Ancient Mariners Reach Britain
Reindeer in Scotland--North Sea and English Channel
Land-bridges--Early River Rafts and River Boats--Breaking
of Land-bridges--Coast Erosion--Tilbury Man--Where were
first Boats Invented?--Ancient Boats in Britain--"Dug-out"
Canoes--Imitations of Earlier Papyri and Skin Boats--Cork
Plug in Ancient Clyde Boat--Early Swedish Boats--An African
Link--Various Types of British Boats--Daring Ancient
Mariners--The Veneti Seafarers--Attractions of Early Britain
for Colonists.
The Maglemosian (Baltic) and Azilian (Iberian) peoples, who reached
and settled in Britain long before the introduction of the Neolithic
industry, appear, as has been shown, to have crossed the great
land-bridge, which is now marked by the Dogger Bank, and the narrowed
land-bridge that connected England and France. No doubt they came at
first in small bands, wandering along the river banks and founding
fishing communities, following the herds of red deer and wild cows
that had moved northward, and seeking flints, &c. The Crô-Magnons,
whose civilization the new intruders had broken up on the Continent,
were already in Britain, where the reindeer lingered for many
centuries after they had vanished from France. The reindeer moss
still grows in the north of Scotland. Bones and horns of the reindeer
have been found in this area in association with human remains as
late as of the Roman period. In the twelfth century the Norsemen
hunted reindeer in Caithness.[44] Cæsar refers to the reindeer in
the Hercynian forest of Germany (_Gallic War_, VI, 26).
[44] _The Orkneyinga Saga_, p. 182, Edinburgh, 1873, and
_Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland_, Vol.
VIII.
The early colonists of fair Northerners who introduced the
Maglemosian culture into Britain from the Baltic area could not have
crossed the North Sea land-bridge without the aid of rafts or boats.
Great broad rivers were flowing towards the north. The Elbe and the
Weser joined one another near the island of Heligoland, and received
tributaries from marshy valleys until a long estuary wider than is
the Wash at present was formed. Another long river flowed northward
from the valley of the Zuyder Zee, the mouth of which has been traced
on the north-east of the Dogger Bank. The Rhine reached the North
Sea on the south-west of the Dogger Bank, off Flamborough Head; its
tributaries included the Meuse and the Thames. The Humber and the
rivers flowing at present into the Wash were united before entering
the North Sea between the mouth of the Rhine and the coast of East
Riding.
The Dogger Bank was then a plateau. Trawlers, as has been stated,
sometimes lift from its surface in their trawl nets lumps of peat,
which they call "moor-log", and also the bones of wild animals,
including the wild ox, the wild horse, red deer, reindeer, the elk,
the bear, the wolf, the hyæna, the beaver, the walrus, the woolly
rhinoceros, and the hairy mammoth. In the peat have been found the
remains of the white birch, the hazel, sallow, and willow, seeds
of bog-bean, fragments of fern, &c. All the plants have a northern
range. In some pieces of peat have been found plants and insects that
still flourish in Britain.[45]
[45] Clement Reid, _Submerged Forests_, pp. 45-7. London, 1913.
The easiest crossing to Britain was over the English Channel
land-bridge. It was ultimately cut through by the English Channel
river, so that the dark Azilian-Tardenoisian peoples from Central and
Western Europe and the fair Maglemosians must have required and used
rafts or boats before polished implements of Neolithic type came into
use. In time the North Sea broke through the marshes of the river
land to the east of the Thames Estuary and joined the waters of the
English Channel. The Strait of Dover was then formed. At first it
may have been narrow enough for animals to swim across or, at any
rate, for the rude river boats or rafts of the early colonists to be
paddled over in safety between tides. Gradually, however, the strait
grew wider and wider; the chalk cliffs, long undermined by boring
molluscs and scouring shingle, were torn down by great billows during
winter storms.
