If we turn now to the materials wherewith the ships of the ancients were constructed we shall find that they here differed as much from the practice of modern nations, at least in the north, as in the form and style of rigging. With us scarcely anything but oak or teak is employed in those parts which come in contact with the water, whereas the Greeks constructed their war galleys, in which speed was of the greatest moment, of fir,[[1688]] while they chiefly made use of pitch pine in the building of merchantmen, as that wood long resists the corrosive action of the sea.
The Cypriotes appear in all cases to have given the preference to the pine which abounds in the island, and was esteemed superior to the pitch tree,[[1689]] though the latter was sometimes appropriated to the building of ships of war. Among the Syrians and Phœnicians, in whose country a supply of pine was not to be obtained,[[1690]] the custom prevailed of building ships entirely of cedar.[[1691]] The practice of employing oak[[1692]] had, likewise, already been introduced, though it does not appear to have been common; but in the larger classes of ships the keel was always of that timber, in order that, when drawn on shore, it might be able to sustain the weight of the superincumbent mass. In the holcades or merchantmen, the keel, like the ship itself, was of pitch pine; but all such vessels were in those days supplied with a false keel, called chelysma,[[1693]] of oak, or oxya, designed to act as a protection when they were drawn up into dry dock. Masts and yards were commonly of the silver fir;[[1694]] oars of such timber as grew on the northern slopes of mountains.[[1695]] The turned work used in ornamenting the interior was commonly of mulberry, ash, elm, or platane wood, of which the last was least esteemed.[[1696]]
Sails were made and manufactured from a variety of materials. It has been seen above, in speaking of the Egyptian war ships, that they sometimes consisted of a number of hides sown together. They were, likewise, in various countries, plaited, as now in China,[[1697]] from reeds, or rushes, but the sailcloth of the Greeks was generally, like our own, woven from hemp.[[1698]] For this, in Egypt, the papyrus was sometimes substituted. Princes and grandees occasionally, in their pleasure-boats, employed, in lieu of these rude materials, cotton or fine linen, dyed, to augment their beauty, of the most brilliant purple. To this Shakespeare alludes in the following passage, which though familiar, perhaps, to the reader, I must, nevertheless, beg permission to quote:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burnt on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick with ’em: the oars were silver;
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,