THE EDGE OF WORLD: A NOVEL HANNO NAVIGATOR

Hanno the Navigator is the seventeenth life in the Ancient Civilisations series. His own words, however few, survive to describe what he saw, and his story turns the silence around a single short document into a voyage worth imagining in full. The only surviving account of his voyage is six hundred words long. It describes sixty ships and thirty thousand colonists passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the open Atlantic, a fleet larger than almost any other organised expedition in the ancient world. It describes a coast on fire at night, a mountain the Carthaginians called the Chariot of the Gods, and an island of hair-covered creatures whose name, passed down through a Carthaginian sailor's interpreter, is still used today: gorillai. Hanno was a suffete of Carthage, one of its two chief magistrates, when the city commissioned him to found colonies along the Atlantic coast of Africa and chart what lay beyond the known world. What he found is recorded in the Periplus: a navigator's log, translated from a lost Punic original, abbreviated almost to fragments, and ending not in triumph but in the most deflating sentence in the literature of exploration: they turned back because their food ran out. Everything else (who the Lixite guides were, what the coastal peoples thought as sixty warships appeared on their horizon, what Hanno actually felt at the edge of the known world) survives only in the silence around the document. This novel inhabits that silence. It follows Hanno from the double harbour of Carthage through the founding of colony after colony, the first sight of an active volcano on the West African coast, and the encounter that gave the world's largest apes their name, rendered with the same honesty about what cannot be known that the Periplus itself demands. The voyage did not end because Hanno chose to stop. It ended because the food ran out. This is, perhaps, the most honest thing about it. A vivid, atmospheric reconstruction of one of history's most important and most frustrating documents, and the voyage it only partly describes. The Edge of the World is the seventeenth novel in the Ancient Civilisations series.