It may be that for a long period after the North Sea and English
Channel were united, the Dogger Bank remained an island, and that
there were other islands between Heligoland and the English coast.
Pliny, who had served with the Roman army in Germany, writing in the
first century of our era, refers to twenty-three islands between
the Texel and the Eider in Schleswig-Holstein. Seven of these have
since vanished. The west coast of Schleswig has, during the past
eighteen hundred years, suffered greatly from erosion, and alluvial
plains that formerly yielded rich harvests are now represented by
sandbanks. The Goodwin Sands, which stretch for about ten miles off
the Kentish coast, were once part of the fertile estate of Earl
Godwin which was destroyed and engulfed by a great storm towards the
end of the eleventh century. The Gulf of Zuyder Zee was formerly a
green plain with many towns and villages. Periodic inundations since
the Roman period have destroyed flourishing Dutch farms and villages
and eaten far into the land. There are records of storm-floods
that drowned on one occasion 20,000, and on another no fewer than
100,000 inhabitants.[46] It is believed that large tracts of land,
the remnants of the ancient North Sea land-bridge, have been engulfed
since about 3000 B.C., as a result not merely of erosion but the
gradual submergence of the land. This date is suggested by Mr.
Clement Reid.
[46] The dates of the greatest disasters on record are 1421,
1532, and 1570. There were also terrible inundations in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in 1825 and 1855.
"The estimate", he says, "may have to be modified as we obtain
better evidence; but it is as well to realize clearly that we are
not dealing with a long period of great geological antiquity; we
are dealing with times when the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Minoan
(Cretan) civilizations flourished. Northern Europe was then probably
barbarous, and metals had not come into use;[47] but the amber trade
of the Baltic was probably in full swing. Rumours of any great
disaster, such as the submergence of thousands of square miles and
the displacement of large populations, might spread far and wide
along the trade routes." It may be that the legend of the Lost
Atlantis was founded on reports of such a disaster, that must have
occurred when areas like the Dogger Bank were engulfed. It may be
too that the gradual wasting away of lands that have long since
vanished propelled migrations of peoples towards the smiling coasts
of England. According to Ammianus the Druids stated that some of the
inhabitants of Gaul were descendants of refugees from sea-invaded
areas.
[47] It was not necessarily barbarous because metal weapons had
not been invented.
The gradual sinking of the land and the process of coast erosion
has greatly altered the geography of England. The beach on which
Julius Cæsar landed has long since vanished, the dwellings of the
ancient Azilian and Maglemosian colonists, who reached England in
post-Glacial times, have been sunk below the English Channel. When
Tilbury Docks were being excavated Roman remains were found embedded
in clay several feet below high-water mark. Below several layers of
peat and mud, and immediately under a bank of sand in which were
fragments of decomposed wood, was found the human skeleton known as
"Tilbury man". The land in this area was originally 80 feet above its
present level.[48] But while England was sinking Scotland was rising.
The MacArthur cave at Oban, in which Azilian hunters and fishermen
made their home on the sea-beach, is now about 30 feet above the old
sea-level.
[48] _Submerged Forests_, p. 120.
Before Dover Strait had been widened by the gradual sinking of the
land and the process of coast erosion, and before the great islands
had vanished from the southern part of the North Sea, the early
hunters and fishermen could have experienced no great difficulty in
reaching England. It is possible that the Azilian, Tardenoisian, and
Maglemosian peoples had made considerable progress in the art of
navigation. Traces of the Tardenoisian industry have been obtained
in Northern Egypt, along the ancient Libyan coast of North Africa
where a great deal of land has been submerged, and especially at
Tunis, and in Algiers, in Italy, and in England and Scotland, as has
been noted. There were boats on the Mediterranean at a very early
period. The island of Crete was reached long before the introduction
of copper-working by seafarers who visited the island of Melos, and
there obtained obsidian (natural glass) from which sharp implements
were fashioned. Egyptian mariners, who dwelt on the Delta coast,
imported cedar, not only from Lebanon but from Morocco, as has been
found from the evidence afforded by mummies packed with the sawdust
of cedar from the Atlas Mountains.[49] When this trade with Morocco
began it is impossible to say with certainty. Long before 3000 B.C.,
however, the Egyptians were building boats that were fitted with
masts and sails. The ancient mariners were active as explorers and
traders before implements of copper came into use.
