AN EGYPTIAN BOAT OF THE 5TH DYNASTY
The double mast, shown in this drawing, was in common use in Egypt about 3000 B. C. It is occasionally to be seen on native boats in the Orient to-day.
Sails, then, progressed little, save in size, beyond the skin that first was stretched before the breeze in some remote savage genius’s canoe, and, until the Crusades began at the end of the 11th Century, sails and spars remained simple and, from the viewpoint of to-day, comparatively inefficient. With a favouring wind ships could hoist their sails and proceed merrily enough, but with a wind even mildly unfavourable sailors sometimes lay in sheltered harbours for weeks or got out their oars and proceeded on their way with strenuous labour.
When ships first began to utilize sails to go in directions other than approximately that in which the wind blew is unknown. Certainly ships propelled by even the crudest sails could do more than drift before the wind, and as hulls became longer and deeper, they were, of course, able to sail more and more to the right and left. When, however, ships first were able to make headway against the wind is problematical. Certain it is that for many thousand years after sails were known there seems to have been no connection in the minds of ship-builders between the use of sails and the construction of the underbodies of their ships so as to interpose any especial obstacle to the water in order to prevent the undue motion of their hulls sideways. Naturally enough, the very earliest of ships was constructed with the idea of ease of propulsion forward, but, so long as that object was gained, the shape of the hull, apparently, gave them little thought save in so far as space was needed for crew and cargo. Designs were brought out, of course, that were increasingly sturdy and seaworthy, but fin keels, or similar contrivances, are a development of recent times.
Ships there were, of course, even in ancient times, that were driven exclusively, or almost exclusively, by sails, but the fact that these ships, and many that depended largely on oars, were hauled high and dry and carefully laid up during the less favourable seasons would seem to prove that except under ideal conditions sails, as they were then, were highly impractical affairs.
The earliest sails of which there is definite record are those shown in carvings of ships on ancient Egyptian temples. These were hardly more complicated than the skins of the theoretical savage who first utilized the energy of the wind. They were made of cloth and were rectangular and were stretched between two spars—one at the top and one at the bottom—and these spars were raised and lowered in the process of making or taking in sail.
AN EGYPTIAN SHIP OF THE 12TH DYNASTY
It is possible that ships of this type were able, under ideal conditions, to make a little headway, while under sail, against the wind. It was not for many, many centuries, however, that sailing ships were able definitely to make much headway in that direction.
Now this method of stretching a sail is not inefficient. The cloth can be held more or less flat, and such a sail could, if the hull of the ship were so constructed as almost to prevent lateral motion, propel the hull in the direction it was pointed, even though that direction were at right angles to the wind. If the hull were properly designed, such a sail might readily be made to propel the hull at a little less than at right angles, and, once that were done, the ship would actually be making headway against the wind. It is quite conceivable that the Egyptians had perfected this art—not, perhaps, with the sail I have mentioned, but with a later development of this sail when the lower spar had disappeared and the upper spar had become greatly elongated and was set at an angle to the mast, so that from it depended a great triangular sail, called, now, a lateen sail.