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Other documents randomly have
different content
 SHIPS
OF THE SEVEN SEAS
 CHAPTER I
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SHIPS

I MAGINE the world without ships. Mighty empires that now exist
and have existed in the past would never have developed. Every
continent—every island—would be a world alone. Europe, Asia, and
Africa could have known each other, it is true, in time. North and
South America might ultimately have become acquainted by means
of the narrow isthmus that joins them. But without ships, Australia
and all the islands of all the seas would still remain unknown to
others, each supporting peoples whose limited opportunities for
development would have prevented advanced civilization. Without
ships the world at large would still be a backward, savage place,
brightened here and there with tiny civilizations, perhaps, but limited
in knowledge, limited in development and in opportunity. Without
ships white men could never have found America. Without ships the
British Empire could never have existed. Holland, Spain, Rome,
Carthage, Greece, Phœnicia—none of them could ever have filled
their places in world history without ships. Without ships the
Bosphorus would still be impassable and the threat of Xerxes to
Western civilization would never have been known. Greater still—far
greater—without ships the Christian religion would have been limited
to Palestine or would have worked its way slowly across the deserts
and mountains to the South and East, to impress with its teachings
the Arabs, the Assyrians, the Hindoos, and the Chinese.
Ships have made the modern world—ships have given the white
man world supremacy, and ships, again, have made the English-
speaking peoples the colonizers and the merchants whose
manufactures are known in every land, whose flags are respected all
around the globe, and whose citizens are now the most fortunate of
all the people of the earth.
All of this we owe to ships.
 Far back before the beginnings of history lived the first sailor. Who
he was we do not know. Where he first found himself water-borne we
cannot even guess. Probably in a thousand different places at a
thousand different times a thousand different savage men found that
by sitting astride floating logs they could ride on the surface of the
water.
In time they learned to bind together logs or reeds and to make
crude rafts on which they could carry themselves and some of their
belongings. They learned to propel these rafts by thrusting poles to
the bottoms of the lakes or rivers on which they floated. They
learned, in time, how to make and how to use paddles, and as
prehistoric ages gave way to later ages groping savages learned to
construct rafts more easily propelled, on which platforms were built,
to keep their belongings up above the wash of the waves that
foamed about the logs.
And ultimately some long-forgotten genius hollowed out a log with
fire, perhaps, and crude stone tools, and made himself a heavy,
unwieldy canoe, which, heavy as it was and awkward, could still be
handled much more readily than could the rafts that had served his
forbears for perhaps a hundred centuries.
And with this early step forward in the art of ship-building came a
little of the light that heralded the approaching dawn of civilization.
 AN EGYPTIAN BOAT OF 6000 B. C.
This drawing was made from what is probably the most ancient
known record of a ship. The high bow and stern seem somewhat
overdone, and it is likely that they were less elevated than this
picture shows them. The carving from which this was taken,
however, exaggerates them still more.

The very first pages of recorded history tell us of ships, and we

know that many prehistoric men were adept at building such boats
as dugout canoes. In Switzerland many signs have been found of a
people who dwelt there in the Stone Age, and among the simple
belongings of this people of great antiquity have been found canoes
hollowed from single logs. In the bogs of Ireland, and in England and
Scotland similar dugouts have been occasionally found, which had
been buried in the course of time far below the surface of the
ground.
 By the time the Stone Age came the dugout was perfected, and
still later other types of boats appeared. Perhaps the hollowed log
suggested the use of the curved bark of the tree as a canoe, and
ultimately a framework of wood was developed to hold the weight of
the occupant while a covering of bark kept out the water. The
framework was necessary for two reasons—first, to give the
structure the necessary strength to keep its shape; and second, to
bear the weight of the builder and his belongings. Other coverings,
such as skins and woven fabrics covered with pitch, came into use in
parts of the world where suitable bark was scarce.
The next step in the building of boats was a method of fastening
pieces of wood together in suitable form. This probably came from a
desire for boats of larger size, which required greater strength, for
man early became a trader and wished to transport goods. Bark
could not support a heavy hull, and dugouts are necessarily limited
in size, being constructed of the trunks of single trees, although
dugouts fifty or sixty feet in length, or even longer, are not unknown.
Probably the earliest boats of this new type were tied together by
thongs or cords. Even to-day the natives of Madras, in India, build
boats by this method, and similar types are to be found on the Strait
of Magellan, on Lake Victoria Nyanza in Central Africa, and in the
East Indies. Many of these have been very highly developed until
now they are built of heavy hand-hewn boards fitted together with
ridges on their inner sides, through which holes are bored for the
thongs that lash them together. The boards are fastened together
first, and later a frame is attached to the interior. This construction
makes a very “elastic” boat which bends and twists in a seaway, but
which, because of this “elasticity,” is able to navigate waters that
would prove fatal to the more rigid types of crudely constructed
boats. The Hindoos often use them in the heavy surf that drives in
upon the beaches from the Bay of Bengal.
 A LARGE EGYPTIAN SHIP OF THE 18TH DYNASTY
The overhanging bow and stern were common on most early
Egyptian ships, and the heavy cable, stretched from one end of the
hull to the other and supported on two crutches, was used to
strengthen these overhanging ends.