[49] _The Cairo Scientific Journal_, Vol. III. No. 32 (May,
1909), p. 105.
Here we touch on a very interesting problem. Where were boats first
invented and the art of navigation developed? Rafts and floats
formed by tying together two trees or, as in Egypt, two bundles of
reeds, were in use at a very early period in various countries. In
Babylonia the "kufa", a great floating basket made watertight with
pitch or covered with skins, was an early invention. It was used
as it still is for river ferry boats. But ships were not developed
from "kufas". The dug-out canoe is one of the early prototypes of
the modern ocean-going vessel. It reached this country before the
Neolithic industry was introduced, and during that period when
England was slowly sinking and Scotland was gradually rising. Dug-out
canoes continued to come during the so-called "Neolithic" stage of
culture ere yet the sinking and rising of land had ceased. "That
Neolithic man lived in Scotland during the formation of this beach
(the 45-to 50-foot beach) is proved", wrote the late Professor James
Geikie, "by the frequent occurrence in it of his relics. At Perth,
for example, a dug-out canoe of pine was met with towards the bottom
of the carse clays; and similar finds have frequently been recorded
from the contemporaneous deposits in the valleys of the Forth and the
Clyde."[50]
[50] _Antiquity of Man in Europe_, p. 274, Edinburgh, 1914. The
term "Neolithic" is here rather vague. It applies to the Azilians
and Maglemosians as well as to later peoples.
How did early man come to invent the dug-out? Not only did he hollow
out a tree trunk by the laborious process of burning and by chipping
with a flint adze, he dressed the trunk so that his boat could be
balanced on the water. The early shipbuilders had to learn, and did
learn, for themselves, "the values of length and beam, of draught and
sweet lines, of straight keel; with high stem to breast a wave and
high stern to repel a following sea". The fashioning of a sea-worthy,
or even a river-worthy boat, must have been in ancient times as
difficult a task as was the fashioning of the first aeroplane in our
own day. Many problems had to be solved, many experiments had to
be made, and, no doubt, many tragedies took place before the first
safe model-boat was paddled across a river. The early experimenters
may have had shapes of vessels suggested to them by fish and birds,
and especially by the aquatic birds that paddled past them on the
river breast with dignity and ease. But is it probable that the
first experiments were made with trees? Did early man undertake the
laborious task of hewing down tree after tree to shape new models,
until in the end he found on launching the correctly shaped vessel
that its balance was perfect? Or was the dug-out canoe an imitation
of a boat already in existence, just as a modern ship built of
steel or concrete is an imitation of the earlier wooden ships? The
available evidence regarding this important phase of the shipping
problem tends to show that, before the dug-out was invented, boats
were constructed of light material. Ancient Egypt was the earliest
shipbuilding country in the world, and all ancient ships were
modelled on those that traded on the calm waters of the Nile. Yet
Egypt is an almost treeless land. There the earliest boats--broad,
light skiffs--were made by binding together long bundles of the
reeds of papyrus. Ropes were twisted from papyrus as well as from
palm fibre.[51] It would appear that, before dug-outs were made, the
problems of boat construction were solved by those who had invented
papyri skiffs and skin boats. In the case of the latter the skins
were stretched round a framework, sewed together and made watertight
with pitch. We still refer to the "seams" and the "skin" of a boat.
[51] Breasted, _A History of Egypt_, pp. 96-7.
The art of boat-building spread far and wide from the area of origin.
