The gorilla, though rediscovered in recent years, was apparently known to the ancients. Hanno, a Carthaginian admiral who flourished some five or six hundred years B.C., once sailed from Carthage with a fleet of sixty vessels and a company of 30,000 persons, under instructions to proceed past the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar), with a view to planting colonies on the western coast of Africa. In the course of their travels they discovered several islands inhabited by wild creatures with hairy bodies. "There were," says the ancient navigator, "many more females than males, all equally covered with hair on all parts of the body. The interpreters called them _gorillas_. On pursuing them, we could not succeed in taking a single male, they all escaped with astonishing swiftness, and threw stones at us; but we took three females, who defended themselves with so much violence, that we were obliged to kill them; but we brought their skins, stuffed with straw, to Carthage." Professor Owen remarks upon this that "though such creatures would suggest to Hanno and his crew no other idea of their nature than that of a kind of human being, yet the climbing faculty, the hairy body, and the skinning of the dead specimens strongly suggest that they were great apes. The fact that apes somewhat resembling the negroes, of human size and with hairy bodies, still exist on the west coast of Africa renders it highly probable that such were the creatures which Hanno saw, captured, and called 'gorullai'."