But the Phœnicians were more than mere traders or fighters: they were the world’s greatest explorers—until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of our era. It was they who voyaged out of the Mediterranean across the turbulent Bay of Biscay to Cornwall and perhaps Ireland. I am of the firm opinion that they also continued their travels further eastward across the North Sea: we will deal with that, however, in the next chapter. At any rate about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. they circumnavigated Africa, obeying the orders of Neco, an Egyptian king, “who”—to continue in Hakluyt’s Elizabethan English—“(for trial’s sake) sent a fleet of Phœnicians downe the Red sea: who setting forth in the Autumne and sailing Southward till they had the Sunne at noone-tide upon their sterbourd (that is to say, having crossed the Æquinoctial and the Southerne tropique) after a long Navigation, directed their course to the North, and in the space of 3. yeeres environed all Africk, passing home through the Gaditan streites, and arriving in Egypt.”[11] It was the Phœnicians, too, who with the Israelites in the time of Solomon sailed down the Red Sea to Eastern Africa, Persia, and Beluchistan. Some, indeed, have thought that the Phœnicians sailed out of the Mediterranean and keeping their course to the westward were the first to discover America. Whether this is true or not is a matter for dispute, but it is quite possible. I have seen a little seven-ton cutter yacht that came across on her own bottom, and she is not half the size of the old Phœnician ships. Nor had she a few dozen galley slaves on board to pull at the oars: still less the room wherein to stow them.[12] There is, then, nothing at all improbable in the Phœnicians having gone so far afield. They were not pressed for time, and could afford to wait till the weather suited them. Given a fair wind they could not have had better shaped canvas for the voyage than theirs. Every sailor will tell you that there is nothing to beat the squaresail for ocean passages, and those who have tried the fore-and-aft rig for deep-sea sailing have lived to wish they had had a rectangular sail set across the mast, so as to avoid the fear of gybing as in a fore-and-after. Lord Brassey, when, in the famous race across the Atlantic in 1905, he commanded his own yacht the _Sunbeam_, afterwards endorsed these opinions about the respective merits of the square-sail and of the fore-and-aft rig. Moreover, the Phœnicians had ample brails for reefing. True, the ship would roll considerably with so shallow a keel, but her length would be of some assistance, and no doubt the skipper would see to it that the crew steadied her with their oars.