History of Lisbon francophile compatriots for the brutality and depredations of the French. Meanwhile, to control access to the capital, Wellington's chief engineer, Richard Fletcher, built the defensive lines known as the Lines of Torres Vedras across the peninsula on which Lisbon sits, using Portuguese workmen. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Tagus on the other, the city was reachable only by a narrow stretch of land blocked by a range of hills stretching from Sintra to Torre Vedras, which since Roman times had marked the bounds of Lisbon's territory. Conceived by Fletcher and a Portuguese major, Neves Costa,
Atlantic Ocean this all-encompassing ocean was instead known as Oceanus, the gigantic river that encircled the world; in contrast to the enclosed seas well known to the Greeks: the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In contrast, the term "Atlantic" originally referred specifically to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and the sea off the Strait of Gibraltar and the North African coast. The Greek word "thalassa" has been reused by scientists for the huge Panthalassa ocean that surrounded the supercontinent Pangaea hundreds of millions of years ago. The term "Aethiopian Ocean", derived from Ancient Ethiopia, was applied to the Southern Atlantic as late