Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/11

 HISTORY

OF

CHAPTER I. BEFORE AND DURING THE ROMAN OCCUPATION.

small beginnings, hidden in the depths of ancient time, of that which has become so mighty a thing as British commerce, have an interest for the imagination, the same in kind with that belonging to the discovery of the remote spring or rill which forms the apparently insignificant source of some famous river, but as much higher in degree as the history of human affairs is a higher study than the history of inanimate nature.

The Phoenicians, the great trading people of antiquity, are the first foreigners who are recorded to have opened any commercial intercourse with the British islands. There are some facts which make it probable that this extremity of the globe was visited even by the navigators of the parent Asiatic states of Sidon and Tyre. Tin, a product then to be obtained only from Britain and Spain, was certainly used in considerable quantities by the civilized nations of the earliest times. It was the alloy with which, before they attained the knowledge of the art of giving a high temper to iron, they hardened copper, and made it serve for warlike instruments and many other purposes. A mixture of copper and tin, in due proportions, was perhaps fitted, indeed, to take a sharper edge as a sword or spear than could have been given to iron itself, for a long time after the latter metal came to be known and wrought. It is certain at least that swords and other weapons fabricated of the compound metal continued to be used long after the introduction of iron. VOL. I.B