Sixty Ships Into the Unknown: Hanno's Voyage Down the African Coast
A Carthaginian fleet of sixty ships and thousands of settlers vanished past the Pillars of Hercules to found cities on an unmapped coast — and came home with the skins of hairy, hostile 'gorillas' as proof of how far they had gone.
In 470 BC, a Carthaginian nobleman named Hanno stood at the head of an extraordinary fleet: sixty ships and, by the account that survives, some 30,000 people. His mission was not conquest but colonization — to sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the strait we now call Gibraltar, and plant Carthaginian towns along the unknown coast of northwest Africa. He was, by most scholarly reckoning, a member of Carthage's ruling Magonid family, possibly the son of Hamilcar I, though the ancient sources are frustratingly vague about who exactly he was — some call him a king, others simply a general or commander.
What makes Hanno unusual among ancient explorers is that he left behind his own account of the journey, a periplus, literally a 'sailing around.' The original was written in Punic, the Carthaginian language, and that version is lost forever. But a Greek translation survived, copied by scribes across the centuries, with only two manuscripts surviving today, dating to the ninth and fourteenth centuries. In 1559, Conrad Gessner produced the first Latin translation in Zurich, giving the text new life in the European imagination.
The periplus opens with a striking declaration: this is the report of Hanno, king of the Carthaginians, on his voyage into the Libyan lands beyond the Pillars of Hercules, dedicated afterward in the sanctuary of Kronos. Hanno describes founding one city first, then sailing on to found five more. Along the way he encounters the Lixitae, a nomadic people who receive the Carthaginians warmly and tell them of the Ethiopians living further inland. Several Lixitae join the fleet as guides or interpreters.
The expedition presses on to a small island called Kerne, where another settlement is built. Nearby, at a lake called Chretes, the text describes savage men, and along an unnamed river, dangerous wild beasts. Sailing still further south, Hanno's crew meets Ethiopians whose language not even the Lixitae interpreters can understand — a detail suggesting just how far from familiar territory they had traveled.
From there the account grows stranger and more vivid. The fleet finds an 'immense opening of the sea' from which fires can be seen burning at night. They land at a bay called the Horn of the West, on an island inhabited by humans, but flee in fear. Further on they pass a land lit by many flames and a very tall mountain rising over the coast — details that later readers have puzzled over as possible references to volcanic activity or ritual fires.
More from Explorations
Humboldt: The Man Who Measured the World
A Prussian noble's son, once mocked as a sickly child, would climb a volcano to a world-record height and rewrite how humanity understood nature itself.
The Man Who Named Canada
A Breton mariner planted a wooden cross on a foreign shore and claimed a kingdom he did not understand — then spent a winter frozen into its river, praying a stranger's remedy would save his men.
HMS Challenger: The Voyage That Charted the Deep
A stripped-down warship, its guns torn out to make room for microscopes, set sail from Portsmouth to answer a question no one had ever properly asked: what lies at the bottom of the sea?
Scott's Last Expedition: The Letters Written at the End of the World
Five men reached the bottom of the world only to find a Norwegian flag already planted there. What followed was not glory, but a slow, frozen unraveling that the world would remember for a century.
Marco Polo: In the Court of Kublai Khan
A fifteen-year-old boy meets the father he barely knew — and is soon swept toward the richest court on Earth. Twenty-four years later, he returns home with tales so vast that Venice simply calls him 'Mister Millions'.
The Ships That Vanished Into the Ice
Two ships, 129 men, and a mission to conquer the last blank space on the map of the Arctic — none of them came home.