Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/63

 is almost the same. It seems, therefore, not improbable that the Phœnicians, while still in their old homes on the Persian Gulf, may have found their way in pre-historic ages to India, and may there have met with it, as it is abundant at Banka in the Straits of Sumatra; then, when in later days they found it again in even greater abundance in England, that they gave it the name they had previously adopted from the far East. The trade in tin was so valuable that the Phœnicians did their best to keep secret the locality whence they obtained it; and Strabo tells a curious tale of a merchant captain, whose ship was pursued by the Romans, and who preferred stranding his vessel to allowing her to fall into their hands, whereby the secret would have been discovered; and moreover, that on his return home, he recovered from his government the value of the ship he had thus sacrificed for the public weal of his country.

Another very important trade may be noticed here, though it is not strictly of Phœnician origin, that in amber. This semi-mineral substance, as is well known, is procured chiefly from the shores of the Baltic, though it is not unknown elsewhere. There is a curious record of what was supposed to be its discovery, in Pliny's account of an exploratory voyage by Pytheas, of Marseilles, who named the island whence he obtained it Abulus. Xenophon of Lampsacus, however, calls the island Baltia—whence obviously our Baltic. The amber trade is strangely