CHAPTER 6
HE LOSES 12 SHIPS
Odysseus tells us that at the sheer citadel of Lamos Telepylos of the Laistrygones...
"we entered the glorious harbour which a sky towering
cliff encloses on either side, with no break anywhere,
and two projecting promontories facing each other
run out toward the mouth, and there is a narrow entrance,
there all the rest of them had their oar-swept ships in the inward
part, they were tied up close together inside the hollow
harbour...
I myself, however, kept m black ship on the outside,
at the very end..."
There are some spectacular cliffs on the west coast of Ireland, for example, the Cliffs of Moher,
in County Clare, which rise to 700 feet. But such cliffs do not seem to occur in the area around a
small harbour of the type Odysseus describes, although it is possible that he reached the area of
Killary Harbour on the west coast of Ireland.
Odysseus sent three men ashore but one was snatched up to be killed and eaten, the others
"darted away" back to the ships.
Odysseus continues:
"...the powerful
Laistrygones come swarming up from every direction,
tens of thousands of them, and not like men, like giants.
These, standing along the cliffs, pelted my men with man-sized
boulders, and a horrid racket went up by the ships, of men
being killed and ships smashed to pieces..."
"I...chopped away the cable that tied the ship with the dark prow,
...my ship, and only mine, fled out from the overhanging
cliffs to the open water, but the others were all destroyed there."
The Iliad, also attributed to Homer, Book II, has a "catalogue of ships". Line 637 says of
Odysseus:
"Following with him were twelve ships
with bows painted red."
From this it appears that the fleet of Odysseus probably comprised 13 ships when it left Troy.
According to Homer's Odyssey, there has been no mention of losing any ships until now. It may
be that we won't find this harbour with high cliffs in Brittany, Western England or Ireland,
because it's a poetic device to dispose of the unwanted extra ships.
Alternatively, there are two traditions, both of which could account for loss of ships in other
ways. One says that some companions of Odysseus were shipwrecked on the coast of the
Balearic Islands and the survivors swam ashore naked (Map 7A):
"What is the reason that the islanders near the Pillars of Herakles are called Gymnetes?
Because of some shipwrecked companions of Odysseus who were saved on those islands
naked, by swimming towards them, and they decided to settle there. Timeafter, when they
begot children from their local wives, they named their sons Gymnetes (=offspring of the
naked), remembering how they themselves were saved (i.e. naked)."
This would not have been known in modern times before 1968 when a fragment of an ancient
popular Greek book was discovered which included the above quote. The Pillars of Heracles
(Hercules) we call the straits of Gibraltar.
Another tradition says that Odysseus, or Ulysses, as the Romans called him, founded Lisbon.
Lisbon first emerged from history as Olisipo, a name derived from Ulysses. He is credited by
tradition as the first Mediterranean mariner to navigate the outer ocean, the Atlantic.
This could account for loss of some of the twelve ships if he had them with him. Alternatively if
he set out on a separate voyage after returning home from Troy, as we were told in the "lying
story" in the Odyssey, he would probably have taken only two or three other ships with him for
this particular voyage.
I suggest that Odysseus, grasping for profit as we are told, knew precisely where he wanted to go,
but probably was not sure how to get there. Odysseus lived in the bronze age. I think he set out
on a voyage to get tin from the Scilly Isles. This tin was traded across Europe by land caravans
to the near east nations who were short of the tin needed to smelt with their copper to make
bronze. I think he knew there was gold being mined in Ireland, and that there was precious
amber in the Baltic. By scientific tests we now know that almost all Mycenaean amber came
from the Baltic. Any one of these items was valuable and I believe this was the real purpose of
his voyaging. There was good reason for it. Overland commercial travel was tediously slow and
subject to exorbitant tariffs by each petty kingdom the merchant traders passed through. Sea
travel was faster and safer if you could avoid bad weather, shipwreck, and sea raiders like
Odysseus. But a commercial voyage does not make good drama. It is much better to have
Odysseus seeking his way home when all the time he is being drawn further and further away.
But whether he had 12 other ships with him or not, I calculate that he would at this point have
reached a harbour on the west coast of Ireland.