PREFACE

To the Most Illustrious and Most Powerful

STATES

OF HOLLAND

AND WEST FRIESLAND.

An ornate decorative woodcut initial 'T' is set within a square frame featuring scrolling acanthus leaves and floral motifs. That Tyre, which was once famous for her offspring, for the cities she birthed—Leptis, Utica, and that rival of the Roman Empire, greedy for the whole world, Carthage; even Gades modern Cádiz, Spain founded beyond the known world, as Pliny says: that Tyre, I say, which filled all the shores of the Mediterranean Sea with her commerce and the export of merchandise, and by her zeal for navigation far surpassed the other maritime cities of Phoenicia: and she alone, having overcome the narrow straits of the land, slipped through the Erythraean Sea original: mare Erythræum; in this context, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to survey the shores of Asia and Africa, and dared to probe the outer seas, even as nature herself almost resisted and was unwilling: