A course of reading should always begin with the study of general principles, in order that in your subsequent and more detailed examination of the field, the relative importance of each fact that you master may be appreciated. The Britannica provides, in the article Commerce (Vol. 6, p. 766), a bird’s-eye view of the whole subject of marine transportation. The article would not fill more than 16 pages of this Guide; you can read it (and digest it as you read it, so clear is it) in an hour, and yet it will give you such a grasp of the whole science—for it is a science—of international trade that you will spend another hour in assorting and classifying, in your own mind, a mass of impressions you had received before, at school or in the course of casual reading, impressions which have not been so useful to you as they should have been because they had not been systematically arranged. There is no text book in existence which outlines the subject so fully and clearly as does this one brief article—about one five-thousandth part of the total contents of the Britannica.
This article will arouse your interest in the direct relation between commerce, past, present and future, and the progress of civilization. You will realize that the man who has any part in the vast shifting of cargoes from one part of the world to another is distributing ideas and ideals and ambitions as well as commodities, and in the article Civilization (Vol. 6, p. 403), by Dr. Henry Smith Williams, editor of The Historians’ History of the World, you will see how harbours receive and send on to the inlands the influences as well as the manufactures of the more advanced communities.
From these articles you should turn to the three great articles which deal with the methods by which these wonderful results are accomplished. These three are Ship, Shipbuilding and Shipping, all in volume 24, and equivalent to about 420 or 425 pages of this Guide. These three articles contain hundreds of illustrations, more than forty being full page plates. They are by the most eminent authorities. Sir Philip Watts, director of naval construction for the British Navy, designer of the Dreadnoughts and the Super-Dreadnoughts of the British Navy, as well as of the “Mauretania” and the “Lusitania,” chairman of the Federation of Shipbuilders, and naval architect and director of the warshipbuilding department of Armstrong, Whitworth & Co., Ltd., wrote the articles Shipbuilding and Ship (except the history of ships before the invention of steamships, which is by Edmund Warre, provost of Eton, well-known as a writer on nautical history). The article Shipping is by Douglas Owen, lecturer at the Royal Naval War College and author of Ports and Docks.
In brief, these three articles in length, contents,—both text and illustrations,—and authorship, make up a remarkable book on the subject, valuable either as a text-book or a work of reference for the ship builder, the marine engineer or the student of shipping.
Story of the Ship
Taking the articles separately, the article Ship begins with a section of nearly 10,000 words on the early development of ships. It suggests that shells floating on the water or the nautilus may first have suggested the use of a hollowed tree-trunk for transportation—the first boat or “ship” (the word comes from the same root as “scoop”) as distinct from a raft. The evolution of boat building is traced,—from dug-out to bark- or skin-covered frame, built like modern racing-shells sometimes ribs first and then skin laid on and sometimes shell first and then ribs inserted. In spite of the great length of the period during which such boats were used—of course they are still used by more primitive peoples,—it is interesting to notice that there were local variations which never became general, such as the outrigger and weather platform, used in the South Pacific and not found elsewhere.
Egyptian vessels we may study in the excellent early tomb-paintings still preserved, and one of these shows a ship, not a canoe or large boat, such as was in use from 3000–1000 B. C., fitted with oars and a mast in two pieces which could be lowered and laid along a high spardeck.
The Phoenicians did more than the Egyptians to develop ship and navigation, and a Phoenician galley of the 8th century B. C. is shown in an Assyrian wall painting. The Phoenicians probably sailed out of the Mediterranean, to Britain for tin, or even around Africa.
Greek ships and shipbuilding we know from a full and varied national literature, from the figures on coins and vases, and from the discovery in 1834 at the Peiraeus, the port of Athens, of records of Athenian dockyard superintendents for several years between 373 and 324 B.C. We have besides descriptions, partly technical, showing the point of view of the engineer or architect, written by Roman authors. The article gives a critical account of the Greek types of vessels. The growth of Roman shipping seems to have been due primarily to political reasons and to have advanced slowly but surely,—practical devices being introduced to solve special difficulties in a field and on an element where the Romans were far from being at home. A five-tiered Carthaginian galley which had drifted ashore served the Romans as a model for their first war-ship, and with crews taught to row in a framework set up on dry land they manned a fleet which was launched in sixty days from the time that the trees were felled.
Mast and Sail