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Authors: Alistair Moffat

Tags: #History, #Scotland, #Non Fiction

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What is also striking is Pytheas’ sense of enterprise in venturing into the unknown, far beyond the limits of Mediterranean knowledge of north-western Europe. With characteristic precision and reticence, Herodotus had mentioned the ‘Tin Islands’ that lay somewhere in the remote northern ocean but added
immediately, ‘I cannot speak with any certainty’. Tin was an essential ingredient in the alloy of bronze and, since deposits were rare along the shores of the Mediterranean, Greek merchants were always anxious to find new sources. Pytheas’ epic journey was therefore not only motivated by curiosity and an evident sense of scientific enquiry but also by the needs of commerce. Tin was very valuable and, if the mists and monsters which guarded the chilly northern seas could be avoided, there was money to be made.

Contacts already existed. Tin was being regularly traded between southern Britain and the Mediterranean in the fourth century
BC
but almost certainly passing through several pairs of hands on its way south. If Pytheas could discover a feasible route from Marseilles to Britain, then perhaps a chain of expensive middlemen could be cut out.

He began his long journey overland, travelling first to the port of Narbonne and, from there, was probably rowed up the River Aude as far as the draught of a boat could reach and then onwards on foot or horseback up over the watershed and down to the headwaters of the River Garonne. From there a boat would have taken Pytheas quickly and comfortably to the great estuary of the Gironde and the Atlantic coast beyond.

This and several other overland and river routes to the north were well known to the Greek colonists of Marseilles and archaeology confirms a brisk trading network exchanging Mediterranean goods for the produce of the peoples of what is now France. On the shores of the Bay of Biscay, Pytheas will have found passage on local boats plying between shore markets further up the coast or possibly with merchants from his home port or with native traders who had done business with them. No doubt he avoided travelling alone and vulnerable – perhaps he had companions whose involvement is now lost to history. In any event, passage could be rapid and, if there were no significant breaks in his journey, the explorer could have found himself in Brittany, on the southern shores of the English Channel, less than 30 days after leaving Marseilles.

Pytheas was standing on the very edge of geography. As far as he knew, no Greek had come so far north and survived to record what he saw. Certainly Cornish tin was imported but none of his compatriots had come to the place called Belerion where it was panned from streams and hacked out of shallow pits. None had seen the charcoal-burners smelt the ore into astragal-shaped ingots weighing about 80 kilograms although many had passed through the markets of Marseilles. Several of these remarkable objects have been found at various stages of their journey to the Mediterranean. They were brought to the beach market between St Michael’s Mount and Marazion on the Cornish coast, not far from Penzance. Once deals had been done and the tin loaded into boats, the rising tide refloated them and they trimmed their sails and swung away south out to sea. The sea captains navigated by pilotage, hugging the coastline, measuring progress by seamarks and crossing the Channel when the French coast came in sight, often at Cap Gris Nez.

Cost, convenience and speed dictated that a sea journey, safely managed in the summer months, was always to be preferred to the slow and dangerous business of transporting goods overland. Quantities were necessarily smaller and robbers lay in wait. When the tin ships arrived at the mouth of the Seine, the Loire or the Gironde, they travelled as far up the rivers as they could. At the point when the keels began to scrape the river bed or become clogged in mud, the 80-kilo astragals were unloaded and transferred to packhorses. Their figure-of-eight shape allowed two to be carried by each animal, slung on either side of a wooden packsaddle and lashed securely. The average packhorse could manage 160 kilos at a steady uphill walk without too much loss of condition. But these routes were only possible in summer when enough grass grew and could be grazed. Once a string of packhorses reached the banks of the River Rhône, the tin was untacked, set into boats and the current carried them quickly downstream to the sea and Marseilles.

Pytheas had travelled in the opposite direction and when he crossed the Channel, probably on a merchant ship bound for the
well-known seamark of St Michael’s Mount, he was about to enter unknown waters. Most likely in short hops, he made his way up through the Irish Sea to the Isle of Man where he took his second measurement of the height of the sun (the first having been carried out in Brittany). As he moved further north the climate would have cooled noticeably, the land grown more rugged and mountainous and the maritime culture changed radically. Pytheas almost certainly found himself travelling in a very different sort of craft from what he had been used to. Here is Rufus Festus Avienus’ much later – and more poetic – version of the passage introducing Britain from
On the Ocean
:

 

Lying far off and rich in metals,

Of tin and lead. Great the strength of this nation,

Proud their mind, powerful their skill,

Trading the constant care of all.

 

They know not to fit with pine

Their keels, nor with fir, as use is,

They shape their boats; but strange to say,

They fit their vessels with united skins,

And often traverse the deep in a hide.

 

These were seagoing curraghs, not unlike those still being built in the south-west of Ireland. In 320
BC
, the waters of the Irish Sea and the Atlantic shores of Scotland and Ireland would have been crossed by many curraghs, some of them very large, all of them well suited to the swells and eddies of the ocean. Curraghs were quick, easy and cheap to construct. First a frame of greenwood rods (hazel was much favoured, and willow) was driven either into the ground or into holes made in a gunwale formed into an oval. Then the rods were lashed together with cord or pine roots into the shape of a hull, upside down. Once all was tight and secure – the natural whip and tension of greenwood helped this part of the process very much – the framework was then made rigid by the fitting of benches which acted as
thwarts. Over the hull hides were stretched and sewn together (or ‘united’) before being lashed to the gunwales. When the hides shrank naturally, they tightened over the greenwood rods and the seams were then caulked with wool grease or resin. Large curraghs could take twenty men or carry two tons of cargo and, since they were so straightforward to make from materials widely available, they and their small, round cousins, the coracles, would have sailed the coasts of Scotland and Ireland in their many thousands.

