The English nation, more than perhaps any other, has been characterised not so much by her inventiveness as by her skill in adapting other nations’ ideas. The present age of electricity and other inventions illustrates the general truth of this statement. Thus, her ships of to-day are the result of continually improving on the designs of other nations. From Norway she got her first sailing ships; from the Mediterranean she assuredly derived considerable knowledge in maritime matters generally. Certainly from Spain she learned much of the art of navigation, of rigging and of shipbuilding. From the French, as we go down through time, she acquired a vast increase of her knowledge of ship-designing and shipbuilding. Not the least of this was the importance to a vessel of fine lines. The Dutch taught us a good deal of seamanship and tactics, as we know from Pepys’s Diary. Finally, about the year 1850, after the American clippers had raced all our big ships of the mercantile marine off the ocean, England learned to build clippers equally fast and superior in strength, and so regained the sea-carrying trade she had lost. In yacht designing also she has learned much from American architects, as the Germans within the last few years have learned from us.
Sailing ships are the links which bind country to country, continent to continent. They have been at once the means of spreading civilisation and war. It is a fact that the number of new ships to be built increases proportionately as the trade of a country prospers, and one of the first signs of bad trade is the decrease in the shipbuilder’s orders. But, good trade or bad trade, peace or war, there will always be a summons in the sea which cannot be resisted. It summoned the Egyptians to sail to the land of Punt to fetch incense and gold. It summoned the Phœnicians across the Bay of Biscay to the tin mines of Cornwall. It called the Vikings to coast along the Baltic shores for pillage and piracy. It called the Elizabethans to set forth from Bristol and London in order to find new trade routes, new markets for their goods, fresh sources of their imports. It calls some for trade, some for piracy, some for mere adventure, as in the case of the yachtsman of to-day. It seduces ships from the safety of snug harbours only to be tossed about by the billows of a trackless expanse. The sea ever has been, ever is, and ever will be, uncertain, fickle, unkind. In spite of the fact that for 8000 years and more shipbuilders, designers, and seamen have by experience and invention sought every possible means to overcome its terrors and to tame its fury; in spite of the fact that these men have never succeeded in getting the upper hand, yet the call of the sea will ever be obeyed. When once she has fascinated you, when once you have consented to her cry and got the salt into your veins, you become as much the slave of the sea as any Roman underling that pulled at the oar of an ancient galley. The sea calls you; you hoist up your sails, and come.
CHAPTER II.
EARLY EGYPTIAN SHIPS FROM ABOUT 6000 B.C.
The earliest information that we can find about the sailing ship comes, of course, from Egypt: for although the first signs of the dawn of culture were seen in Babylonia, yet that is an inland country and not a maritime region. Notwithstanding the fact that to the east of the Syro-Arabian desert there flow the navigable rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates, and granting that it is only reasonable to suppose that the earliest inhabitants on the banks of these important streams did actually engage in the building of some sort of boat or ship, yet we are not in a position to make any statement from definite evidence. The age of the Babylonian civilisation is exceedingly remote, and long prior to that of the Egyptians, but that is the most that we can say. What their rowing or sailing craft were like—who knows? The discoveries made in this, the most historic corner of the world, by Layard and his successors have told us something about the craft that breasted the waters of the Tigris, but this information belongs to no period earlier than 700 or 900 B.C. Whether subsequent discoveries may lift up the curtain that hides from our view the remains, or at least the crude designs, of the first objects that were ever propelled by wood or sail is entirely a matter of uncertainty.
Of one thing we may rest assured—that Babylonia was in a comparatively high state of civilisation about six thousand years before the Christian era. For at about this date from the East came Babylonian settlers, who found their way towards the setting sun and, finally halting to the North-West of the Red Sea, colonised the region on either side of the Nile. Here, then, they arrived from Babylonia, not a barbarian wild tribe, but, as we know from the most learned Egyptologists, a highly civilised people, possessing great ability in certain arts and of definite intellectual development. It would be only natural that a band of emigrants that had been living by the banks of the Tigris or Euphrates should eventually settle by a river. An Englishman who has lived all his life on the lower reaches of the Thames, is far more likely to fix his habitation on the shores of a colonial river than to trek inland and ultimately “bring up” in the middle of a grazing country. The new inhabitants of the land that we know by the name of Egypt would feel themselves at home by its river. Whatever knowledge they had possessed of boat-building in Babylonia they carried with them across the Arabian desert and put into practice along the banks of the Nile. The accompanying illustration (Fig. 3) will show to what ability these colonisers or their immediate successors had attained. Here will be noticed the earliest form of sailing ship in existence. The mast, the square sail, the high bow and the curve of the hull are to us of the highest possible interest as showing the first beginnings of the modern full-rigged ship or yacht. This illustration has been taken from an amphora found in Upper Egypt and now in the British Museum. The date ascribed to it by the ablest Egyptologists is that of the Pre-Dynastic period, which for the sake of clearness we may regard as about 6000 B.C.
Fig. 3. Egyptian Ship of about 6000 b.c.