Mariner, born in Massilia (Marseille), Gaul. He sailed past Spain, Gaul, and the E coast of Britain (c.330 BC), and reached the island of Thule, six days' sail from N Britain (possibly Iceland). His account of the voyage is lost, but referred to by several later writers.
Pytheas (Πυθέας, c. 380 – c. 310 BC) was a Greek merchant, geographer and explorer from the Greek colony Massalia (today Marseille). He traveled around a considerable part of Great Britain, circumnavigating it between 330 and 320 BC. Pytheas is the first person on record to describe the Midnight Sun, the aurora and Polar ice, and the first to mention the name Britannia and Germanic tribes.
Voyage
Pytheas described his travels in a periplus titled On the Ocean (Περὶ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ). Some of them, Polybius and Strabo, accused Pytheas of documenting a fictitious journey he could never have funded. Pytheas estimated the circumference of Great Britain within 2.5% of modern estimates.
Pytheas was not the first person to sail up into the North Sea territories and around Great Britain. Trade between Gaul and Great Britain was already routine; The Roman Avienus writing in the 4th century mentions an early Greek voyage, possibly from the 6th century BCE. A recent conjectural reconstruction of the journey Pytheas documented has him traveling from Marseille in succession to Bordeaux, Nantes, Land's End, Plymouth, the Isle of Man, Outer Hebrides, Orkney, Iceland, Great Britain's east coast, Kent, Helgoland, returning finally to Marseille.
The start of Pytheas's voyage is unknown.
Cornwall was important because it was the main source of tin. Pytheas studied the production and processing of tin there. During his circumnavigation of Great Britain, he found that tides rose very high there.
Pytheas visited an island six days sailing north of Great Britain, called Thule. It has been suggested that Thule may refer to Iceland but parts of the Norwegian coast, Shetland and Faroe Islands have also been suggested by historians. Pytheas says Thule was an agricultural country that produced honey.
He said he was shown the place where the sun went to sleep, and he noted that the night in Thule was only two to three hours. As Strabo says (as quoted in Chevallier 1984):
The term used for "marine lung" actually means jellyfish, and modern scientists believe that Pytheas here tried to describe the formation of pancake ice at the edge of the drift ice, where sea, slush, and ice mix, surrounded by fog.
After completing his survey of Great Britain, Pytheas travelled to the shallows on the continental North Sea coast. According to "The Natural History" by Pliny the Elder:
The island could have been Helgoland, Zealand in the Baltic Sea or even the shores of Bay of Gdansk, Sambia and or Curonian Lagoon which were historically the richest sources of amber in the North Europe (Pliny's Gutones might have been Germanic Goths or Balt Galindians).
Pytheas may have returned the way he came;
Literary influence
It is clear that Pytheas' own writing, On the Ocean (Περί του Ωκεανού), which has not survived, was a central source of information to later periods, and possibly the only source. Whether one or many, none of Pytheas' own writings remain, and extant accounts of his voyage are primarily contained in Strabo, Diodorus of Sicily and Pliny the Elder.
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