps from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In 1306, Marino Sanuto’s map counted no less than 350 Fortunate Isles, to the west of Ireland, that became the goal of voyages of discovery. In the eighteenth century, people still hypothesized about the existence of St Brendan’s Island. The West’s memory could not forget them. On English maps from 1853 one can still see a green isle, like a lost rock, marked at 44° 48’ latitude north and 26° 10’ longitude west.⁷ After the Renaissance, however, an effort was made to rationalize myth. Of course, the legend of Atlantis was still accepted by Montaigne, Buffon and Voltaire, but they wished to uncover the reality. Atlantis was identified with America, Scandinavia and, especially, with the Canaries. The Etruscans, the ancestors of the Guanches, who inhabited the Canary Islands before the arrival of the Spanish, Basques, or the ancient Italians, were identified as its inhabitants.

This effort to get back to the reality of the Atlantic had begun earlier, even in antiquity. Thus the ocean’s tides were themselves the object of Virgil’s astonished attention:

As the sea advances wave by wave, now rushing to the land, throwing foam over the rocks and soaking the edge of the sand in the bay; now turning and hurrying back, sucking down the stones and rolling them along in its undertow while the shallows retreat and the shore is left dry.⁸

Strabo even goes so far as to want to criticize a legend he considers ill-founded:

It is ridiculous to believe that they [the Cimbri] left their lands through ill feeling towards ordinary waves, a regular phenomenon that recurs each day. Nor need we believe (since it is pure fiction) what is told concerning extraordinarily large waves. The ocean actually shows greater or lesser differentiation in this type of phenomenon, according, however, to definite rules and at predictable times.⁹

The same author unhesitatingly treats Pytheas, ‘the man who gave an account of Thule’, as an ‘arrant liar’.¹⁰

Certainly, however, scepticism with regard even to the legend of Atlantis only appeared much later. It is only therefore at the beginning of the nineteenth century that German explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt considers that Atlantis does not belong to the domain of geographical fact but to that of pure imagination. For Humboldt, the fantastic image of the ideal state presented in Plato’s Critias is a counterpart of the old Athenian state.

Suffused by an imagery quite as unrestrained as that of the Celts, the Arab geographers aim to base their story on realities experienced by their contemporaries. One Al-Idrisi recalls a story, in the twelfth century, just as legendary as that of St Brendan’s voyage, or of the Breton monks from the abbey of Pointe de Saint-Mathieu: in his picture of the ‘Adventurers of Lisbon’, he recounts the voyage organized in the tenth century by eight Moslem sailors.¹¹ His heroes have just left familiar shores for, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the Sea of Perpetual Gloom, the unknown ocean numbering no less than 30,000 fabulous islands at the edge of the world, with their man-eating monsters and covered in gold and silver. The fantastic aspect of the voyage is clear from the mention of ‘adventurers’ and in several passages noting the fear inspired by the ocean with its immense waves, its obscure depths and numerous reefs barely lit by the weak light. Without doubt, however, there remain genuine facts. The sailors probably landed at Madeira, called the Island of Sheep, and then in the Canaries, before ending up on the Moroccan coast after 37 days at sea. Safi was a port then at the height of its expansion on the Atlantic coast of the Maghrib. The Arab geographer’s demonstration of the reality of a voyage has a precursory character, since it presages later European discoveries. It turned towards an unknown ocean, still of course feared, but often visited on its Iberian and African coasts. The geographers also managed to gather together the heritage of antiquity.

The realities of the ancients

Phoenician and Carthaginian voyages in the near Atlantic

It would be useful to distinguish the reconnaissance expeditions, such as those of Hanno of Carthage or Pytheas of Massilia, from the networks of maritime relations established by the ancient Thalassocracies. From the sixteenth to the fourth century BC, Phoenicia, with Tyre as its front-ranking port, dominated the eastern Mediterranean, its enormous expansion becoming apparent from the very beginning of the first millennium. Founded by the Phoenicians, Carthage solidly established its trade on the south of the western Mediterranean. In the same period, the Greeks greatly extended their networks at the Point of Euxin in the Aegean Sea; on either side of Sicily, Marseilles and the Etruscans were able to build up a rich commerce before the Mediterranean became the Romans’ Mare Nostrum. Roman imperialism, however, only got underway slowly: in the fourth century, Carthage was able to sign a treaty with Rome to divide up trade in the western Mediterranean and, later, to make the Romans tremble before Carthage fell in 146 BC.

