ABSTRACT
As the Admiralty Pilot makes clear, anyone who sails westward beyond the site where traditionally Hercules set up the ‘pillars’ to warn seamen to trespass no further into the outer ocean at once enters a very different and far less agreeable world. In place of the relatively steady breezes of the Mediterranean summer he may at any moment meet a gale or be becalmed in a thick fog. If he tries to hug the coast, he may be cast up on rocks by the onshore swell, or swept off course by the tides. If he strikes boldly out to sea he may be blown out far beyond his capability for returning and never make land again. As Don Pedro Nino said even as late as AD 1406, with the characteristic reaction of a Mediterranean sailor to a voyage from Spain to the English Channel: ‘The Western Sea is not like the Mediterranean Sea, which has neither ebb nor flow nor great currents … It is most evil, especially for galleys.’ No wonder the Arabs called the Atlantic ‘the Sea of Darkness’ and in the Dark Ages it was associated with Satan. 1
