But though the Phoenicians have left us no record of their travels and voyages, they had been the carriers of knowledge, and it was from them that the Greeks learnt of "the extreme regions of the world" and of the dim "far west." Indeed, it is highly probable that from the Phoenicians they got material for their famous legend of the Argonauts and their adventures in the Black Sea. Though the story is but legendary, and it has been added to with the growing knowledge of the world, yet it gives an idea of the perils that beset the sailors of those remote ages and of their limitations. And again we must remind ourselves that both the Phoenicians and early Greeks had, like the Egyptians and Babylonians, childish ideas as to the form of the earth. To them it was a circular plane, encircled by the ocean, which they believed to be a broad, deep-running river flowing round and round the world. Into this ocean stream ran all the rivers and seas known to them. Over the earth was raised a solid firmament of bronze in which the stars were set, and this was supported on tall pillars "which kept the heaven and the earth asunder." The whole delightful story of the Argonauts can be read in Kingsley's "Heroes." It is the story of brave men who sailed in the ship _Argo_, named after the great shipbuilder Argos, to bring back the Golden Fleece from Colchis in the Black Sea. Nowhere in all the history of exploration have we a more poetical account of the launching of a ship for distant lands: "Then they have stored her well with food and water, and pulled the ladder up on board, and settled themselves each man to his oar and kept time to Orpheus' harp; and away across the bay they rowed southward, while the people lined the cliffs; and the women wept while the men shouted at the starting of that gallant crew." They chose a captain, and the choice fell on Jason, "because he was the wisest of them all"; and they rowed on "over the long swell of the sea, past Olympus, past the wooded bays of Athos and the sacred isle; and they came past Lemnos to the Hellespont, and so on into the Propontis, which we call Marmora now." So they came to the Bosphorus, the "land then as now of bitter blasts, the land of cold and misery," and a great battle of the winds took place. [Illustration: A MAP OF THE VOYAGE OF THE ARGONAUTS. Drawn according to the principal classical traditions. The voyage through the ocean which, according to the ancient idea, surrounded the world will be especially noted.] Then the Argonauts came out into the open sea--the Black Sea. No Greek had ever crossed it, and even the heroes, for all their courage, feared "that dreadful sea and its rocks and shoals and fogs and bitter freezing storms," and they trembled as they saw it "stretching out before them without a shore, as far as the eye could see."