The introduction of this construction made boats of considerable

size possible, and for the first time boats larger than anything that
could possibly be called a canoe were successfully floated.
From this form a further step was ultimately made in which the
various parts were fastened together by the use of wooden pegs,
and this was the most advanced type long centuries after the dawn
of history. The Nile was navigated by such boats at the height of
Egypt’s civilization, and Homer describes this type of boat as the one
in which Ulysses wandered on his long and wearisome journey
home.
While the art of boat-building had been travelling this long, slow
way, the art of propulsion had not been idle. Long since, the simple
pole of the early savage had lost its usefulness, for men soon
learned to navigate waters too deep for poles. The paddle followed,
and was perfected to a very high point, as its use in all parts of the
world still testifies.
But further means were still to come, and by the time Ulysses
started on his journey from the fallen city of Troy, both the sail and
the oar, which for three thousand years were to be supreme as
propelling forces, had come into use.
In Ulysses’s boat, therefore, we see for the first time a combination
of structural features and propelling agents that compare, remotely
though it may be, with ships as they are to-day. A built-up structure
with a framework, propelled by sails—it was an early counterpart of
the ships of the present time.
Naturally enough this development did not take place
simultaneously in all parts of the world. The most advanced
civilizations such as those of Phœnicia, Greece, and China
developed the most advanced ship-building methods, just as they
developed the most advanced arts and sciences and thought and
religion.
For instance, when Columbus discovered America a vital factor in
the development of ships was entirely unknown to the natives that he
found. No Indian tribe with which he or later explorers came in
contact had learned the use of sails to propel the canoes they almost
universally used. Civilizations of surprising worth, with art and
architecture in high stages of advancement, had existed and had
practically disappeared in Yucatan and Central America, and other
civilizations of genuine attainment were later found, by Cortes and
Pizarro, in Mexico and Peru, yet none of them knew the uses of the
sail.
 On the other hand, the Egyptians and the Phœnicians used the
sail, and twenty-five centuries before the discovery of America the
Phœnicians are thought to have sailed their ships around the
continent of Africa from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.
But while the art of ship-building progressed more rapidly after the
development of the use of wooden pegs for fastenings, and the use
of sails and oars made possible more extended sea journeys, still
the development was slow, and until the discovery of the power of
steam in the latter part of the 18th Century no revolutionary changes
in ships took place.
Just when the method originated of first constructing the frame of
the ship and of covering this frame with planks, we do not know, but
the transition from the method in use at the time of Homer was
simple and the change was probably gradual.
 A PERUVIAN BALSA
These “boats” are really rafts made of reeds.

It seems possible that the built-up boat may have had its origin in
the attempt of some savage to raise the sides of his dugout canoe by
the addition of boards in order to keep the water from harming his
goods.
But all of the history of boats up to the time of written history is
necessarily mostly surmise.
It is interesting to note, however, that every one of these basic
types is still to be found in use. In Australia, for instance, are to be
found savages whose boats are nothing but floating logs, sharpened
at the ends, astride of which the owner sits. Rafts, of course, are
common everywhere. Dugout canoes are to be found in many lands,
among which are the islands of the Pacific and the western coast of
Canada and Alaska. The birch-bark canoe is still common among
the Indians of America—particularly of Canada; the skin-covered
boat is still used commonly by the Eskimos, two types, the kayak, or
decked canoe, and the umiak, or open boat being the most common.
I have seen the latter type used also by the Indians who live on
Great Bear Lake in northern Canada.
Boats fastened together with thongs or lashings are numerous in
parts of India and elsewhere, the Madras surfboats being, perhaps,
the best examples.
Boats built up of planks fastened together by pegs are to be found
in many parts of the world. I learned to sail in a boat of this type, but
very much modernized, on Chesapeake Bay. The other methods,
very much perfected, are still in everyday use among boat- and ship-
builders.
Thus it will be seen that some knowledge of all these various types
may still serve some useful purpose, for one may find in everyday
use all the fundamental types of construction that have ever existed.
 AN AFRICAN DUGOUT
In this boat the builders have hollowed out the log but have
not otherwise changed it. It is a present-day counterpart of
boats known and used long before the dawn of history.

