CHAPTER VII
THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA
The history of shipping in an earlier chapter will also answer as a history of early international commerce. It began with the Egyptians and Phenicians, and was confined to their parts of the Mediterranean until after the middle ages, when it moved steadily to the western borders of Europe.
How great, rich, and influential were Tyre and its people we have already seen. A thousand years before the Christian era they controlled the commerce of the ancient world by reason of their wisdom as traders and their skill and energy as navigators and seamen. Turn to the twenty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, and see how the Phenician metropolis was regarded, even in the time of that prophet, six hundred years before Christ. These Syrians had gradually extended their commerce until it took in the whole known world; and by their caravans to and from the interior of Arabia, Persia, India, and the Soudan, by their trains (perhaps of pack-horses) across Europe, by their marine expeditions to the Nile,—which they forced open to trade, for ancient Egypt was much like China in its exclusiveness,—and by their ships to all the Mediterranean ports, and up and down the Atlantic coast, they gathered and exchanged in the bazaars of Tyre and Sidon the products, manufactures, and luxuries of every country that had anything to sell. To the Phenicians, indeed, was ascribed, by the Latin and Greek writers of a few centuries later, the invention of navigation; and even when Phenicia had become of little account as a nation, its conquerors noted with admiration the skill of the men of that coast in seamanship. “They steered by the pole-star, which the Greeks therefore called the Phenician star; and all their vessels, from the common round gaulos to the great Tarshish ships,—the East-Indiamen, so to speak, of the ancient world,—had a speed which the Greeks never rivaled.”
Later, in the days of the Roman supremacy, the trading-ships were as important to the country as its soldiers, for nearly every free man was in the army, and the slaves made poor farmers. A large part of the grain, as well as cattle, to supply the wants of the people, had to be brought from Egypt, which was pretty sure to have “corn,” as the Bible calls it, when the rest of the world was suffering from short crops. Egypt supplied grain to Rome during the second Punic war, thus enabling her to resist the invasion of Carthage, and it is possible that Rome’s later political alliance with Egypt was largely due to her interest in Egyptian crops. Large fleets of grain-ships, convoyed by armed vessels, were continually passing between the African coast and the Tiber, and so many were the risks they ran of wreck or capture, that the arrival of a flotilla with its precious freight of food was always a cause of rejoicing, at any rate, among the poor.
These merchant ships of classical times were broader and heavier than the war-galleys, and although they carried a few oars to help themselves in a difficulty, they ordinarily moved by means of sails, probably lugs. One of the grain-ships plying between Egypt and Italy about 150 A. D., according to Lucian, was one hundred and eighty feet long, slightly more than one fourth as broad, and forty-three and a half feet deep inside,— more like a barge than a “ship.” The largest used in this trade would carry about two hundred and fifty tons. The transports that accompanied one of Justinian’s fleets, A. D. 533, are stated to have carried one hundred and sixty to two hundred tons of supplies each.
These Roman vessels were made of pine, and were coated with a composition of tar and wax, then painted, often with elaborate decorations in bright colors, with pigments mixed with melted wax. Now and then one was built of truly vast proportions, as that one which brought from Egypt to Rome the first of the stolen obelisks.
A CAPTAIN IN THE MERCHANT MARINE.