Everything must have a beginning, and, however right and proper things
may appear to those who begin them, they generally wear a strange,
sometimes absurd, aspect to those who behold them after the lapse of
many centuries.
When we think of the trim-built ships and yachts that now cover the
ocean far and wide, we can scarce believe it possible that men really
began the practice of navigation, and first put to sea, in such
grotesque vessels as that represented on page 55.
In a former chapter reference has been made to the rise of commerce and
maritime enterprise, to the fleets and feats of the Phoenicians,
Egyptians, and Hebrews in the Mediterranean, where commerce and
navigation first began to grow vigorous. We shall now consider the
peculiar structure of the ships and boats in which their maritime
operations were carried on.
_Boats_, as we have said, must have succeeded rafts and canoes, and big
boats soon followed in the wake of little ones. Gradually, as men's
wants increased, the magnitude of their boats also increased, until they
came to deserve the title of little ships. These enormous boats, or
little ships, were propelled by means of oars of immense size; and, in
order to advance with anything like speed, the oars and rowers had to be
multiplied, until they became very numerous.
In our own day we seldom see a boat requiring more than eight or ten
oars. In ancient times boats and ships required sometimes as many as
four hundred oars to propel them.
The forms of the ancient ships were curious and exceedingly picturesque,
owing to the ornamentation with which their outlines were broken, and
the high elevation of their bows and sterns.
We have no very authentic details of the minutiae of the form or size of
ancient ships, but antiquarians have collected a vast amount of
desultory information, which, when put together, enables us to form a
pretty good idea of the manner of working them, while ancient coins and
sculptures have given us a notion of their general aspect. No doubt
many of these records are grotesque enough, nevertheless they must be
correct in the main particulars.
Homer, who lived 1000 B.C., gives, in his "Odyssey," an account of
ship-building in his time, to which antiquarians attach much importance,
as showing the ideas then prevalent in reference to geography, and the
point at which the art of ship-building had then arrived. Of course due
allowance must be made for Homer's tendency to indulge in hyperbole.
Ulysses, king of Ithaca, and deemed on of the wisest Greeks who went to
Troy, having been wrecked upon an island, is furnished by the nymph
Calypso with the means of building a ship,--that hero being determined
to seek again his native shore and return to his home and his faithful
spouse Penelope.
"Forth issuing thus, she gave him first to wield
A weighty axe, with truest temper steeled,
And double-edged; the handle smooth and plain,
Wrought of the clouded olive's easy grain;
And next, a wedge to drive with sweepy sway;
Then to the neighbouring forest led the way.
On the lone island's utmost verge there stood
Of poplars, pines, and firs, a lofty wood,
Whose leafless summits to the skies aspire,
Scorched by the sun, or seared by heavenly fire
(Already dried). These pointing out to view,
The nymph just showed him, and with tears withdrew.
"Now toils the hero; trees on trees o'erthrown
Fall crackling round, and the forests groan;
Sudden, full twenty on the plain are strewed,
And lopped and lightened of their branchy load.
At equal angles these disposed to join,
He smoothed and squared them by the rule and line.
(The wimbles for the work Calypso found),
With those he pierced them and with clinchers bound.
Long and capacious as a shipwright forms
Some bark's broad bottom to outride the storms,
So large he built the raft; then ribbed it strong
From space to space, and nailed the planks along.
These formed the sides; the deck he fashioned last;
Then o'er the vessel raised the taper mast,
With crossing sail-yards dancing in the wind:
And to the helm the guiding rudder joined
(With yielding osiers fenced to break the force
Of surging waves, and steer the steady course).
Thy loom, Calypso, for the future sails
Supplied the cloth, capacious of the gales.
With stays and cordage last he rigged the ship,
And, rolled on levers, launched her on the deep."
The ships of the ancient Greeks and Romans were divided into various
classes, according to the number of "ranks" or "banks," that is, _rows_,
of oars. _Monoremes_ contained one bank of oars; _biremes_, two banks;
_triremes_, three; _quadriremes_, four; _quinqueremes_, five; and so on.
But the two latter were seldom used, being unwieldy, and the oars in
the upper rank almost unmanageable from their great length and weight.
Ptolemy Philopator of Egypt is said to have built a gigantic ship with
no less than forty tiers of oars, one above the other! She was managed
by 4000 men, besides whom there were 2850 combatants; she had four
rudders and a double prow. Her stern was decorated with splendid
paintings of ferocious and fantastic animals; her oars protruded through
masses of foliage; and her hold was filled with grain!
