[197] The supposed anterior discovery of the Canaries by a Norman rover would be no argument, for these islands may be reached without encountering the principal difficulties of the enterprise. And further at the time of the alleged discovery, the compass may have been in use in the north of Europe. The coins of the Baltic show the intimacy there of the Saracens from the first century of the Hejira, and African settlers in England are entered in Doomsday Book. The use of it in the north, long before its employment by the Portuguese, has been asserted by various writers, not only as derived from the Arabs, but also as original, or derived from the Chinese. “Il’ est certain que les marins des côtes de Normandie et de Bretagne employaient dès le xiii siècle l’aiguille aimanée sous le nom de _marinette_.”--_Esmenard._ “Raymondus Lullus in 1272 describes a compass used by the Basques and Catalonians.”--_Cosmos_, vol. ii. p. 474. “The Fins have a compass which possesses the peculiarity of indicating the rising and setting of the sun--which must be in the figures round it, as in the Chinese compass--in summer and winter, in a manner that can only agree with the latitude 49° 20´.”--SALVERTE, _Occult Sciences_, tom. ii. p. 252. BOOK II. THE COUNTRY OF THE ROVERS. CHAPTER I. OFF SALEE. November 30. A Heaven of pale blue is reflected in the Atlantic; there is not a speck above nor a breath below; there is nothing that tells of Atlas or of Africa--no cloud-capped and snow-clad peaks overshadowing the ocean, or pillaring the sky. The land is low and tame; but on nearing it along the water’s edge, a fast-set fence of breakers appears, which would crush in an instant the _Baron Renfrew_, or _Ptolemy Philopator’s_ fifty-decker: in memory of such incidents, no doubt, Antæus honoured Neptune with a temple of human heads. These horrid fangs, now covered with foam and now left bare, might well suggest the idea of a dragon-guarded land. Calm as it is, at a distance of three or four miles from the shore we hear the surf like distant thunder: the spray, on the rolling in of every wave, shoots up as if a succession of mines were fired by a train. In this merciless fence the gaps are few and far between, hard to find, and, when found, harder still to enter by. Along the distance we have run, there are but three openings where small craft might find refuge, but then only when such refuge is not wanted; that is to say, with calm weather, a leading wind, a tranquil sea, and a full tide. A vessel caught in a westerly gale would have a lee-shore (and what a lee-shore!) stretching in a right line for five or six hundred miles, without a promontory behind which to shelter, or a port for which to make, and (towards the south) with a current incessantly setting upon the breakers.