Welcome to our second annual Halloween special here at the Maritime History Podcast. This year I opted for a nautical tale by the ever-popular American author of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. Some people love this tale, some hate it, but no matter your side, this is a proper sea-tale of weirdness, "ghosts" and an underlying current of horror, so, without any further rambling, I bring you my reading of Manuscript Found in a Bottle by Edgar Allan Poe.

Today we fill in some gaps concerning Greek colonization, looking first at the founding of colonies along the eastern coast of Sicily. The Greeks colonized by force more so than did the Phoenicians, so we'll draw some distinctions there and see how the two cultures began to come into more conflict in and around the central Mediterranean. Then, we learn a bit more about the process of Greek colonization, including a small bit about the role that religion played. The Homeric epics then inform us about the state of shipbuilding in the 8th century BCE, with the famous passage where Odysseus builds a boat taking central stage. We wrap up by trying to flesh out why exactly the Greeks and Phoenicians developed animosity toward each other, with tales from Odysseus and Eumaeus from the Odyssey giving us a window into Greek perceptions. The Greeks continue the push west!

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