That this account is exaggerated and fanciful is abundantly evident; but
it is highly probable that Ptolemy did construct one ship, if not more,
of uncommon size.
The sails used in these ships were usually square; and when there was
more than one mast, that nearest the stern was the largest. The rigging
was of the simplest description, consisting sometimes of only two ropes
from the mast to the bow and stern. There was usually a deck at the bow
and stern, but never in the centre of the vessel. Steering was managed
by means of a huge broad oar, sometimes a couple, at the stern. A
formidable "beak" was affixed to the fore-part of the ships of war, with
which the crew charged the enemy. The vessels were painted black, with
red ornaments on the bows; to which latter Homer is supposed to refer
when he writes of red-cheeked ships.
Ships built by the Greeks and Romans for war were sharper and more
elegant than those used in commerce; the latter being round bottomed,
and broad, in order to contain cargo.
The Corinthians were the first to introduce _triremes_ into their navy
(about 700 years B.C.), and they were also the first who had any navy of
importance. The Athenians soon began to emulate them, and ere long
constructed a large fleet of vessels both for war and commerce. That
these ancient ships were light compared with ours, is proved by the fact
that when the Greeks landed to commence the siege of Troy they _drew up
their ships on the shore_. We are also told that ancient mariners, when
they came to a long narrow promontory of land, were sometimes wont to
land, draw their ships bodily across the narrowest part of the isthmus,
and launch them on the other side.
Moreover, they had a salutary dread of what sailors term "blue water"--
that is, the deep, distant sea--and never ventured out of sight of land.
They had no compass to direct them, and in their coasting voyages of
discovery they were guided, if blown out to sea, by the stars.
The sails were made of linen in Homer's time; subsequently sail-cloth
was made of hemp, rushes, and leather. Sails were sometimes dyed of
various colours and with curious patterns. Huge ropes were fastened
round the ships to bind them more firmly together, and the bulwarks were
elevated beyond the frame of the vessels by wicker-work covered with
skins.
Stones were used for anchors, and sometimes crates of small stones or
sand; but these were not long of being superseded by iron anchors with
teeth or flukes.
The Romans were not at first so strong in naval power as their
neighbours, but in order to keep pace with them they were ultimately
compelled to devote more attention to their navies. About 260 B.C. they
raised a large fleet to carry on the war with Carthage. A Carthaginian
quinquereme which happened to be wrecked on their coast was taken
possession of by the Romans, used as a model, and one hundred and thirty
ships constructed from it. These ships were all built, it is said, in
six days; but this appears almost incredible. We must not, however,
judge the power of the ancients by the standard of present times. It is
well known that labour was cheap then, and we have recorded in history
the completion of great works in marvellously short time, by the mere
force of myriads of workmen.
The Romans not only succeeded in raising a considerable navy, but they
proved themselves ingenious in the contrivance of novelties in their
war-galleys. They erected towers on the decks, from the top of which
their warriors fought as from the walls of a fortress. They also placed
small cages or baskets on the top of their masts, in which a few men
were placed to throw javelins down on the decks of the enemy; a practice
which is still carried out in principle at the present day, men being
placed in the "tops" of the masts of our men-of-war, whence they fire
down on the enemy. It was a bullet from the "top" of one of the masts
of the enemy that laid low our greatest naval hero, Lord Nelson.
From this time the Romans maintained a powerful navy. They crippled the
maritime power of their African foes, and built a number of ships with
six and even ten ranks of oars. The Romans became exceedingly fond of
representations of sea-fights, and Julius Caesar dug a lake in the
Campus Martius specially for these exhibitions. They were not by any
means sham fights. The unfortunates who manned the ships on these
occasions were captives or criminals, who fought as the gladiators did--
to the death--until one side was exterminated or spared by imperial
clemency. In one of these battles no fewer than a hundred ships and
nineteen thousand combatants were engaged!
Such were the people who invaded Britain in the year 55 B.C. under
Julius Caesar, and such the vessels from which they landed upon our
shores to give battle to the then savage natives of our country.
It is a curious fact that the crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries were the chief cause of the advancement of navigation after
the opening of the Christian era. During the first five hundred years
after the birth of our Lord, nothing worthy of notice in the way of
maritime enterprise or discovery occurred.