Until recently the Chinese were building junks of the same type
as they did four or five hundred years earlier. These junks have
been compared by more than one writer to the deep-sea boats of the
Egyptian Empire period. The Papuans make "dug-outs" and carve eyes
on the prows as did the ancient Egyptians and as do the Maltese,
Chinese, &c., in our own day. Even when only partly hollowed, the
Papuan boats have perfect balance in the water as soon as they are
launched.[52] The Polynesians performed religious ceremonies when
cutting down trees and constructing boats.[53] In their incantations,
&c., the lore of boat-building was enshrined and handed down. The
Polynesian boat was dedicated to the _mo-o_ (dragon-god). We still
retain a relic of an ancient religious ceremony when a bottle of wine
is broken on the bows of a vessel just as it is being launched.
[52] Wollaston, _Pygmies and Papuans (The Stone Age To-day in
Dutch New Guinea)_, London, 1912, pp. 53 et seq.
[53] Westervelt, _Legends of Old Honolulu_, pp. 97 _et seq._
After the Egyptians were able to secure supplies of cedar wood from
the Atlas Mountains or Lebanon, by drifting rafts of lashed trees
along the coast line, they made dug-out vessels of various shapes,
as can be seen in the tomb pictures of the Old Kingdom period. These
dug-outs were apparently modelled on the earlier papyri and skin
boats. A ship with a square sail spread to the wind is depicted on an
Ancient Egyptian two-handed jar in the British Museum, which is of
pre-dynastic age and may date to anything like 4000 or 5000 B.C. At
that remote period the art of navigation was already well advanced,
no doubt on account of the experience gained on the calm waters of
the Nile.
[Illustration: (_a_) Sketch of a boat from Victoria Nyanza, after
the drawing in Sir Henry Stanley's _Darkest Africa_. Only the
handles of the oars are shown. In outline the positions of some
of the oarsmen are roughly represented.
(_b_) Crude drawing of a similar boat carved upon the rocks
in Sweden during the Early Bronze Age, after Montelius. By
comparison with (_a_) it will be seen that the vertical
projections were probably intended to represent the oarsmen.
The upturned hook-like appendage at the stern is found in ancient
Egyptian and Mediterranean ships, but is absent in the modern
African vessel shown in (_a_).
These figures are taken from Elliot Smith's _Ancient Mariners_
(1918).]
The existence of these boats on the Nile at a time when great
race migrations were in progress may well account for the early
appearance of dug-outs in Northern Europe. One of the Clyde canoes,
found embedded in Clyde silt twenty-five feet above the present
sea-level, was found to have a plug of cork which could only have
come from the area in which cork trees grow--Spain, Southern France,
or Italy.[54] It may have been manned by the Azilians of Spain whose
rock paintings date from the Transition period. Similar striking
evidence of the drift of culture from the Mediterranean area towards
Northern Europe is obtained from some of the rock paintings and
carvings of Sweden. Among the canoes depicted are some with distinct
Mediterranean characteristics. One at Tegneby in Bohuslän bears a
striking resemblance to a boat seen by Sir Henry Stanley on Lake
Victoria Nyanza. It seems undoubted that the designs are of common
origin, although separated not only by centuries but by barriers of
mountain, desert, and sea extending many hundreds of miles. From
the Maglemosian boat the Viking ship was ultimately developed; the
unprogressive Victoria Nyanza boatbuilders continued through the
Ages repeating the design adopted by their remote ancestors. In both
vessels the keel projects forward, and the figure-head is that of
a goat or ram. The northern vessel has the characteristic inward
curving stern of ancient Egyptian ships. As the rock on which it
was carved is situated in a metal-yielding area, the probability is
that this type of vessel is a relic of the visits paid by searchers
for metals in ancient times, who established colonies of dark miners
among the fair Northerners and introduced the elements of southern
culture.
[54] Lyell, _Antiquity of Man_, p. 48.
