Chapter VIII: Section C

Aryan immigrants--Gael and Briton--Earliest classical nomenclature--British Isles--Albion--Ierne--Cassiterides--Phoenician tin trade _viâ_ Cadiz.

C. 1.--How or when the first swarms of the Aryan migration reached Britain is quite unknown.[11] But they undoubtedly belonged to the Celtic branch of that family, and to the Gaelic (Gadhelic or Goidelic) section of the branch, which still holds the Highlands of Scotland and forms the bulk of the population of Ireland. By the 4th century B.C. this section was already beginning to be pressed northwards and westwards by the kindred Britons (or Brythons) who followed on their heels; for Aristotle (or a disciple of his) knows our islands as "the Britannic[12] Isles." That the Britons were in his day but new comers may be argued from the fact that he speaks of Great Britain by the name of _Albion_, a Gaelic designation subsequently driven northwards along with those who used it. In its later form _Albyn_ it long remained as loosely equivalent to North Britain, and as _Albany_ it still survives in a like connection. Ireland Aristotle calls _Ierne_, the later Ivernia or Hibernia; a word also found in the Argonautic poems ascribed to the mythical Orpheus, and composed probably by Onomacritus about 350 B.C., wherein the Argo is warned against approaching "the Iernian islands, the home of dark and noisome mischief." This is the passage familiar to the readers of Kingsley's 'Heroes.'[13]

C. 2.--Aristotle's work does no more than mention our islands, as being, like Ceylon, not pelagic, but oceanic. To early classical antiquity, it must be remembered, the Ocean was no mere sea, but a vast and mysterious river encircling the whole land surface of the earth. Its mighty waves, its tides, its furious currents, all made it an object of superstitious horror. To embark upon it was the height of presumption; and even so late as the time of Claudius we shall find the Roman soldiers feeling that to do so, even for the passage of the Channel, was "to leave the habitable world."

C. 3.--But while the ancients dreaded the Ocean, they knew also that its islands alone were the source of one of the most precious and rarest of their metals. Before iron came into general use (and the difficulty of smelting it has everywhere made it the last metal to do so), tin had a value all its own. It was the only known substance capable of making, along with copper, an alloy hard enough for cutting purposes--the "bronze" which has given its name to one entire Age of human development. It was thus all but a necessary of life, and was eagerly sought for as amongst the choicest objects of traffic.

C. 4.--The Phoenicians, the merchant princes of the dawn of history, succeeded, with true mercantile instinct, in securing a monopoly of this trade, by being the first to make their way to the only spots in the world where tin is found native, the Malay region in the East, Northern Spain and Cornwall in the West. That tin was known amongst the Greeks by its Sanscrit name _Kastira_[14] ([Greek: kassiteros]) shows that the Eastern source was the earliest to be tapped. But the Western was that whence the supply flowed throughout the whole of the classical ages; and, as the stream-tin of the Asturian mountains seems to have been early exhausted, the name _Cassiterides_, the Tin Lands, came to signify exclusively the western peninsula of Britain. Herodotus, in the 5th century B.C., knew this name, but, as he frankly confesses, nothing but the name.[15] For the whereabouts of this El Dorado, and the way to it, was a trade secret most carefully kept by the Phoenician merchants of Cadiz, who alone held the clue. So jealous were they of it that long afterwards, when the alternative route through Gaul had already drawn away much of its profitableness, we read of a Phoenician captain purposely wrecking his ship lest a Roman vessel in sight should follow to the port, and being indemnified by the state for his loss.