Page 253 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

farther westward there were other islands and even a great land

mass. Not long ago three ships had set out to find those lands,
on a prospecting trip financed in the hope of finding a new mar­
ket for bronze across the Atlantic. But the ships had never re­
turned, and no one knew whether they had reached their desti­
nation (it would be a rash man who, today, would claim to
know).

In 1480 b.c. there was a sort of reunion to celebrate the tenth
anniversary of the sailing from Sweden, though only six of the
original crew, who happened to be in Knossos at the time, man­
aged to get together. They were now in their late twenties and

early thirties, broad-shouldered blond-bearded men, experienced
seamen—except for the odd man who had married a Cretan wife
up country and was contentedly growing olives and vines on the
terraced farm he had inherited with the girl. They all talked Cre­

tan now by preference, and their own language sounded foreign
in their ears.
They were in the main prosperous men, with money invested
ashore or with part interests in the boats they sailed and the car­
goes they carried. But that was not unusual. There was money
in sailing and in trade these days, they all agreed. For the past

twenty years and more there had been no major wars, and trade
had flourished as never before by land and sea. As the seamen
sat at their table under the vines in the warm summer evening,
looking out over the busy harbor and the blue sail-dotted wa­

ters, they felt the subconscious satisfaction of being at the hub
of the universe, at the center of an expanding economy, where
from year to year more primary products and more manufac­
tured goods were being produced, and more of both were being
carried by an ever-increasing tonnage of trading vessels. Over

the whole world standards of living were rising, and no recession
was in sight.
To the north and west there was no frontier any more, and
those of the sailors who plied the Adriatic route, up to Trieste and

the mouth of the Po (where later Venice was to stand) could re­
late news of their distant Scandinavian homeland which was
scarcely more than a year out of date. Europe was no longer a