The labour of the rowers, which must have been excessive, was cheered by a musician appointed for the purpose, who at the same time contributed, by his voice and his instrument, to make the rowers keep time and pull together. This office could have been no sinecure; and the lungs of the musician must have been formed of no ordinary materials.
Steering by fixed stars.The heavenly bodies (continues our author) were observed by sailors on a twofold account; being of use to them in prognosticating the Which were the chief stars observed by the ancients.seasons, and as guides to direct their course. The chief stars observed in foretelling the weather were Arcturus, the Dog-star, Aræ, Orion, Hyades, Hædi, Castor and Pollux, Helena, &c. It was likewise Reliance upon omens of various kinds.customary to take notice of various omens offered by sea-fowl, fishes, and divers other things, as the murmuring of the floods, the shaking and buzzing noise of trees in the neighbouring woods, the dashing of the billows against the shore, and many more, in all which good pilots were nicely skilled. As to the direction in their voyage, the first practitioners in the art of navigation, being unacquainted with the rest of the celestial motions, steered all the day by the course Exclusive course by the sun practised in early times.of the sun, betaking themselves at night to some safe harbour, or making fast their vessel to, and sleeping on, shore; not daring to venture to sea till their guide had risen to discover the way: that this was their constant custom, may be observed from the ancient descriptions of those times, whereof, says Potter, I shall only give the following instance:
Sol ruit interea, et montes umbrantur opaci,
Sternimur optatæ gremio telluris ad undam,
Sortiti remos, passimque in littore sicco
Corpora curamus, fessos sopor irrigat artus.—Æneid, iii. v. 508.
Afterwards the Phœnicians, who some will have to be the first inventors of navigation, discovered the motions of other stars, as may be observed in Pliny (lib. vii.), and Propertius (lib. ii. v. 990). We find the Phœnicians to have been directed by Cynosura, or the Lesser Bear (which was first observed, in the opinion of some, by Thales the Milesian); when the mariners of Greece, as well as of other nations, steered by the Greater Bear, called Helice. For the first observation of this they were obliged to Nauplius, if we may believe Theon; or, according to the report of Flaccus (Argonaut 1), to Tiphys, the pilot of the celebrated Argo. But of these two, we are told by Theon, the former was the securer guide, and therefore was followed by the Phœnicians, who for skill in marine affairs outstripped not only all the rest of the world, but even the Grecians themselves.
RATES OF SAILING OF ANCIENT VESSELS.
The general rate of sailing of the vessels of the ancients appears to be even lower than we might naturally expect from their clumsy and imperfect construction. This will be sufficiently evident from the examples collected of their voyages, by the justly-celebrated author of the Illustrations of Herodotus, a work which we are sorry to say has become extremely scarce, since there are few books whose circulation would be more advantageous to those who value historical and geographical research.
It will be seen, from a view of the examples in question, that the mean rate of sailing of the best-equipped vessels of antiquity, was no more than thirty-five and thirty-seven geographic miles per day, equivalent to two and a half or three geographic miles an hour, taking the day at twelve hours. We will give them in Major Rennell’s own words.