How Far Did Early Missionaries Travel?

Part Two -- Necho 's Phoenician Flotilla


You can imagine the look or surprise on faces of natives living along the East and West coasts of Africa one day in the seventh century B.C. as they saw a fleet of foreign galleys sailing past them. 

 These vessels were part of a flotilla commissioned by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho to sail around Africa from East to West starting in the Red Sea.

There was no certainty they would succeed. For centuries  Phoenician mariners had been trying to sail southward along Africa's Atlantic coastline  for centuries but had not succeeded in a complete trip around Africa from that direction according to the Greek historian Herodotus, because of  tricky Atlantic currents and winds along that part of the coastline. 

Still, they set off, sailing down the Red Sea and then southward along the East coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean.  And according to Herodotus they returned to Egypt  after sailing around the southern tip of Africa, north along the Atlantic coastline and eastward through the Mediterranean three years later  after  stopping over somewhere along the route long enough to plant and harvest  a food crop.

Some historians have debated the reliability of Herodotus' account  but historian Lionel Carson believes there is no reason why skilled Phoenician mariners could not have completed the voyage  in the time mentioned.

This successful voyage by the Phoenican flotilla do doubt opened up the way for merchants and traders and even early Christian missionaries  to follow behind them just as  the voyage of Pytheas we'll look at in Part Three did much the same thing North of the Mediterranean along the Atlantic Ocean as far as Britain and beyond.