The above form but a small portion of the works devoted wholly or in part to the subject, but they are believed to contain all the material necessary for even a more detailed statement than my purpose demands.
Of the voyages of the ancients, properly so called, that is, of such as preceded the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century, I shall here say little. These maritime expeditions, confined for the most part to the Mediterranean, though extending for some distance along the coasts of the Indian and Atlantic oceans, with occasional voyages designedly or accidentally prolonged to more distant islands, and it may be continents, come down to us through antique histories, cosmographies, and poems, so mixed with vague hypothetical and mythological conceptions, that the most searching investigation is often unable to separate fact from fable. There are multitudes of classic and mediæval legends adopted by Tasso, Pulci, and other Italian poets, such, for example, as that which makes the Greek wanderer Ulysses the pioneer of western adventure, which in a sober treatise are scarcely worthy of mention. Turning to the dawn his vessel's poop, this son of Laertes, it is said, passed Gibraltar, the bound ordained by Hercules not to be overstepped by man, and, as Dante tells us, sailed for the Happy Isles of the unknown Atlantic, unrestrained by son, or father, or even Penelope's ever-weaving web of love.
A little journey was a wonderful exploit before the time of Christ—instance the immortal fame achieved by Hanno, the Carthaginian, in visiting the west coast of Africa, B. C. 570; by Herodotus, in making the excursion of Egypt and India, B. C. 464-456; by Pytheas, in his voyage to the British Isles, B. C. 340; by Nearchus, in descending the Indus, B. C. 326; by Eudoxus, in his attempt to sail round Africa, B. C. 130; by Cæsar, in undertaking the conquest of Gaul, B. C. 58; by Strabo, in penetrating Asia some thirty or forty years later. After the Christian era Pausanias, a Roman, in 175 wrote a guide-book of Greece; Fa Hian, a Chinese monk, went westward into India in the year 400 or thereabout; Cosmas Indicopleustes travelled in India a century and a half later and wrote a book to prove the world square, and the universe an oblong coffer; Arculphe wrote of the Holy Land about 650; an Englishman, Willibald, made the tour of southern Europe and Palestine, setting out from Southampton in 721; in 851 went Soliman from Persia to the China sea. So it has been said.