Pytheas visits an island six days sailing…
325 BCE
Pytheas visits an island six days sailing north of Great Britain, called Thule.
It has been suggested that Thule may refer to Iceland or Greenland, though historians have also suggested parts of the Norwegian coast and the Shetland and Faroe Islands.
Pytheas says Thule was an agricultural country that produced honey.
Its inhabitants ate fruits and drank milk, and made a drink out of grain and honey.
Unlike the people from Southern Europe, they had barns, and threshed their grain there rather than outside.
He said he was shown the place where the sun went to sleep, and he noted that the night in Thule was only two to three hours.
One day further north the "congealed" sea began, he claimed.
As Strabo says (as quoted in Chevallier 1984): Pytheas also speaks of the waters around Thule and of those places where land properly speaking no longer exists, nor sea nor air, but a mixture of these things, like a "marine lung", in which it is said that earth and water and all things are in suspension as if this something was a link between all these elements, on which one can neither walk nor sail.
The term used for "marine lung" (which caused much discussion in the past) actually means jellyfish, and modern scientists believe that Pytheas here tried to describe the formation of pancake ice at the edge of the drift ice, where sea, slush, and ice mix, surrounded by fog.
Besides its texture, the appearance of pancake ice is perhaps reminiscent of a group of jellyfish.
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