EARLY NAVIGATION IN THE INDIAN OCEAN,* Ti-is Philadelphia Commercial Museum
and its secretary, Mr. Wilfred Schoff, deserve to he congratulated on this result of their scheme to provide a complete history of commerce. Mr. Selloff has given us an excellent translation of the Periplus, the first record of trading in the East in vessels owned and commanded by Westerners; and he has provided an apparatus of notes so full and learned as to form a kind of history of ancient commerce. Students of the history of geography will find this volume of the highest value, and lovers of historical curiosities will discover much in the notes to please them. We have only two complaints to make. The map, though good in its way, might well have been on it larger scale, and the volume -would have been immensely improved by the addition of the twenty pages or so of the Greek text. As it is, Mr. Schoff has to be constantly transliterating the Greek words—a device which no scholar can regard with satisfaction.
We know nothing about the author of the Periplus, but we wall guess that he was an Egyptian Greek, a merchant living at Berenice, on the western coast of the Red Sea, and that he had made the journey he describes, at any rate as far as Cape Comorin. Mr. Selloff, after an elaborate and convincing argument, gives the date of the work approximately as A.D, 60. For long the Phwnieians and the Arabs had held a monopoly of the Indian trade, jealously concealing the actual source of the chief wares. Oriental goods were brought by the Indian merchants to Socotra or Cape Guardafui, and there redis- tributed to Egyptian and Greek traders. The result was that Rome had only a vague idea whence came some of her costliest merchandise. A curious instance is the ease of 'cinnamon. The Roman world, including the author of the Periplus, believed that it came from the Somali coast. But cinnamon never grew there. It catue from the mountains of India, and was only transhipped at Guard:dui. And it was common knowledge that male- hathron, famed in the history of ointments, came from India, and yet malabathvon is the leaf of the tree of which cinnamon is the bark. In the first century Rome was making a strenuous bid for the sea-borne trade of the East, and the Arab monopoly was falling before her activities. A Roman, one Harpalus, had discovered the periodic changes of the Indian monsoon, and so opened up the way to a direct deep-sea voyage from Aden to India. The present author knows about Harpalus's discovery and explains it ; but he gives the coastwise voyage also. Ho takes us down the western shore as far as Zanzibar, and round the eastern shore to the Ganges and the Malay Peninsula. His work is the first Admiralty sailing directions ever issued, and he tells of the exports and imports of each place in the style of a Consular Report. For his age he is remarkably shrewd and well-informed. He makes no strain upon our credulity, and he has grasped many geographical facts which the Western world forgot for centuries.o deep S d is the change- lessness of the East that not a few of his notes are still
accurate.
* 7'ho Poripine of the Erythrwan Sea: Travel and Trade • the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century. Translated from the (;rook liokatil Annotated. by Wilfred H. Schott London: Longmans and Co. L7a Coasting down the western shore Of the Red Sea, we pass Ptolemais, the present Port Sudan, to which the •ive4 Was brought from the Nubian forests. Then came Adulis, a very important harbour, which is now represented by Massowa. Berbera, the modern starting-place of the Somaliland caravans, is culled Malao. All these ports, according to our author, exported cinnamon, but he did not realize that such cinnamon cause from much farther afield—probably, Mr. Schoff thinks, from as far off as Burma and China. It is curious to reflect through how many hands this spice must have passed before it reached the Roman kitchens. The imports men- tioned are curiously modern—shoddy, coarse jeans, cheap jewellery. The wants of the half-civilized are much the same all through history. One of the exports mentioned is " honey from the reed called sacchari "—the first reference in European history to sugar as an article of commerce. Like cinnamon it came from India. The author takes us round Guarchtfui and spme con- siderable distance down. the east coast of Africa. It was pre-eminently the Arab sphere at the date of the Periplus and for centuries before. Mr. Selloff seems- to err in his note on this passage, for he says that Dr. Maciver has "conclusively" upset the theory of the Sabteo-Phmnician origin of the Zimbabwe ruins. Most people, we think, would agree that Mr. Hall's Prehistoric Rhodesia provides a final answer to Dr. Maciver. Zanzibar is described, and the last port mentioned is Rhapta, which may be the modern Kilwa. After that we read: "The unexplored ocean curves round to the west, and, running along by the regions to the south of 2Ethiopia and Libya and Africa, it mingles with the western sea." The ancients knew that Africa could be circum- navigated, but Europe had no notion of the length of its southward extension till the Portuguese discoveries in the fifteenth century.
There was not much for the commercial traveller to record on the eastern side of the Red Sea. Fish-eaters, cave dwellers, and wandering Bedouins gave little opportunity to the merchant. But once through the Straits we reach the frankincense country, especially the Hadramaut Valley, where between the desert hills and the sea the world's output of the commodity was gathered. The world of to-day still gets its small.stock of incense here, for Arab vessels carry it to Bombay and. Aden. It was the most valuable merchandise in the ancient world, and for several thousand years nations contended for . the control of its supply ground. When freights were high and population relatively small a merchant made his money by carrying high-priced. objects of luxury which took up little room. Nowadays the profits of trade come oftener from cheap articles of universal consumption. The author gives a good description of the Persian Gulf and the curious coast of Makran. You may know the mouth of the Indus, he says, by the presence of great serpents which come out to meet you. The dragons of the Makran coast have been famous ever since Alexander's army marched. along it.
The description of India is full, and on the whole very accurate—at least for the western aide. One of the chief imports from Europe was the red coral of the Western Mediterranean, which, according to Pliny, was as highly prized in India as were pearls at Rome. There was also a very large import of bullion, for there was considerable profit on the exchange. Readers of Tacitus will remember the rescript of Tiberius in which he condemned the drain of specie from Rome. Pliny calculated that India received annually between four and five millions in gold and silver coin, and that the products which she gave in return were sold in Rome at one hundred times their original cost. The result, of course, was that in time the Roman currency was degraded and ultimately repudiated. Among the exports recorded an interesting entry is " Seric skins." This means that even in the first century sables and other Siberian furs were sent over- land through Turkestan to the Indus' mouth—a trade which flourished almost up to our own days. By way of the Indus, too, came silk yarn from China. The ordinary silk trade route was through Turkestan and Parthia, but it was precarious at its best, and Rome and, later, Byzantium were always trying to reach China direct. It was not till Justinian's day that two monks succeeded in bringing back silkworms' eggs, and so introducing silk culture into Europe. One of the most lucrative exports was pepper, in which Roman cookery delighted, and which fetched in the oapital something like ten shillings a pound. Huge profits were made in it, and it formed, Mr. Selloff thinks, about three-fourths of the average west-bound cargo. When the Romans bought off Alaric part of the price was 3,000 pounds of pepper.
Once round Cape Commin our author grows vaguer. He thinks that Chryse or the Malacca Peninsula—which he believed to ho an island—lay just opposite the Ganges' mouth. He knows, however, that to the north lay a land called This with a great inland city called Thinae. This can only be the Chinese state Ts'in, with its capital Hien-yang. From it, he says, raw silk was exported through Bactria to the mouths of the Indus and the Ganges. He describes the Tibetan caravans and the markets of the Himalayan valleys. Beyond this his knowledge does not go. " The regions beyond," he says with the finality of the early geographer, "are either difficult of access, because of their excessive winters and great cold, or else cannot be sought out, because of some divine influence of the gods."
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