But about this time an event took place which caused the foundation of
one of the most remarkable maritime cities in the world. In the year
476 Italy was invaded by the barbarians. One tribe, the Veneti, who
dwelt upon the north-eastern shores of the Adriatic, escaped the
invaders by fleeing for shelter to the marshes and sandy islets at the
head of the gulf, whither their enemies could not follow by land, owing
to the swampy nature of the ground, nor by sea, on account of the
shallowness of the waters. The Veneti took to fishing, then to making
salt, and finally to mercantile enterprises. They began to build, too,
on those sandy isles, and soon their cities covered ninety islands, many
of which were connected by bridges. And thus arose the far-famed city
of the waters--"Beautiful Venice, the bride of the sea."
Soon the Venetians, and their neighbours the Genoese, monopolised the
commerce of the Mediterranean.
The crusades now began, and for two centuries the Christian warred
against the Turk in the name of Him who, they seem to have forgotten, if
indeed the mass of them ever knew, is styled the Prince of Peace. One
of the results of these crusades was that the Europeans engaged acquired
a taste for Eastern luxuries, and the fleets of Venice and Genoa, Pisa
and Florence, ere long crowded the Mediterranean, laden with jewels,
silks, perfumes, spices, and such costly merchandise. The Normans, the
Danes, and the Dutch also began to take active part in the naval
enterprise thus fostered, and the navy of France was created under the
auspices of Philip Augustus.
The result of all this was that there was a great moving, and, to some
extent, commingling of the nations. The knowledge of arts and
manufactures was interchanged, and of necessity the knowledge of various
languages spread. The West began constantly to demand the products of
the East, wealth began to increase, and the sum of human knowledge to
extend.
Shortly after this era of opening commercial prosperity in the
Mediterranean, the hardy Northmen performed deeds on the deep which
outrival those of the great Columbus himself, and were undertaken many
centuries before his day.
The Angles, the Saxons, and the Northmen inhabited the borders of the
Baltic, the shores of the German Ocean, and the coasts of Norway. Like
the nations on the shores of the Mediterranean, they too became famous
navigators; but, unlike them, war and piracy were their chief objects of
pursuit. Commerce was secondary.
In vessels resembling that of which the above is a representation, those
nations went forth to plunder the dwellers in more favoured climes, and
to establish the Anglo-Saxon dominion in England; and their celebrated
King Alfred became the founder of the naval power of Britain, which was
destined in future ages to rule the seas.
It was the Northmen who, in huge open boats, pushed off without chart or
compass (for neither existed at that time) into the tempestuous northern
seas, and, in the year 863, discovered the island of Iceland; in 983,
the coast of Greenland; and, a few years later, those parts of the
American coast now called Long Island, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Nova
Scotia, and Newfoundland. It is true they did not go forth with the
scientific and commercial views of Columbus; neither did they give to
the civilised world the benefit of their knowledge of those lands. But
although their purpose was simply selfish, we cannot withhold our
admiration of the bold, daring spirit displayed by those early
navigators, under circumstances of the greatest possible disadvantage--
with undecked or half-decked boats, meagre supplies, no scientific
knowledge or appliances, and the stars their only guide over the
trackless waste of waters.
In the course of time, one or two adventurous travellers pushed into
Asia, and men began to ascertain that the world was not the
insignificant disc, or cylinder, or ball they had deemed it. Perhaps
one of the chief among those adventurous travellers was Marco Polo, a
Venetian, who lived in the latter part of the thirteenth century. He
made known the central and eastern portions of Asia, Japan, the islands
of the Indian Archipelago, part of the continent of Africa, and the
island of Madagascar, and is considered the founder of the modern
geography of Asia.
The adventures of this wonderful man were truly surprising, and although
he undoubtedly exaggerated to some extent in his account of what he had
seen, his narrations are for the most part truthful. He and his
companions were absent on their voyages and travels twenty-one years.
Marco Polo died; but the knowledge of the East opened up by him, his
adventures and his wealth, remained behind to stir up the energies of
European nations. Yet there is no saying how long the world would have
groped on in this twilight of knowledge, and mariners would have
continued to "hug the shore" as in days gone by, had not an event
occurred which at once revolutionised the science of navigation, and
formed a new era in the history of mankind. This was the invention of
the mariner's compass.