Hanno the Navigator

Hanno the Navigator sailed down the West African coast around 500 BC and left the earliest surviving account of the voyage. He was a Carthaginian, probably of the Magonid family that dominated the city's politics, and the expedition was almost certainly a colonising venture rather than pure exploration. The record is the Periplus of Hanno, a short Greek text that claims to be a translation of an inscription he set up in the temple of Baal Hammon at Carthage. It states that he sailed with sixty ships of fifty oars and thirty thousand people, which is not credible as a figure and may reflect a corrupted number. He founded settlements along the Moroccan Atlantic coast, including Thymiaterion and Cerne on an island, and continued south past a great river with crocodiles and hippopotami, generally taken to be the Senegal. The passages that have kept the text in circulation come further on. He describes a coast covered by forest at night with fires and the sound of drums, pipes and shouting; a mountain of fire called the Chariot of the Gods, from which streams of flame reached the sea, which is usually identified with Mount Cameroon; and an island in a gulf full of hairy people whom his interpreters called Gorillae, three of whom were caught and skinned when they could not be taken alive. The word gorilla was taken from that passage in 1847 for the newly described ape. How far he reached is argued — Sierra Leone, Gabon or Cameroon. No Carthaginian original survives, and some scholars regard the text as a Greek compilation.

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