The ancient boats found in Scotland are of a variety of types. One
of those at Glasgow lay, when discovered, nearly vertical, with prow
uppermost as if it had foundered; it had been built "of several
pieces of oak, though without ribs". Another had the remains of an
outrigger attached to it: beside another, which had been partly
hollowed by fire, lay two planks that appear to have been wash-boards
like those on a Sussex dug-out. A Clyde clinker-built boat, eighteen
feet long, had a keel and a base of oak to which ribs had been
attached. An interesting find at Kinaven in Aberdeenshire, several
miles distant from the Ythan, a famous pearling river, was a dug-out
eleven feet long, and about four feet broad. It lay embedded at the
head of a small ravine in five feet of peat which appears to have
been the bed of an ancient lake. Near it were the stumps of big oaks,
apparently of the Upper Forestian period.
Among the longest of the ancient boats that have been discovered
are one forty-two feet long, with an animal head on the prow, from
Loch Arthur, near Dumfries, one thirty-five long from near the River
Arun in Sussex, one sixty-three feet long excavated near the Rother
in Kent, one forty-eight feet six inches long, found at Brigg,
Lincolnshire, with wooden patches where she had sprung a leak, and
signs of the caulking of cracks and small holes with moss.
These vessels do not all belong to the same period. The date of the
Brigg boat is, judging from the geological strata, between 1100 and
700 B.C. It would appear that some of the Clyde vessels found at
twenty-five feet above the present sea-level are even older. Beside
one Clyde boat was found an axe of polished green-stone similar to
the axes used by Polynesians and others in shaping dug-outs. This
axe may, however, have been a religious object. To the low bases of
some vessels were fixed ribs on which skins were stretched. These
boats were eminently suitable for rough seas, being more buoyant than
dug-outs. According to Himilco the inhabitants of the OEstrymnides,
the islands "rich in tin and lead", had most sea-worthy skiffs.
"These people do not make pine keels, nor", he says, "do they know
how to fashion them; nor do they make fir barks, but, with wonderful
skill, fashion skiffs with sewn skins. In these hide-bound vessels,
they skim across the ocean." Apparently they were as daring mariners
as the Oregon Islanders of whom Washington Irving has written:
"It is surprising to see with what fearless unconcern these
savages venture in their light barks upon the roughest and
most tempestuous seas. They seem to ride upon the wave like
sea-fowl. Should a surge throw the canoe upon its side, and
endanger its over turn, those to the windward lean over the
upper gunwale, thrust their paddles deep into the wave, and by
this action not merely regain an equilibrium, but give their
bark a vigorous impulse forward."
The ancient mariners whose rude vessels have been excavated around
our coasts were the forerunners of the Celtic sea-traders, who,
as the Gaelic evidence shows, had names not only for the North
Sea and the English Channel but also for the Mediterranean Sea.
They cultivated what is known as the "sea sense", and developed
shipbuilding and the art of navigation in accordance with local
needs. When Julius Cæsar came into conflict with the Veneti of
Brittany he tells that their vessels were greatly superior to those
of the Romans. "The bodies of the ships", he says, "were built
entirely of oak, stout enough to withstand any shock or violence....
Instead of cables for their anchors they used iron chains.... The
encounter of our fleet with these ships was of such a nature that
our fleet excelled in speed alone, and the plying of oars; for
neither could our ships injure theirs with their rams, so great
was their strength, nor was a weapon easily cast up to them owing
to their height.... About 220 of their ships ... sailed forth from
the harbour." In this great allied fleet were vessels from our own
country.[55]
[55] Cæsar's _Gallic War_, Book III, c. 13-15.
It must not be imagined that the "sea sense" was cultivated because
man took pleasure in risking the perils of the deep. It was stern
necessity that at the beginning compelled him to venture on long
voyages. After England was cut off from France the peoples who had
adopted the Neolithic industry must have either found it absolutely
necessary to seek refuge in Britain, or were attracted towards it by
reports of prospectors who found it to be suitable for residence and
trade.