Cruise Into the Past

CONQUEST BY MAN (455 pp.)--Paul Herrmann--Harper ($6). This is a German scholar's fascinating survey of travel and discovery before Columbus. Author Herrmann has pulled together all sorts of odd bits of learned lore to show that "the world has been since early times almost as great and wide as in our own day." He tells why experts now think that Bronze Age drummers lugged oaken sample cases through north European forests, and how the Egyptians of 4,000 years ago rowed their galleys 4,000 miles south to the Zambezi River to fetch myrrh, frankincense and gold. The eleventh of Hercules' twelve mythical labors--to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides--suggests to him that the Greeks may have sailed into the Atlantic by 1400 B.C. The giant Atlas, who gave Hercules such a timely hand, may have been "the gigantic snow-capped Peak of Teneriffe on the Canary Islands," and the apples the hero plucked were perhaps the golden-yellow fruit of the Canary strawberry tree. Though Author Herrmann considers it only "possible" that America was reached even before Leif Ericson's 11th century voyage to Vinland, his stimulating and well-balanced chronicle of heroism, curiosity and restless greed leaves the reader with the feeling that such a feat was well within the powers of early man.

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