C. to
circumnavigate Africa, and returned, it is said, at the end of three
years by the Red Sea. An expedition issuing from Carthage skirted the
coast of Africa to the Gulf of Guinea; the commander Hanno wrote an
account of the voyage which is still preserved.
=Commodities.=--To civilized peoples the Phoenicians sold the products
of their industry. In barbarous countries they went to search for what
they could not find in the Orient. On the coast of Greece they
gathered shell-fish from which they extracted a red tint, the purple;
cloths colored with purple were used among all the peoples of ancient
times for garments of kings and great lords.
From Spain and Sardinia they brought the silver which the inhabitants
took from the mines. Tin was necessary to make bronze, an alloy of
copper and tin, but the Orient did not furnish this, and so they
sought it even on the coasts of England, in the Isles of Tin (the
Cassiterides). In every country they procured slaves. Sometimes they
bought them, as lately the slavers bought negroes on the coast of
Africa, for all the peoples of this time made commerce in slaves;
sometimes they swooped down on a coast, threw themselves on the women
and children and carried them off to be retained in their own cities
or to be sold abroad; for on occasion they were pirates and did not
scruple to plunder strangers.
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