Indians?

Pliny' Natural History, book II

"
LXVII. Today the whole of the West is navigated from Cadiz and the
Straits of Gibraltar all round Spain and France. But the larger part
of the Northern Ocean was explored under the patronage of his late
Majesty Augustus, when a fleet sailed round Germany to the promontory
of the Cimbri and thence seeing a vast sea in front of them or
learning of it by report, reached the region of Scythia and
localities numb with excessive moisture. On this account it is
extremely improbable that there is no sea in those parts, as there is
a superabundance of the moist element there. But next, on the
Eastward side, the whole quarter under the same star stretching from
the Indian Ocean to the Caspian Sea was navigated throughout by the
Macedonian forces in the reigns of Seleucus and Antiochus, who
desired that it should be called both Seleucis and Antiochis after
themselves. And many coasts of Ocean round the Caspian have been
explored, and very nearly the whole of the North has been completely
traversed from one side to the other by galleys, so that similarly
also there is now overwhelming proof, leaving no room for conjecture,
of the existence of the Maeotic Marsh, whether it be a gulf of that
Ocean, as I notice many have believed, or an overflow from it from
which it is separated off by a narrow space. On the other side of
Cadiz, from the same Western point, a great part of the Southern gulf
is navigated today in the circuit of Mauretania. Indeed the greater
part of it Alexander the Great's eastern conquests also explored as
far as the Arabian gulf; in which, when Augustus's son Gaius Caesar a
was operating there, it is said that figureheads of ships from
Spanish wrecks were identified. Also when the power of Carthage
flourished, Hanno sailed round from Cadiz to the extremity of Arabia,
and published a memoir of his voyage, as did Himilco when despatched
at the same date to explore the outer coasts of Europe. Moreover we
have it on the authority of Cornelius Nepos that a certain
contemporary of his named Eudoxus when flying from King Lathyrus
emerged from the Arabian Gulf and sailed right round to Cadiz; and
much before him Caelius Antipater states that he had seen someone who
had gone on a trading voyage from Spain to Ethiopia. Nepos also
records as to the northern circuit that Quintus Metellus Celer,
colleague of Afranius in the consulship but at the time pro-consul of
Gaul, received from the King of the Swabians a present of some
Indians, who on a trade voyage had been carried off their course by
storms to Germany. Thus there are seas encircling the globe on every
side and dividing it in two, so robbing us of half the world, since
there is no region affording a passage from there to here or from
here to there. This reflexion serves to expose the vanity of mortals,
and appears to demand that I should display to the eye and exhibit
the extent of this whole indefinite region in which men severally
find no satisfaction.
"

Scythia seems to be in the North too. Does this reference to "the
Maeotic Marsh" mean that they believed there was a sailing route from
the Black Sea to the Baltic? How would they get such an idea (unless
someone seemed to have sailed that way)?

And what are those Indians doing there?

Torsten