Old Tales
I love these old tales of how far some people went exploring. Of course, we only hear about these ones because they wrote it down. I mean, Pytheas gets a lot of press for having sailed from Greece to Germany, around Brtiain, up to Norway, and across to Iceland. He described whales and pack ice and all kinds of stuff that when he got back people said he was lying through his teeth. But of course, everywhere he went there were already people. Dunnoe about Iceland, but it stands to reason there were Inuit there before the 10,000 Vikings colonists arrived en-masse.
But maybe the local natives tended to make smaller journeys? In 700 BC the Phoenicians sailed the whole way around Africa! The motive seems to have been profit. It was a Phoenician, Himilco, who in 500 BC first sailed out through Gibraltar and round to England. Why? He was looking for Cornwall, the source of tin, essential for the new Bronze technology that had been discovered and meant that armies with bronze swords just sliced right through any poor saps stuck using plain old iron that dulled quickly. The Phoenicians needed a quicker and more economical way than paying the tariffs and wages for people to lug it through France on their backs all the way down to the Med. Pytheas used skinboats, kept them waterproof by spreading butter over them, navigated without a compass (had to wait a few hundred years for the Chinese to figure that one out) and must have been one hell of a sailor.
Ability and spunk aside, it was the desire for profit that funded Pytheas. This bunch of merchants in Marseilles were pissed off in turn paying the price the Phoenicians demanded for their tin. So they commissioned Pytheas to independently discover the Phoenician route. They were a canny lot, who kept their cards close to their chests. When the Phoenician/Canaanite civilisation was finally wiped out (mainly by the newly arrived religiously-inspired Israelites who didn’t care for ocean voyages or profit and had decided that everyone dammit was going to worship YAHWEH over all the other Semiteic gods, or else…) most of their routes and knowledge died with them. There’s even speculation that the Phoenicians kept the Egyptian Pharaohs supplied with cocaine from one of their longest routes: across to Brazil and South America. Some mad bastards even think they made it to Australia — I think that’s a bit far-fetched.