Sailing ships

by E. Keble Chatterton

Fig. 9. Phœnician Ship.
From a coin of Sidon, c. 450 B.C.

But the ship depicted in the Palace of Khorsabad, while not showing any sail, indicates very clearly a mast with stays leading fore and aft to the bow (which ends in a horse’s head) and to the stern. The shape of this craft, if it was anything like the Phœnician ships, which came to Northern Europe, would certainly seem to prove that the Phœnicians continued their voyage further east to Norway; for here, with the high tapering stern and bow, and the decoration of the latter, is what could very easily be taken for the early design of the Viking ships. She is entirely different from the Egyptian type of ship, though she has evidently been based on the latter.

Passing now to the two coins of Sidon, these are both probably of about the year 450 B.C. Fig. 9 is from a coin in the British Museum. It is a little indistinct, but the Egyptian stern is still seen, though the ram, as already referred to, is at the bows. The double steering oars are faintly visible, though the long line of shields, which survived well into the middle ages, is clearly defined. The curve of the keel-line is very beautiful, and she must have been very fast, as indeed we know from historians similar shaped vessels in Greece were. Although such a ship was of great length, yet by reason of the curve of the keel, having the greatest depth amidships, and because of the design of the stern, she would probably steer pretty easily. This, of course, was essential in the naval manœuvres that were undertaken in fights. As to the sails, if the reader has already followed us in the previous chapter, these call for but little explanation again. The yard is ordinarily kept fixed. The sails hang apparently in two sections like so many curtains, being divided at the mast. The same peculiarity is to be seen in the Irrawadi junks referred to previously.

For shortening sail in a blow, or for stowing when coming to anchor, the six brails seen depending from the yard would be wound round the sail, once or twice, by sending a couple of men to the top of the yard, the crew below throwing up the rope to be passed round sail and yard. It was a clumsy method, but it sufficed. The reader may remember that the Dutchmen have used this principle since the sixteenth century, and the Thames barge of to-day still follows the general idea. The only real difference is that in the Dutchman and Thames barge, being fore-and-aft rigged, the brail comes horizontally—at right angles to the mast—instead of vertically, and parallel to the mast, whilst, of course, going aloft is unnecessary. Even this Dutch brailing system was derived from that used by the lateen-sails of the Mediterranean. (See the mizzen of the Santa Maria, in Fig. 45.) In detail, too, there is a slight difference, for the modern ships we are mentioning have a ring, or fair-lead, for the brail to come through, one end being fastened to the sail, the standing part passing through the ring on the leach of the sail and so back to the mast.

What we have said regarding this illustration is applicable also to Fig. 10. But happily this shows us some important details in the stern. First, the staff with crescent-top denotes that she was the admiral’s flagship. The curved-line immediately below represents part of the structure called the aphlaston (ἀ + Φλαζω = I crush). This was placed as a protection for the ship against the terrible damage that might be done by the enemy charging into her and ramming her. A still better example of this detail will be noticed in Fig. 14. One can easily trace this as having come from the Egyptian ships of the eighteenth dynasty that went to Punt. Immediately below this, in Fig. 10 again, and hanging down, may be either a protection against the enemy or, as will be seen in the ship of Odysseus (Fig. 16), a kind of decoration resembling some rich carpet, to ornament the stern where the admiral was located in authority. This second Phœnician illustration is from a coin in the Hunterian Collection, Glasgow.

Fig. 10. Phœnician Ship.
From a coin of Sidon, c. 450 B.C.

It has been said that some of the larger Phœnician ships were as long as 300 feet, though this statement needs to be taken with caution. At any rate, it is accurate to describe them as being long, straight, narrow, and flat-bottomed, and as carrying sometimes as many as fifty oarsmen. Although the crescent-shape had for so long a time been almost a convention for the design of the ship, yet the nation that could found so important and prosperous a colony as Carthage, and that built ships both for Egyptians and Persians, would not be likely to be held down too tightly by custom where their own clever genius and invaluable practical experience taught them otherwise. By completely modifying the bow as it had been customary in the Egyptian ships, the Phœnicians started a new fashion in naval architecture which, permeating through Greek and Roman history, is still found in the galleys of the Adriatic as late as the eighteenth century of our era. Those bows, with or without the ram, even on a Maltese sailing galley, show their ancient Phœnician ancestry in an undeniable manner.

Our information regarding ancient Greek and Roman ships is derived from the following sources: the writings of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, Cæsar, Tacitus, Xenophon, Lucian, Pliny, Livy, Æschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Plutarch, Sophocles, and others; the inventories of the Athenian arsenals of the fourth century B.C.; ancient Greek vases; reliefs discovered in Southern Europe at various periods; monuments and tombs; mosaics found in North Africa, ancient coins; the Voyages of St. Paul; and finally ancient remains such as fibulæ, terra-cotta models, and earthenware lamps.

From these diverse channels of information we find that the Phœnicians who invented the bireme and the trireme, who had adopted the Egyptian stern and rigging for their ships, handed these features on to the Greeks, and they, in turn, to the Romans. The earliest Greek ships were afloat in the thirteenth century B.C., and by about the year 800 B.C. maritime matters had taken the greatest hold on the dwellers in the Greek peninsula and the western coasts of Asia Minor. The fierce race for wealth which to-day we see going on in America had its precedent in the eighth century before the Christian era in the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean. Very quickly the contestants found that the shortest route to affluence was viâ the sea. Indeed, following the example of their first teachers, the Phœnicians, so zealously did they keep to their ships that the Milesian sea-traders formed a party in the State known as “the men never off the water.” In the seventh century, if not earlier, the Greeks were prosperously fishing in the Black Sea; and though the dangers of rounding Mount Athos in the Ægean were in those days to some extent analogous to the perils which a sailing ship to-day suffers in doubling Cape Horn, yet in the fourth century B.C., Xerxes, rather than risk a series of shipwrecks to his fleet in the stormy seas at the foot of this mountain, had the sandy isthmus connecting the mainland pierced with a canal.