The Laestrygonians — Telepylus (the Laestrygonians) (Τηλέπυλος / Λαιστρυγόνες), landfall 7 of 15 on the voyage of odysseus
Homer's Odyssey, Book X. The cannibal giants destroy eleven ships. Traditional location: Bonifacio, southern Corsica (Bérard); also placed in Sardinia.
A harbour like a stone trap: sheer cliffs all around and one narrow mouth. Eleven captains moor inside; only Odysseus, wary, ties his ship to a rock outside the entrance.
The scouts follow a path to the town and meet a girl at a spring who leads them to her father — Antiphates the Laestrygonian, who snatches one man up and eats him. The giants swarm the cliffs and spear the trapped ships like fish, smashing them with boulders. Eleven ships and their crews are destroyed in minutes.
Odysseus cuts his cable and rows for open water. Of the twelve ships that left Troy, one remains.
The harbour trap
Telepylus of the Laestrygonians has a harbour like a stone jar: sheer cliffs all around and one narrow mouth, water flat as glass. Eleven captains gratefully moor inside. Odysseus — the disasters are teaching him — ties his own ship to a rock outside the entrance.
The scouts follow a smooth road to the town and meet a girl drawing water, tall as a tower, who points them to her father's house. Her mother is the size of a mountain; her father, King Antiphates, snatches up one of the three men and starts eating him. The other two run. The giants swarm to the cliff-tops and rain boulders on the trapped fleet, spearing men like fish and carrying them off for their feast. Eleven ships, with every man aboard, are smashed in minutes. Odysseus cuts his cable with his sword and his single ship rows for its life.
It is the greatest catastrophe of the entire voyage — worse than the Cyclops, worse than Scylla, worse than the storm that will kill the rest. The Odyssey's fleet dies here, in a harbour too safe to leave.
“Spearing them like fish, they carried home their loathsome meal.” — Odyssey X, 124
Bérard's fjord: This map follows Victor Bérard in placing Telepylus at Bonifacio, on Corsica's southern tip: a long cliff-walled calanque with one narrow mouth, invisible until you are inside it — Homer's harbour drawn from life. Homer also says the paths of night and day pass close there, which has led others to place the Laestrygonians near the midnight sun of the far north.
The fleet after this landfall: 1 of 12 ships. Eleven ships and their crews destroyed in the harbour. Of some six hundred men who left Troy, perhaps forty-five remain.