SHIPS
OF THE SEVEN SEAS
CHAPTER I
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SHIPS
Imagine the world without ships. Mighty empires that now exist and have existed in the past would never have developed. Every continent—every island—would be a world alone. Europe, Asia, and Africa could have known each other, it is true, in time. North and South America might ultimately have become acquainted by means of the narrow isthmus that joins them. But without ships, Australia and all the islands of all the seas would still remain unknown to others, each supporting peoples whose limited opportunities for development would have prevented advanced civilization. Without ships the world at large would still be a backward, savage place, brightened here and there with tiny civilizations, perhaps, but limited in knowledge, limited in development and in opportunity. Without ships white men could never have found America. Without ships the British Empire could never have existed. Holland, Spain, Rome, Carthage, Greece, Phœnicia—none of them could ever have filled their places in world history without ships. Without ships the Bosphorus would still be impassable and the threat of Xerxes to Western civilization would never have been known. Greater still—far greater—without ships the Christian religion would have been limited to Palestine or would have worked its way slowly across the deserts and mountains to the South and East, to impress with its teachings the Arabs, the Assyrians, the Hindoos, and the Chinese.
Ships have made the modern world—ships have given the white man world supremacy, and ships, again, have made the English-speaking peoples the colonizers and the merchants whose manufactures are known in every land, whose flags are respected all around the globe, and whose citizens are now the most fortunate of all the people of the earth.
All of this we owe to ships.
Far back before the beginnings of history lived the first sailor. Who he was we do not know. Where he first found himself water-borne we cannot even guess. Probably in a thousand different places at a thousand different times a thousand different savage men found that by sitting astride floating logs they could ride on the surface of the water.
In time they learned to bind together logs or reeds and to make crude rafts on which they could carry themselves and some of their belongings. They learned to propel these rafts by thrusting poles to the bottoms of the lakes or rivers on which they floated. They learned, in time, how to make and how to use paddles, and as prehistoric ages gave way to later ages groping savages learned to construct rafts more easily propelled, on which platforms were built, to keep their belongings up above the wash of the waves that foamed about the logs.
And ultimately some long-forgotten genius hollowed out a log with fire, perhaps, and crude stone tools, and made himself a heavy, unwieldy canoe, which, heavy as it was and awkward, could still be handled much more readily than could the rafts that had served his forbears for perhaps a hundred centuries.
And with this early step forward in the art of ship-building came a little of the light that heralded the approaching dawn of civilization.