The Carthaginians upon this come ashore again and look.

If they think the gold to be enough, they take it and go their way; but if it does not seem to them sufficient, they go aboard ship once more, and wait patiently.

Then the others approach and add to their gold, till the Carthaginians are satisfied.

Neither party deals unfairly by the other: for they themselves never touch the gold till it comes up to the worth of their goods, nor do the natives ever carry off the goods until the gold has been taken away." The nature of the Phoenician trade with the Canaries, or Fortunate Islands, is not stated by any ancient author, and can only be conjectured.

It would scarcely have been worth the Phoenicians' while to convey timber to Syria from such a distance, or we might imagine the virgin forests of the islands attracting them.[9109] The large breed of dogs from which the Canaries derived their later name[9110] may perhaps have constituted an article of export even in Phoenician times, as we know they did later, when we hear of their being conveyed to King Juba;[9111] but there is an entire lack of evidence on the subject.
Perhaps the Phoenicians frequented the islands less for the sake of commerce than for that of watering and refitting the ships engaged in the African trade, since the natives were less formidable than those who inhabited the mainland.[9112] There was one further direction in which the Phoenicians pushed their maritime trade, not perhaps continuously, but at intervals, when their political relations were such as to give them access to the sea which washed Asia on the south and on the southeast.