Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/14

 of as discoveries made by Himilco; on the contrary, the Isle of the Hiberni is described as known by the epithet of the Sacred Isle to the ancients, and the resort for the purposes of traffic to the Œstrymnides is declared to have been a custom of the inhabitants of Tartessus and Carthage.

No mines of any kind are now wrought in the Scilly islands; but they present appearances of ancient excavations, and the names of two of them, as Camden has remarked, seem to intimate that mining had been at one time carried on in them. They may in early times have produced lead as well as tin; or, these metals here obtained by the Phoenicians, or their colonists of Tartessus and Carthage, may have been brought from the neighbouring peninsula of Cornwall, which produces both, and which besides was most probably itself considered one of these islands. Pliny, it may be noted, has preserved the tradition, that the first person who imported lead (plumbum—by which name, however, he designates both lead and tin) from the island of Cassiteris was Midacritus, which has been supposed to be a corruption of Melicartus, the name of the Phoenician Hercules. Cassiteris means merely the land of tin, that metal being called in Greek cassiteron.

The next notice which we have of the trade of the Phoenicians, or their colonists, with Britain, is that preserved by Strabo. His account is, that the traffic with the isles called the Cassiterides, which he describes as being ten in number, lying close to one another, in the main ocean north from the Artabri (the people of Gallicia), was at first exclusively in the hands of the Phoenicians of Gades, who carefully concealed it from all the rest of the world. Only one of the ten islands, he states, was uninhabited; the people occupying the others wore black cloaks, which were girt about the waist and reached to their ankles: they walked about with sticks in their hands, and their beards were as long as those of goats. They led a pastoral and wandering life. He expressly