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 us that the southwest monsoon was called the Hippalus, and the author of the Periplus explains that "a pilot named Hippalus was the first, who, from observing the position of the ports, and the configuration of the sea, discovered the mode of sailing right across the open sea; from which the name of Hippalus is given to the local wind which blows steadily from the southwest, in the Indian seas."

The voyage of Hippalus, whose example had been so generally followed in the time of Pliny that the journey to and from India was then regularly made by many ships every year, marks an epoch in the story of navigation. Up to this time the seamen of western Asia and of Europe had not ventured out of sight of land, and the length of their voyages had been determined by the convolutions of the coast-lines which they skirted. The man who, first of all his kind, had the hardihood to face the open sea, to lose the comfortable sight of terra firma, to stake his life upon the accuracy of his own crude knowledge of geography, and to sail thus bravely into the Unknown, deserves to take rank with the world's great adventurers, with Colombus, with da Gama, with Magellan, and in that he had less of accumulated experience to fortify his resolution, he may even be accounted a greater than they.

The opening up of the direct sea-route to India thus effected served at once to give an enormous impetus to trade between Alexandria and the East, and Pliny was able to obtain first-hand information on the subject of Ceylon from four ambassadors whom a king of that