One type of boat I have not mentioned, yet it is of time-honoured

ancestry and is still in daily use among thousands of people. This is
the outrigger canoe. In different parts of the world it has different
names. In the Philippines, for instance, it is called, in two of its forms,
vinta and prau. These boats have one thing in common, and that is
an outrigger. An outrigger is a pole made of bamboo or some other
light wood, floating in the water at a distance of a few feet from the
boat itself. It is held rigid and parallel to the hull by two or more cross
bars. Sometimes there is an outrigger on each side but often there is
only one. On the smaller boats the outrigger consists of a single
pole. On larger boats, or those which are inclined to be particularly
topheavy because of the load they are intended to carry, the size of
the sail, or for some other cause, several poles may make up each
outrigger. The use of this addition is to secure stability, for the boats
to which they are attached are usually extremely narrow and alone
could not remain upright in the water, or at best could not carry sail in
a seaway, where the combination of wind and wave would quickly
capsize them. These outrigger canoes—and some of them are
capable of carrying forty or fifty passengers—are extremely
seaworthy, and the native sailors do not hesitate to take them for
hundreds of miles across seas often given to heavy storms. In the
development of ships, however, they play no part, for their only
unique characteristic has never been incorporated into ships of
higher design.
It is interesting that while all the cruder types of boats are still to be
found in daily use in various parts of the world, the more highly
developed designs, up to those of the 17th Century, have
disappeared. Many of them, it is true, have influenced later designs,
but most of the marks they left can be traced only with great difficulty.
The earliest boats of which we have definite records are those that
were in use in Egypt about 3000 B. C. Some of these were of
considerable size, for carvings on tombs and temples show them
carrying cargoes of cattle and other goods, and show, too, on one
side, as many as twenty-one or twenty-two, and in one case twenty-
six, oars, besides several used for steering. Many of these boats
were fitted with a strange sort of double mast, made, apparently, of
two poles fastened together at the top and spread apart at the
bottom. These masts could be lowered and laid on high supports
when they were not needed to carry sail.
The boats themselves seem to have been straight-sided affairs
with both ends highly raised, ending, sometimes, in a point and
sometimes being carried up into highly decorated designs that at the
bow occasionally curved backward and then forward like a swan’s
neck. The end of this was often a carved head of some beast or bird
or Egyptian god. On the boats intended for use as war galleys the
bow was often armed with a heavy metal ram.
 AN ESKIMO UMIAK
This boat is structurally similar to the kayak except that it has no
deck. It is a larger boat, and will carry heavy loads and perhaps as
many as a dozen people. It is made by covering a frame with skins.

These ships—for they had by this time grown to such size that
they are more than canoes or boats—often extended far out over the
water both forward and aft, and any concentration of weight on these
overhanging extremities had a tendency to strain the hull amidships.
This was offset, as it sometimes is to-day on shallow draft river
boats, by running cables from bow to stern over crutches set
amidships.
While the Egyptians were the first to picture their ships, it is not
certain that they were the first to have ships of real size and sea-
going ability, for the very temples and tombs on the walls of which
are shown the ships that I have described have also the records of
naval victories over raiders from other lands who must have made
the voyage to the Egyptian coast in order to plunder the wealth of
that old centre of civilization.
The Egyptians, however, were never a sea-going people in the
sense that the Phœnicians were. But strange as it may be, the
Phœnicians, despite the fact that they probably invented the
alphabet, did not make the first record, or, as a matter of fact, any
very important records, of their great development in the ship-
building art. The earliest picture of which we know of Phœnician
ships is on the wall of an Assyrian palace and dates back only to
about 700 B. C. which was after the Assyrians had conquered the
Phœnicians and had for the first time (for the Assyrians were an
inland people) come in contact with sea-going ships.
By this time the Phœnicians had had many years of experience on
the sea, and the Assyrian representation shows a ship of more
advanced design than the Egyptians had had.
There are few records, however, from which we can gain much
knowledge of Phœnician ships, although we know they ventured out
of the Mediterranean and were familiar with the coasts of Spain,
Portugal, France, and even England, where they went to secure tin.
And as I mentioned earlier, they may even have circumnavigated
Africa, and it seems likely that they invented the bireme and the
trireme, thus solving the question of more power for propulsion.
A bireme is a boat propelled by oars which has the rowers so
arranged that the oars overlap and form two banks or rows, one
above the other. A trireme is similar except that there are three
banks. With this arrangement a boat may have twice or three times
as many rowers (in these old boats there was never more than one
man to an oar) without lengthening the hull.
To the Greeks we owe the first detailed accounts of the art of ship-
building and of ship construction. In early Greek history the vessels
were small and were usually without decks, although some of them
had decks that extended for part of their length. They carried crews
that ranged up to a hundred or more, and, in the democratic fashion
of the early Greeks, they all took part in the rowing of the ship, with
the possible exception of the commander. At this early period great
seaworthiness had not been developed, and there are many
accounts of the loss of ships in storms and of the difficulty of
navigating past headlands and along rocky coasts. Later, Greek
ships cruised the Mediterranean almost at will, but ship design and
construction had first to develop and the development took centuries.
Even in those days there was a marked difference between the
ships intended for commerce and those intended for war. The war
vessels—and the pirate vessels, which of course were ships of war
—were narrow and swift, while the ships of commerce were broad
and slow: broad because of the merchant’s desire to carry large
cargoes, and slow because the great beam and the heavy burdens
prevented speed.
 AN ESKIMO KAYAK
These small canoes are made of a light frame covered with skins.

