Around the Horn
The Phoenician Loop That Might Have Been
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Voyages & Ventures is a series for readers who crave true tales of exploration – epic journeys into the unknown, told with wit, grit, and historical precision. These books spotlight bold navigators, quiet rebels, and improbable adventurers who pushed beyond the map’s edge and changed how we see the world – even if no one believed them at the time.
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Around the Horn: The Phoenician Loop That Might Have Been is the most astonishing voyage you've probably never heard of. Set around 600 BCE, this gripping, richly imagined account follows a fleet of Phoenician sailors allegedly commissioned by Egypt’s Pharaoh Necho II to do the unthinkable: sail all the way around Africa. If they succeeded, they were the first humans ever to circumnavigate a continent. And then – vanished. No monuments. No poems. Just a single Greek historian squinting at the story and raising an eyebrow.
Told in the voice of an engaging dinner-party historian – dryly amused, meticulously informed, and just a bit irreverent – this book revives one of history’s greatest maybes. From the sweltering bottleneck of the Red Sea to the cold fury of the Atlantic and the strange inversion of the sun beneath the equator, you’ll travel with ships that shouldn’t have survived, crews who probably regretted signing on, and a culture that valued secrecy more than applause.
This isn’t your average historical tale. It’s a voyage powered by pitch and perseverance, not glory. You’ll discover what ancient mariners ate (hint: it involved salt and low expectations), how they navigated (by instinct, star, and stubbornness), and why the most believable part of their story was also the one nobody believed. The result is a book that’s as much about human endurance as it is about geographic revelation – a celebration of those who dared to ask what lay past the edge of the known world and didn’t stop when the answer came soaked in rain and wrapped in fog.
With an appendix full of practical tools, unanswered questions, and a code of conduct only a Phoenician could love, Around the Horn is both a deep dive into ancient seafaring and a reminder that some voyages don’t need monuments. They just need wind, will, and someone foolish – or brilliant – enough to follow the coast until it comes home again.