Sailing ships

by E. Keble Chatterton

We see, too, the ships being loaded with the produce of Punt. The Egyptians are bringing the cargo across a gangway from the shore to the ship. There are bags of incense and gold, ebony, tusks of elephants, skins of panthers, frankincense trees piled up in confusion on the ships’ decks. Monkeys, too, have been obtained, which have been truthfully depicted as amusing themselves by walking along the truss. Any one who has ever taken a monkey on board a sailing ship knows that the first thing he does is to run up the rigging. It is a small point this, but it shows that the artist was anxious to be truthful and exact in his details.

The hieroglyphic inscription accompanying this illustration is virtually the bill of lading. It gives a detailed and accurate account of all the articles destined for transport. The translation of this according to Dr. Duemichen is: “The loading of the ships of transport with a great quantity of the magnificent products of Arabia, with all kinds of precious woods of the holy land, with heaps of incense-resin, with verdant incense trees, with ebony, with pure ivory, with gold and silver from the land of Amu, with the (odorous) Tepes wood and the Kassiarind, with Aham-incense and Mestemrouge, with Anau-monkeys, Kop-monkeys, and Tesem-animals, with skins of leopards of the South, with women and children. Never has a transport (been made) like this one by any king since the creation of the world.”

Fig. 7. Egyptian Ship (in the Temple of Deir-el-Bahari).

Finally (see Fig. 7) we are shown three vessels of the fleet returning to Thebes richly laden. The accompanying inscription in this case reads: “The excursion was completed satisfactorily; happy arrival at Thebes to the joy of the Egyptian soldiers. The (Arabian and Ethiopian) princes, after they had arrived in this country, bring with them costly things of the land of Arabia, such as had never yet been brought that could be compared with what they brought, by any of the Egyptian kings, for the supreme majesty of this god Amon-Ra, Lord of the terrestrial thrones.”

“If the expedition really landed at Thebes,” says Dr. Edouard Naville, “we must suppose that at that time, long before Ramases II., who is said to have made a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, there was an arm of the Nile forming a communication with the sea, which extended much farther north than it does now.”[8]

When we remember the splendour and gaiety of the court at Thebes, the many gorgeous festivals that were held on the water, the Egyptians’ love of pleasure and their intense joy in living, we are neither surprised to learn of the great fêtes that celebrated the safe return of these voyagers, nor of the fact that a company of royal dancers accompanied the ships to enliven the navigation with song and dance. That the Egyptians dearly loved their ships and set them in high honour cannot be disputed. Besides burying them in the tombs of their rulers, there were times when sacred boats were carried out of the temples on the occasion of high festivals and dragged along by sledges.

Professor Maspero[9] believes that the navigation of the Red Sea by the Egyptians was far more frequent than is usually imagined, and the same kinds of vessels in which they coasted along the Mediterranean from the mouth of the Nile to the southern coast of Syria, conveyed them also, by following the coast of Africa, as far as the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. These ships were, of course, somewhat bigger and more able than the Nile boats, though they were built on the same model. They were clinker-built with narrow sharp stem and stern, with enormous sheer rising from forward to the high stern. They were not open boats but decked, and we find hieroglyphics denoting the pilot’s orders “Pull the oar,” “To the port side.” Heavier, bigger, with more freeboard and no hold, the Egyptian merchant ships, crowded with their cargo and a complement of fifty sailors, pilots, and passengers, barely afforded room for working the ship properly. The length of ships of the size that went to Punt has been thought to be about sixty-five feet, or much smaller than such modern yachts as “Shamrock” and “Nyria.”

We have already mentioned the wonderful influence the rig of the Egyptians exercised to the eastward, but though the old squaresail rig has gone from Egypt, yet to-day we can still see very similar boats and almost the same rig on the Orange Laut of the Malay West Coast. The overhanging bow and stern, the great sheer from forward to the high poop, the large single squaresail, now converted practically into a lug-sail, are still there to keep alive the memory of the ships of the Dynasties.

I have already referred in the previous chapter to the lateen sail having been adapted from the Egyptian rig a few centuries before the Christian era. But it is probable that between the squaresail rig and the lateen there was just one intermediate stage. By tilting the yard at a different angle to the mast, instead of it being at right angles, so that the foot came down lower, and the peak of the sail was pointed higher, it would be found that the ship would hold a better wind. This is amply borne out by the Egyptian “Nugger” (see Fig. 8), which is still in use on the Nile above the second cataract, and is being replaced only very slowly by the lateen. There is a relief on a sarcophagus found in the precincts of the Vatican, and now in the Lateran Museum, which certainly resembles the “Nugger” in its transition from the squaresail to the lateen. (The date of this is about 200 A.D.). The only important difference is that the Vatican relief shows a topsail added. Finally, discarding the boom altogether, the lateen sail comes with the foot of the sail lower still, and consequently the peak much higher, being but an exaggerated form of our modern lug-sail so prevalent in sailing dinghies. This remains, as we have pointed out above, as the characteristic sail of the Mediterranean, the Nile and Red Sea.