still more widely their manufacturing and commercial activity.

Audacity in enterprise can certainly not be denied to the adventurous
race which, from the islands and coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean,
launched forth upon the unknown sea in fragile ships, affronted the
perils of waves and storms, and still more dreaded "monsters of
the deep,"[316] explored the recesses of the stormy Adriatic and
inhospitable Pontus, steered their perilous course amid all the islets
and rocks of the Ægean, along the iron-bound shores of Thrace, Euboea,
and Laconia, first into the Western Mediterranean basin, and then
through the Straits of Gibraltar into the wild and boundless Atlantic,
with its mighty tides, its huge rollers, its blinding rains, and its
frequent fogs. Without a chart, without a compass, guided only in their
daring voyages by their knowledge of the stars, these bold mariners
penetrated to the shores of Scythia in one direction; to Britain, if
not even to the Baltic, in another; in a third to the Fortunate Islands;
while, in a fourth, they traversed the entire length of the Red Sea,
and entering upon the Southern Ocean, succeeded in doubling the Cape
of Storms two thousand years before Vasco di Gama, and in effecting the
circumnavigation of Africa.[317] And, wild as the seas were with which
they had to deal, they had to deal with yet wilder men. Except in Egypt,
Asia Minor, Greece, and perhaps Italy, they came in contact everywhere
with savage races; they had to enter into close relations with men
treacherous, bloodthirsty, covetous--men who were almost always
thieves, who were frequently cannibals, sometimes wreckers--who regarded
foreigners as a cheap and very delicious kind of food. The pioneers of
civilisation, always and everywhere, incur dangers from which ordinary
mortals would shrink with dismay; but the earliest pioneers, the first
introducers of the elements of culture among barbarians who had never
heard of it, must have encountered far greater peril than others