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DE L'EXTRAPOLATION
We are in the year 325 front. J.- C. Massalia, the current town of Marseilles, was then a Greek colony.
He named Pythéas Massaliote.
Greek mathematician, astronomer and explorer, born in the city.

He was perhaps the first scientific explorer, he supported his discoveries by considerations geographical and

anthropological because he is quite conscious of a thing:

The observation governs science and could not be that while being framed by experiments carried out within a framework strict and rigorous. Whowever, we would be always  in the limbs of prehistory, in the austere world of the obscurantism, néanderthalism, of improbable and the random one:

In a word: abyssal depths of the sad mediocrity. (It is at least as  I imagine it)
 
In this state of mind, he undertook his great maritime voyage, which he described in its book entitled " Description of the ocean ».
Pythéas the coast of Spain followed, and passed by the Straits of Gibraltar, forcing the blockade (already! ) that Carthaginois had established to consolidate their commercial monopolies.
He continued towards north while skirting the coasts of Portugal, Spain and France current, then he crosses the English Channel and reached the point of Cornwall, where he observed the extraction and the cast iron of tin for which Cornwall was famous.
Tonic the West coast of England, he made many stopovers, observed that the inhabitants preserved and beat their grain in barns, because already frequent rain at this time.
He also noticed that they drank a beer containing cereals and of honey. (Guinness is good for you!)
With north of England, he learned the existence from an island, called Thulé, which one reached after six days of navigation towards north.
This island represented the ground inhabited in extreme cases extreme Northern known, where daylight shone without interruption in full summer.
A part of Norway?
Pythéas an exact description of the formation of discs of ices in the Arctic Ocean gave (which one calls today of the "cakes of ice").
He finally his navigation around England began again, estimating with precision the length of the coasts and the distance which then separated it from Massalia while being based on the observation of the latitude.
It seem that he also sailed in the Baltic and perhaps also sailed along the German coasts before turning over in his country.
 

Do not have a close relationship, a strange atavism between Pythéas and Philéas of Jules Vernes, Isn’t it?
A certain analogy with Robur the Conqueror,
An extraordinary voyage...
The history is an eternal restarting…
Pascal, 2004
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