As the Isle of Man Today informs us an Ancient Greek explorer’s extraordinary voyage took him to the Isle of Man 300 years before the birth of Christ, new research claims. Scientist and geographer Pytheas (pronounced Puth-e-as) is now believed to have visited the Island in about 325BC to take sun measurements during a three-year voyage – the first recorded circumnavigation of the British Isles.

Pytheas (Πυθέας), ca. 380 – ca. 310 BC) was a Greek merchant, geographer and explorer from the Greek colony Massilia (today Marseille, France). He made a voyage of exploration to northwestern Europe around 325 BC. He probably travelled around a considerable part of Great Britain, circumnavigating it between 330 and 320 BC. Pytheas is the first person on record to describe the Midnight Sun, the aurora and polar ice, and the first to mention the name Britannia and Germanic tribes. He may have been the first Mediterranean observer to distinguish between the Germanic and Celtic “barbarian” peoples of northern and western Europe. [wiki]

The purpose of Pytheas’s voyage round the British Isles is not entirely certain but may partly have been an attempt to seek other markets.

During his voyage, Pytheas – who coined the name ‘British Isles’ as a geographical description of Britain and Ireland – took measurements of the sun’s height above the horizon at the winter and summer solstice in order to assess his geographical position.

At various points along his route Pytheas would take sun measurements at the summer and winter solstice to establish his geographical position, in addition to reckoning the distances travelled each day by boat. In Pytheas’s day Greek mathematics was not so advanced, but by the second century BC Greek mathematicians and astronomers, notably Eratosthenes and Hipparchos used sun measurements to establish the earth was round.

Converting his calculations to latitude readings Pytheas made his sun measurements at 48 degrees North, then at 54 degrees, then at 58, 61 and 63 plus degrees.

These would equate with Brittany, the Isle of Man, Lewis, Shetland and ‘Ultima Thule’. Professor of Celtic studies at the University of Mannheim in Germany, George Broderick, said:

Though archaeology is now able to tell us that the seas around northern Europe and the British Isles had been frequently sailed since Neolithic times, primarily for fishing, Pytheas’s voyage would represent the first recorded circumnavigation of the British Isles, which almost certainly, from recent reassessment of the evidence, included a landing in the Isle of Man.

Pytheas was not the first person to sail up into the North Sea territories and around Great Britain. Trade between Gaul and Great Britain was routine; fishermen and others would travel to Orkney, Norway or Shetland. The Roman Avienus writing in the 4th century mentions an early Greek voyage, possibly from the 6th century BC. A recent conjectural reconstruction of the journey Pytheas documented has him traveling from Marseille in succession to Bordeaux, Nantes, Land’s End, Plymouth, the Isle of Man, Outer Hebrides, Orkney, Iceland, Great Britain’s east coast, Kent, Helgoland, returning finally to Marseille.

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