During the period at which Athens reached her prime the trireme,
or three-banked ship, was the most popular. As a matter of fact, its
popularity was so great that its name was often given to all ships of
the same general type whether they were designed with two, three,
four, five, or even more banks of oars.
These many-oared ships reached a very high state of perfection
during the supremacy of Greece, and the most careful calculations
were made in order to utilize every available inch by packing the
rowers as closely together as was possible without preventing them
from properly performing their tasks.
The rowers, as I have suggested, sat in tiers, those on each side
usually being all in the same vertical plane, and the benches they
used ran from the inner side of the hull to upright timbers which were
erected between decks, slanting toward the stern. That is, in a ship
with three banks of oars, three seats were attached to each of these
slanting timbers and the footrests of the rower occupying the
topmost seat were on either side of the man who occupied the
second seat in the next group of three. The vertical distance
between these seats was two feet. The horizontal distance was one
foot. The distance between seats in the same bank was three feet.
I have gone into some detail in describing this arrangement, for
rowers—and from the later days of Greece on they were generally
slave rowers—were the motive power of ships for three thousand
years or more, and for more than a thousand years the many-
banked ship was supreme.
 A BIRCH-BARK CANOE
In many parts of the world savage people have learned to build
light frames over which they have stretched the best material
available to them. The Indians of North America commonly utilize
birch bark.

Imagine these toiling galley slaves, chained in hundreds to the

crowded rowing benches, straining at the heavy oars. Tossed by the
seas, they labour unceasingly, stroke on stroke, to the sound of a
mallet falling in never-changing cadence on a block of wood. Hour
on hour they strain, heartened occasionally by a few minutes’ rest.
Their eyes are all but blinded by the sweat from their grimy brows.
Their hands are calloused, their bodies misshapen from long toil on
the rowers’ benches. Above them, on the wind-swept deck, they
hear the clank of armed men, the slap of sandalled feet. A lookout
calls to the officer in command—hurried steps—momentary silence
—shouts and the sound of feet. A messenger appears in the stifling
space below. The sharp clap of the mallet on the block increases its
cadence. Faster and faster swing the oars. Furious and more furious
is the pace. A whip in the hands of a brutal guard falls here and there
on the naked backs of the helpless, straining forms. Their strength is
waning, their breath is coming fast. A man collapses from the strain
and pitches from his elevated seat, half suspended by the chain
around his leg, his oar trailing and useless. From beyond their
wooden walls they hear the muffled clank of the oars of the
approaching enemy.
Cries from on deck, and suddenly a crash. Broken oars are driven
here and there. Screams and oaths and orders and a great
upheaval. Water enters in a score of places. More screams—more
oaths—cries for help to a score of pagan gods—the water covers all.
A great last sigh and one more ship is gone: it is just a tiny incident
in the history of ships.
As I have said, the Greeks developed marine architecture to a
very high point, and the bireme and trireme with which they began
were the first of a long series of developments until ultimately ships
of five, of eight, of even sixteen banks of oars are said to have been
in use, and there is a story, which probably was a figment of
someone’s imagination, of a vessel of forty banks! Such a ship may
possibly have been suggested—may conceivably have been built—
but it seems certain that she could never have been successful or
practical.
Carthage, that great enemy of Rome, was a city of traders—a city
that depended on the sea for its wealth and, to a large extent, even
for its sustenance. Rome, on the other hand, grew to considerable
size without venturing on the sea. When she did first turn her
attention to the water, as her continued expansion forced her to do,
she found that Carthage crossed her course whichever way she
turned. The result was war.
But war between two cities separated by the width of the
Mediterranean had to be fought largely on the sea, and Rome,
inexperienced as a sea-going nation, was put to a severe test.
By chance, however, a Carthaginian quinquireme—that is, a five-
banked ship—battered by storm and abandoned by her crew, drifted
ashore on the sunny coast of Italy, and the Romans, quick to see the
importance of the happening, hauled her high and dry, measured
her, and learned from her battered hull the lessons they needed to
know of ship construction.

AN OUTRIGGER CANOE
Sometimes these canoes have an outrigger on each side, and
sometimes they carry sails.

They built on dry land sets of rowers’ seats, and while they taught
rowers to pull their oars in unison in these unique training benches,
they set to work with the energy that marked Rome out for great
success. Sixty days after they had felled the trees, they had a fleet of
quinquiremes afloat and manned.