Ships & Ways of Other Days

by E. Keble Chatterton

The reader is aware that we have had necessity to refer more than once to the corn-ships from Egypt, and in an age that was given up rather to the development of the fighting galley than to the exploiting of the cargo ship these trans-Mediterranean grain-carriers stand out prominently as a class by themselves. It is most unlikely that they altered much during a space of several hundred years, when even that much-petted craft, the galley, remained so little modified. Therefore the following account which has been left to us by Lucian may be regarded not merely as representative of the corn-ship in his immediate period, but as characteristic of the ship for probably five hundred years at least. Lucian lived in the second century, and was born probably about A.D. 120. In the dialogue from which the following extract is taken he taunts his friend Timolaus with being ever fond of a fine spectacle; to which the latter replies that he had had nothing to do, and being told of “this monster vessel of extraordinary proportions putting in at the Piræus,” he goes on to explain that “she is one of the Egyptian corn-ships and bound for Italy.”

The Egyptian Corn-Ship “Goddess Isis” (circa A.D. 120).

Keenly interested, they went on board her by the gangway, and he goes on to refer to the ship’s cabins, which he examined, to the shipwright who conducted them round the ship, calls attention to the lofty mast, stares in amazement at the sailors “as they mounted by the ropes, and then with perfect safety ran along the yards holding on to the halyards.” A hundred and thirty feet long she measured, with 30-feet beam, whilst from deck to bottom of hold she was 29 feet at her deepest part.

“What a mast she has!” exclaims Samippus, one of the friends; “and how huge a yard she carries, and what a stay it requires to hold it up in its place! With what a gentle curve her stern rises, finished with a goose-neck all of gold! At the other end, in just proportion, the prow stands up, lengthening itself out as it gets forward, and showing the ship’s name, the Goddess Isis, on either side.... The decorations and the flame-coloured foresail, and beyond these the anchor with the windlass and capstan, and I must not omit the stern cabins. Then the number of souls would make one think it was a camp. We were told it carried enough corn to feed all the people of Athens for a year. And all we saw had so far been carried safe and sound by a little old man, using a slight tiller to turn that huge rudder. They showed him to me—a bald-pated fellow with a fringe of curly hair. Hero, I think, by name.”

Then Timolaus still further enriches the narrative:

“The passenger told me of his marvellous seamanship; in all seafaring matters he out-Proteused Proteus in skill. Did you hear how he brought his ship home, and all they went through on the voyage, or how the star guided them to safety?” Lucian answers that he has not heard, so Timolaus goes on to inform him.

“The captain told it me all himself—an honest fellow, and good company. Seven days after leaving the Pharos they sighted Cape Acamas without meeting with any very severe weather. Then the west wind proving contrary, they were swept across as far as Sidon; and after Sidon they fell in with a heavy gale; and on the tenth day came to the Chelidonian Islands, passing through the channel, where they had a narrow escape of going down, every man of them. I know what that is, for I once passed the Chelidonians myself, and remember how high the sea runs there, especially when the wind is in the south-west and backing south. For the result of this is that the Pamphylian Gulf is cut in two by the Lycian Sea, and the wave is split up by endless cross currents at the promontory, the rocks there being sheer and worn sharp by the wash of water, so that the surf becomes really formidable and the roar overpowering, and, indeed, the wave (not infrequently) is full as large as the rock it strikes. This, the captain said, was what they were surprised by in the midst of night and literal darkness; but, he added, the gods were moved with pity at their cries, and revealed to them from the Lycian coast the light of a fire, so that they knew where they were; and at the same time a bright star, one of the Twins, took his place at the masthead, guiding the ship to the left towards the open sea, just as it was bearing down on the rock. After that, having once fallen off from their true course, they at length succeeded in crossing the Ægean, and beating up in the teeth of the Etesian winds, only yesterday, seventy days out from Egypt, put in at the Piræus. They had so long been off their course in the lower seas that they missed doing what they should have done, keeping Crete on the right and steering past Malea. Otherwise they would have been in Italy by this time.”

Further on in the course of the conversation, Adeimantus, one of the friends, mentions that after stopping to measure the thickness of the anchor, “though I had seen everything, I must needs stop to ask one of the sailors what was the average return to the owner from the ship’s cargo.” “Twelve Attic talents,” he replied, “is the lowest figure, if you like to reckon it that way.”[13]

I make no apology for giving so full a quotation, for there is in the narrative something so sincere and yet so curiously modern: the whole picture is so full of sparkling bits of colour that it is most pleasing, and we can almost see this mammoth ship with her hefty spars and beautiful curves and “flame-coloured” sails. The intervening space of nearly two thousand years seems to have made but little difference in the type of skippers. I am sure that to many a sailing man to-day the delightful little sketch of the captain of the Goddess Isis corn-carrier as “the little old man,” “a bald-pated fellow with a fringe of curly hair” sitting at his tiller, will at once suggest the very counterpart in the style and appearance of the skipper of a corn-barge—“an honest fellow, and good company.” And the account of the bad weather encountered successfully, the use of stellar navigation, the good seamanship employed, and the proof of the corn-ship’s seaworthiness are all too interesting to be lightly dispensed with. In the present days of accurate charts, ingenious nautical instruments, and big, sound ships, one is a little too apt to imagine that the ships and the ability of their crews in ancient times were scarcely worthy of serious consideration—deserving of little more than ridicule. So many ill-informed artists, who have drawn on their imagination in the past to depict what they believed to be the ships of olden times, have been shown to be wrong and misleading, that there has been such a reaction as to make it difficult to obtain any definite legitimate picture in one’s mind. It is just such accounts written by contemporaries as that of the Goddess Isis that enable us once more to see the ships of the past in their true likeness and proportions.