Ibn Said goes further, and says no one has ever done this:
"whirlpools always destroy any adventurer." As late as the generation
immediately before Henry the Navigator, about A.D. 1390, another light
of Moslem science declared the Atlantic to be "boundless, so that ships
dare not venture out of sight of land, for even if the sailors knew the
direction of the winds, they would not know whither those winds would
carry them, and as there is no inhabited country beyond, they would run
a risk of being lost in mist, fog, and vapour. The limit of the West is
the Atlantic Ocean."
This was the final judgment of the Arabic race and its subject allies
upon the western limits of the world, and in two ways they helped to fix
this belief, derived from the timid coasting-traders of the Roman Empire
on Greek and Latin Christendom. First, the Spanish Caliphate cut off all
access to the Western Sea beyond the Bay of Biscay, from the eighth to
the twelfth centuries. Not till the capture of Lisbon in 1147, could
Christian enterprise on this side gain any basis, or starting-point. Not
till the conquest of the Algarve in the extreme south-west of the
peninsula, at the end of the twelfth century, was this enterprise free
to develop itself.
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