The introduction of this construction made boats of considerable size possible, and for the first time boats larger than anything that could possibly be called a canoe were successfully floated.
From this form a further step was ultimately made in which the various parts were fastened together by the use of wooden pegs, and this was the most advanced type long centuries after the dawn of history. The Nile was navigated by such boats at the height of Egypt’s civilization, and Homer describes this type of boat as the one in which Ulysses wandered on his long and wearisome journey home.
While the art of boat-building had been travelling this long, slow way, the art of propulsion had not been idle. Long since, the simple pole of the early savage had lost its usefulness, for men soon learned to navigate waters too deep for poles. The paddle followed, and was perfected to a very high point, as its use in all parts of the world still testifies.
But further means were still to come, and by the time Ulysses started on his journey from the fallen city of Troy, both the sail and the oar, which for three thousand years were to be supreme as propelling forces, had come into use.
In Ulysses’s boat, therefore, we see for the first time a combination of structural features and propelling agents that compare, remotely though it may be, with ships as they are to-day. A built-up structure with a framework, propelled by sails—it was an early counterpart of the ships of the present time.
Naturally enough this development did not take place simultaneously in all parts of the world. The most advanced civilizations such as those of Phœnicia, Greece, and China developed the most advanced ship-building methods, just as they developed the most advanced arts and sciences and thought and religion.
For instance, when Columbus discovered America a vital factor in the development of ships was entirely unknown to the natives that he found. No Indian tribe with which he or later explorers came in contact had learned the use of sails to propel the canoes they almost universally used. Civilizations of surprising worth, with art and architecture in high stages of advancement, had existed and had practically disappeared in Yucatan and Central America, and other civilizations of genuine attainment were later found, by Cortes and Pizarro, in Mexico and Peru, yet none of them knew the uses of the sail.
On the other hand, the Egyptians and the Phœnicians used the sail, and twenty-five centuries before the discovery of America the Phœnicians are thought to have sailed their ships around the continent of Africa from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.
But while the art of ship-building progressed more rapidly after the development of the use of wooden pegs for fastenings, and the use of sails and oars made possible more extended sea journeys, still the development was slow, and until the discovery of the power of steam in the latter part of the 18th Century no revolutionary changes in ships took place.
Just when the method originated of first constructing the frame of the ship and of covering this frame with planks, we do not know, but the transition from the method in use at the time of Homer was simple and the change was probably gradual.