Sailing ships

by E. Keble Chatterton

On other vases of this period, some of which may also be seen in the British Museum, are to be found curious crescent-shaped designs that have been sometimes taken for primitive ships by previous writers. Even to the most imaginative it must have been difficult to have given these curious drawings the right to be called boats. The extraordinary erections on what would be the deck, have not any right to be called masts or sails. To any one with the slightest practical knowledge of boats and their ways, it is amusing to find that even these primitive ideas should have been thought to depict any kind of river craft. But I have been enabled to discuss this matter with such eminent Egyptologists as Dr. Wallis Budge, the Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, and Mr. H. R. Hall, both of whom are of the opinion that these designs do not represent ships at all. Dr. Budge suggests that they represent “zarebas,” a word that became very familiar to English people during Kitchener’s campaign in Egypt. In that case, the structures that have been mistaken for masts would represent erections to frighten away enemies or wild beasts. Another theory is that the series of straight lines below what was taken for the ship’s hull, and which were wrongly supposed to represent waves, are perhaps the piles on which the dwelling is built. I have, therefore, omitted such designs as not bearing on the subject of sailing ships.

Starting with a definite illustration before us of a sailing boat of about 8000 years ago, our mind naturally wanders back to the period when the first boat was ever made. Picture, if you will, the prehistoric man standing by the banks of the Tigris or Euphrates gazing in utter helplessness and awe at the liquid mass gurgling on its way to the Persian Gulf. He sees the fishes able to swim beneath its surface and the waterfowl to float above. Then when his mind has reached a sufficiently developed state to permit of his being able to reason, he begins to wonder if he—the superior to fish and fowl—could also be supported in the water until he has reached the other side of the river on which he has as yet never set foot. So, on a day, greatly daring, he entrusts his body to the flowing stream, and at length discovers that by certain exercises he is able to float and swim across to the other side. A new accomplishment has been made, a new world has been opened out to him. When he gets back home he begins to reason still further. How can he carry himself, his family, his goods to the other side? One day, perhaps, while hewing down a tree for his hut, a branch falls into the water. Behold! it possesses the ability of the water-fowl—it floats. So he hews down the trunk itself, sits across it, and for sport, launches off from the bank. Lo! the trunk supports both its own weight and his.

Thus encouraged, his primitive mind sets slowly to work. “If I get a bigger trunk and hollow it out, it will carry me, my family and my property across to the other shore.” So having turned the trunk into a boat, he makes of the branch a punting-pole. At a later stage he puts on a cross-piece to one end of the pole and thus propels himself by paddling, until this in turn becomes an oar.

Since human nature differs but little from age to age, and its chief tendency is ever to proceed along the route of least resistance, he begins to seek some means of motion without work. His descendants improve upon the tree-trunk until it has become more shapely and less clumsy. Then while returning home one evening, tired out with paddling and hunting, he rests on his paddle for a moment! Yet still his boat moves. He holds up the blade of his paddle and the canoe moves a little faster. He stands up, and, the larger the space that is exposed to the wind blowing in the direction in which he is travelling, the more quickly still does the little ship run on. Next day he brings with him a stick which he erects in the boat. That will save him standing. To the stick he makes fast a hide and spreading it to the wind sails faster than anything he has ever seen float on the water.

This is all very well in following winds: he can get along, too, when the wind is abeam, although he has to keep helping her with his paddle—such a lot of lee-way does she make; but every time the breeze gets ahead as he winds round the reaches of the Tigris he has to lower the sail and mast. This is too much for him. His mind is not able to conceive of such a manœuvre of tacking: how could a boat possibly go against the wind? It is unthinkable. He would be a fool to try and reason otherwise against a law of nature. Not, indeed, until thousands of years after him is tacking invented. The Egyptians at any rate did not understand it. Their ships were built for sailing up and rowing down the Nile, and there is abundant evidence to show the mast lowered down on to the top of the after cabin and the oarsmen propelling the boat with the stream.

The prehistoric man has thus made almost the same kind of boat that the savage or half-civilised race makes to-day. The American Indian, the Negro and the undeveloped Asiatic races cannot create any boat superior to the dug-out, because their lack of intelligence is a fatal barrier. But just as the first inventors of flying machines have begun by studying the action of birds on the wing, so in navigation as in aviation. The early boatbuilders who followed the rough dug-out gave a shape to their ships that was derived from the creatures of the water. If the reader will look at the “bows” and underbody of a fish he will see how the general lines of the ship began. If, too, he will look at the stern and “counter” of the duck and swan he will easily notice the resemblance to the overhang of the early Egyptian boats. This is not so fanciful as may appear at first sight. The ancients certainly were affected by the waterfowl in their designing of ships, and the graceful neck of the swan was a regular decoration for the stern of the later Roman ships. It is but common-sense that when man is about to study the method of navigating water or air, he should begin by copying from the creatures that spend their whole time in this activity.

For the development of the art of shipbuilding, few countries could be found as suitable as Egypt. Surrounded on the East by the Red Sea, and by the Mediterranean on the North, it had the additional blessing of a long navigable river running through its midst. Of inestimable value to any country as this is, the equable and dry climate of Egypt, the peacefulness of the waters of the Nile, the absence of storms and the rarity of calms combined with the fact that, at any rate, during the whiter and early spring months, the gentle north wind blew up the river with the regularity of a trade wind, so enabling the ships to sail against the stream without the aid of oars—these were just the conditions that many another nation might have longed for. Very different, indeed, were the circumstances which had to be wrestled with in the case of the first shipbuilders and sailormen of Northern Europe. It is but natural, therefore, that the Egyptians became great sailors and builders: we should have been surprised had the reverse been the case.

In earlier times our sources of Egyptian history were limited almost entirely to what could be derived from ancient Greek and Roman writers. Nor was this of anything but a vague and unreliable character. Happily within our own time this has been supplemented, to an enormous degree, by Egyptian exploration. The first beginnings of this are found in the scientific study of Egyptian monuments, which began about the middle of the nineteenth century. The foundation for the interpretation of hieroglyphic inscriptions was laid in the Rosetta Stone, now fortunately in the British Museum. Discovered at the close of the eighteenth century, its bilingual writing in Egyptian and Greek paved the way for future scholars. Englishmen, German, French and American students have since engaged in the fascinating pursuit of systematically and with scrupulous care, excavating the temples and palaces of the older civilisation that lived on the banks of the Nile thousands of years before the Incarnation. Encouraged alike by the settled state of political affairs in Egypt, and by the support granted in the interests of research by the Egyptian and European Governments, the excavation and preservation of these unique monuments have gone steadily on from year to year. It is from the annual reports of these exploration societies, as well as from the explorers themselves, that we are able to present the details of the Egyptian sailing ships.

It would have been strange if a nation with such a vast waterway, and living in such close proximity to the Mediterranean and Red Seas, should not have left behind some memorials of her shipping. Happily we have no need for disappointment, for the information surviving to us is of two kinds. Firstly, we have the wall-pictures of the ancient buildings, which show almost everything that a picture could tell of a ship and her rigging. These wonderful illustrations have been faithfully copied on the spot. But besides these, within recent years have been unearthed most interesting little wooden model boats. These are of two kinds, those made in the form of a funeral bark, and those which are models of the actual ships that sailed up the Nile at the time they were made. In the former the dead man is seen lying under a canopy or open deck-house with or without rowers. These funeral barks, not being sailing boats, are only of interest in pursuing our present subject as showing us the general lines and shape of the hull, together with the steering and rowing arrangements.