In his magisterial
Life of St Columba
, Adomnan talked of how the Iona community used curraghs to bring materials from the mainland and also described how they could be rowed and sailed. To make passage easier, the saint intervened:

 

[F]or on the day when our sailors had got everything ready and meant to take the boats and curraghs and tow the timbers to the island by sea, the wind, which had blown in the wrong direction for several days, changed and became favourable. Though the route was long and indirect, by God’s favour the wind remained favourable all day and the whole convoy sailed with their sails full so that they reached Iona without delay.

The second time was several years later. Again, oak trees were being towed by a group of twelve curraghs from the mouth of the River Shiel to be used here in repairs to the monastery. On a dead calm day when the sailors were having to use the oars, a wind suddenly sprang up from the west, blowing head on against them. We put in to the nearest island, called Eilean Shona, intending to stay in sheltered water.

 

But once again the power of the saint fixed the weather and the timbers were brought to Iona safely.

Pytheas claimed that his wanderings around Britain were not all seaborne. He travelled inland, but the hide boats will have helped him see much more than if he had gone on foot or even horseback. With a very shallow draught measured only in inches, coracles and curraghs could use rivers and lochs as their highways. Where rocky
rapids or a watershed needed to be traversed, these hide boats were so light as to be easily carried. Turned upside down against the weather, they even made handy overnight shelters.

As he explored, Pytheas began to form strong but not always positive impressions of the peoples and especially the climate of the far north. Strabo, a Greek writer living in Rome after
AD
14, considered
On the Ocean
to be little more than a catalogue of lies and exaggeration. But, in his vast, seventeen-volume
Geographica
, he used it nonetheless. Here is his, and Pytheas’, version of the agriculture of the communities ‘who lived near the chilly zone’:

 

Of the domesticated fruits and animals there is a complete lack of some and a scarcity of others, and that the people live on millet and on other herbs, fruits and roots; and where there is grain and even honey the people also make a drink from them. As for the grain, since they have no pure sunlight, they thresh it in large storehouses having first gathered the ears together there, because [outdoor] threshing floors are useless due to the lack of sun and the rain.

 

Some of this is little more than a Mediterranean view of long northern winters, cloudy days and the bewildering absence of several months of uninterrupted sunshine. The mention of millet is a fascinating misunderstanding. It does not grow in Britain but the reference, bracketed with ‘other herbs, fruits and roots’, is probably to Fat Hen, a nutritious plant now seen as a weed. Still known as
myles
or
mylies
in Scotland and cognate with the Latin word for millet, it was gathered, boiled and eaten as late as the eighteenth century by country people. Its seeds are rich in oil and carbohydrate and traces of Fat Hen have been found by archaeologists at sites dating back to the first millennium
BC
.

More generally, Pytheas was observing a society which still gathered in a harvest from wild places. In all likelihood, these were good locations for such as crab apples, hazelnuts or mushrooms and they will have been cared for and not over-picked. Our ancestors in Scotland ate – until recently – a wide range of plants now regarded as useless weeds.

Compared with Strabo’s scorn, the tone of Diodorus Siculus’ borrowings from
On the Ocean
is probably much closer to the original:

 

Britain, we are told, is inhabited by tribes who are indigenous and preserve in their way of life the ancient customs. For example they use chariots in their wars . . . and their houses are simple, being built for the most part from reeds or timbers. Their way of harvesting their grain is to cut only the heads and store them in roofed buildings, and each day they select the ripened heads and grind them, in this manner getting their food. Their behaviour is simple, very different from the shrewdness and vice that characterise the men of today. Their lifestyle is modest since they are beyond the reach of luxury which comes from wealth. The island is thickly populated, and its climate is extremely cold . . . It is held by many kings and aristocrats who generally live at peace with each other.

 

Once again archaeology supports Pytheas’ observations. Iron reaping hooks have been found at several sites in Scotland and the ancient method of cutting the grain near the top of the stalk is well attested into modern times. When cereals were grown in the old runrig system of long strips, the heads were cut so as to leave fodder for grazing animals. In the autumn, after the harvest, beasts came down from the summer shielings and were set on the reaped rigs to muck them, there being no other form of fertiliser. And cutting near the top also avoided the copious under-weeds of pre-industrial farming.

The last sentence of the extract from Diodorus is the first reference to British kingdoms and, although it is sketchy, even cursory, it has the virtue of simplicity. On his journeys around the coasts and inland, Pytheas clearly came across many kings and therefore many kingdoms. But Britain does not appear, at least not around the year 320
BC
, to have been a squabbling anthill of competing autocrats. There were wars, the Greek explorer implied, but peace was the usual condition of life. As the nature of early Celtic kingship becomes clearer and the evidence
supplied by outsiders more substantial, this observation will seem increasingly unlikely.

Pytheas noted few place-names in
On the Ocean
but one fascinating story was transmitted by Diodorus Siculus which hints at somewhere very specific in Scotland:

 

In the region beyond the land of the Celts there lies in the ocean an island no smaller than Sicily. This island . . . is situated in the north and is inhabited by the Hyperboreans who are called by that name because their home is beyond the point where the north wind blows.

 

Mediterranean historians were in the habit of mediating exotic customs and beliefs to their readers and listeners through more familiar terms and, when Diodorus states that Apollo was worshipped on this distant northern island, he probably meant that there was a moon cult. Worship took place in ‘a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape’. Diodorus goes on:

 

They also say that the moon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a little distance above the earth . . . The account is also given that the god visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished . . . At the time of this appearance of the god he both plays on the lyre and dances continuously the night through from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiades.

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