The ventures and voyages of Phoenician trade soon began to take shape in the ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules. From the end of the second millennium before Christ, the most westerly Phoenician installation was Gades which Tyre had settled and governed, in all likelihood with a view to searching for the tin ore required for the production of bronze, in voyages across the Gulf of Gascony towards the Loire Basin, the Gulf of Morbihan, and as far as Cornwall in Britain. Strabo showed the role Portugal and Andalusia played as ports of call in the Phoenician period, exchanging Iberian salt against lead and tin from the Cassiterides, Cornwall, or the Breton coast of France.¹² Diodorus of Sicily, however, set the extreme limit of the Phoenician diaspora further and deeper into the Atlantic, probably at Madeira, which was conquered much later by the Portuguese. A storm might have carried the Phoenicians to this enchanted isle with its rich soil, luxuriant vegetation and well-watered gardens. According to Pierre Rouillard, the Phoenician presence in Madeira should be understood in the context of Phoenician—Etruscan rivalry. The latter, informed of the discovery, wanted to settle there too. The event can be situated at the moment of great Etruscan dynamism in the seventh century BC, but it is really the Phoenicians to whom this voyage must be attributed.

In fact, on the strength of archaeological remains, only the settlement of Tyre at Gades, at the mouth of the Guadalete, gave the Phoenicians great renown, due to a temple at Melquart. The date traditionally assigned to this settlement, in the twelfth century BC, could correspond to the first voyage of the Tyrians towards the far west. Phoenician trade was already in full expansion, and the Bible attests to its magnitude in the western Mediterranean, even beyond the Pillars of Hercules: ‘Tarshish trafficked with you because of your great wealth of every king; silver, iron, tin and lead they exchanged for your wares’.¹³ ‘The people’s broker amongst the numberless isles’, Tyre managed to find the principal relay for its trade with the west in Tartessus (the biblical Tarshish) on the Atlantic coast of Spain. The very name ‘Tartessus’ immediately evokes ‘land of wonders’, mines, ports, rivers, kingdom. It is to the west of Gades-Cadiz, on this Iberian Atlantic coast, that Huelva can provide the greatest testimony to the activities of the miners and metallurgists who helped make Tarshish the best port for Phoenician trade.

From the seventh century BC, Asia Minor dispatched the best of its mariners to cross the entire length of the Mediterranean in an unbroken voyage, to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar and to follow the African coast for more than 700 kilometres, until, facing Atlas (this time referring to the Moroccan range), they reached the island of Mogador. The Mediterranean sailors, navigating from the southern limit of their voyages to as far away as Cornwall, with Tartessus-Huelva being their principal trading axis, never ceased thereafter to visit the ocean’s shores of Lybia (Africa) and of the Iberian peninsula.

It was almost two centuries later, under Punic control, that the Atlantic coast seems to have undergone its greatest expansion, combining voyages of discovery (the voyage of Hanno the Suffete) and commercial exploitation. The voyage Polybius undertook in the second century BC, on behalf of the Romans, in order to take an inventory of Carthaginian goods in the Atlantic, was very precise. In fact, Pliny the Elder reports:

Polybius says that Cerne is situate at the extremity of Mauritania, over against Mount Atlas, and at a distance of eight stadia from the land; while Cornelius Nepos states that it lies very nearly in the same meridian as Carthage, at a distance from the mainland of ten miles, and that it is not more than two miles in circumference. It is said also that there is another island situate over against Mount Atlas, being itself known by the name of Atlantis.¹⁴

To André Jodin, the distances given by these authors, close to 1,500 metres, could allow the identification of Cerne with the island of Mogador, separated from the coast of the mainland by the same distance. The Phoenicians, and then the Carthaginians, exploited its purple, one of the most famous natural resources of the Moroccan Atlantic coasts. This exploitation would assume its fullest extent under the reign of Juba II, in the Augustan epoch, with the purple extracted from the shells of the island of Mogador proving a striking dye much appreciated by the Roman élite. Already, however, under Phoenician and Carthaginian colonization, Cerne-Mogador was the farthest limit of the trading routes.

In the fifth century BC, Hanno the Carthaginian completed his famous voyage in order to revive the ancient Phoenician settlements beyond the Pillars of Hercules that had lain dormant since the fall of Tyre. Since one of the most prosperous Phoenician trading posts, Lixus, south of the Straits of Gibraltar on the Moroccan coast, 100 kilometres from Tangier, had not disappeared like the other settlements, Hanno was therefore able to enlist help from this colony, and the Lixites provided him with pilots to face the most distant waters, and, in particular, to lead him to Cerne-Mogador, considered by Hanno as a reasonable limit to his colonies.¹⁵

Hanno’s colonists were Libyphoenicians recruited on the Andalusi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Seas in History
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Atlantic legends and Atlantic reality before the Iberian discoveries
• Chapter 2 A new Atlantic: From the fifteenth to the begining of the sixteenth centuries
• Chapter 3 The Atlantic and the Iberians: Sixteenth to seventeenth centuries
• Chapter 4 The Atlantic and the growth of the naval powers: The seventeenth century
• Chapter 5 The golden age of the colonial Atlantic: The eighteenth century
• Chapter 6 Men and powers in the Atlantic: Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
• Chapter 7 The Atlantic in the nineteenth century: Tradition and change
• Chapter 8: The Atlantic in the twentieth century
• Chapter 9: Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography