Miscellaneous Antiquity #1: Did the Carthaginians reach the Azores?

 

The Lagoa do Caldeirão, Corvo, in the Azores archipelago. Image credit: Teresa Rosa.

The Azores have long been assumed to have been uninhabited until the arrival of the Portuguese by sailors in the service of Dom Henrique, or Henry the Navigator, in the early 15th century.  Unlike the Canary Islands (i.e. the Insulae Canariae), there are no classical accounts, no sailing charts or Roman itineraries that mention the archipelago. One work that predates the first mention of the Azores, the Medici Atlas (circa 1351 C.E.), possibly alludes to the islands: the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, or the Voyages of Saint Brendan the Abbot, written around the start of the 10th century. It describes the saint between 512 and 530 C.E. visiting an island populated by sheep, an island inhabited by a dog, an island home to a 'Paradise of Birds', and a island stalked by an 'Ethiopian devil', among other fantastical places, during their journey to the Isle of the Blessed. 

The work, belonging to a genre of immanra or tales of mythological travels, borrows heavily from Celtic mythology and biblical imagery, but the specific details correspond with the ecology and history of the islands of the Atlantic. Canaria Insulae means 'Islands of the Dogs.', and canary birds received their name from the eponymous islands which they inhabited. The term 'Ethiopians' was furthermore a generic designation for African peoples outside of Roman Egypt, Libya and Mauretania. The devil could have been a Berber descendent of groups from the continent, perhaps even the Canarii tribe, who dwelt in the Atlas mountains and who also related their name with dogs. 

Regarding the Azores, Pico island is labelled on early portolan charts as il columbii, or the island of pigeons, and Corvo island as corvis marinis, or island of sea-crows.  This is good evidence that the author of the work knew the north Atlantic coast well, perhaps from an lost Roman source or from local tales by seafarers, but it hardly proves that the Azores were inhabited.

Archaeology, however, tells a different story. Recent paleoenvironmental research has determined that mice from Norway were present on the island by at least 700 CE, suggesting that Norse explorers, either raiders lost on their way to the coasts of Spain or Ireland or settlers who heared of fantastical lands of bounty from Irish storytellers, reached the island, well before continental Europeans and before the Viking Age truly began. But these would not have been the first. Apparently manmade hypogea structures and tumuli, since the 18th century considered to be prehistoric in origin, are found on the island of Corvo. The only close parallels to these structures are in the Iron Age Mediterranean; the Phoenician and Etruscan necropolises in particular, as well as the tayalots of the Balaeric islands. 

While some of the structures could be the result of erosion or natural weathering, archaeological finds, in agreement with classical authors (Strabo, Geographica) in attesting to the Phoenicians settling Gades outside the Pillars of Hercules, i.e. the straits of Gibraltar, in the 12th century BCE. A trading colony was founded near modern Lisbon at the same time, exchanging goods with the local Oestrimni. Phoenicia also had trading links with the Biblical 'land of Tarshish', conjectured by modern scolars to refer to Tartessos, who adopted the Phoenician alphabet but probably spoke a version of insular Celtic. While no direct link between the Phoenicians and the Azorean structures has been established thus far, they were clearly capable of travelling there. 

Tantalizingly, 16th century accounts from Portuguese sailors, such as Damian de Gois, claim that a cloaked equestrian statue stood on one of the hyogea, pointing an arm to the west (or northeast, or north), until it was destroyed during a storm. No sketch or exhaustive account of the statue survives, so it is impossible to say whether it could have been a relic from Phoenician or Punic occupation. The statue might have depicted Hercules, known to the Phoenicians as Melqart, to whom a temple was dedicated to in Gades, that was only rediscovered by Spanish archaeologists last week.

While any evidence has been lost, a further series of accounts from Corvo, in the 18th century, tell of a rainstorm that dredged up a hoard of supposedly Punic and Cyrenacian coins, exposing a ruined stone building. These coins were quickly distributed to various families and convents across the archipelago, but a few were recovered, sketched and published by the Swedish coin-collector Frans Podolyn. The mix of Greek and Carthagian coins, from the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, supports classical accounts of Greek sailors learning from Phoenician peripluses and sailing with Punic navigators, the best known being Pytheas of Massaila. The coins were unremarkable in  Mediterranean trade, so if the accounts can be trusted, this was not the hoard of a royal fleet. 

Perhaps they were deposited by a sailors who had been blown off course on the route to Lisbon, Galicia or the Casserterides (Tin Islands) of Britain, as an votive offering to Heracles/Melqart to return them to safety, or to thank him for revealing this undisturbed paradise. But to judge from the tumuli which seem to date to an earlier period, the Azores may have been their intended destination, retracing the the routes of their ancestors. It's important to note that the only record of Phoenician voyaging comes from third and fourth-hand Greek and Roman sources; all native records would have been burned in the destruction of Carthage or lost amidst the redevelopment of Punic towns and cities by Rome. They may well have produced whole books about the archipelago, that were never translated and languished in palace libraries until meeting a fiery end.

So did Carthage discover the Azores before the Portuguese did? In all probability, they may well have, even if the testimonies of sailors and priests in the early modern period, and the questionable archaeological evidence, should be taken with several pinches of salt. If it was within the capabilities of Irish sailors and Norsemen to travel to the archipelago, using only curraches and primitive long-ships, Punic navigators, the kind who reached equatorial Africa and traversed the coasts of Britain, could have made the journey just as easily.