when they were enabled to resume their journey. Such methods, of course, demanded a longer time than more able seamen would have required, but the Egyptians were in no hurry, so it mattered not. It is patent enough, from the many representations which we find of craft on the Egyptian monuments which have been unearthed, that ships and boats played a highly important part in the life and habits of the Egyptians; but beyond the funereal customs and the connection which these craft had with their religious ideas, we know but little, if we except those models and those representations of their bigger ships seen with sail and mast. It is unquestionable that the shipbuilding industry was one of the most important activities which these Nile-dwellers engaged in; and illustrations still exist which show a shipwright’s yard of the Sixth Dynasty. We can see the men busily at work, whilst the dockyard manager or superintendent is carried in a kind of Sedan-chair to see how the work is progressing. Some are engaged hammering and chipping away at the wood that is to become a boat; some are fixing the different sections in place; whilst others are setting up the truss which was employed for preventing the ship from “hogging.”
But already by the close of the Third Dynasty, Professor Flinders Petrie says, the Egyptian shipbuilders were using quite large supplies of wood for their craft. In one year alone, Senofern constructed sixty ships and imported forty ships of cedar. When we consider that the Nile was the great national highway of Egypt, it was but natural that shipbuilding should be one of the most important trades. There were, first, the light skiffs which could be easily carried from place to place. There were also the larger freight-carriers which sailed the Nile and the open sea; and lastly, there were the houseboats, a kind of modern dahabeeah. The small skiffs were made of reeds for lightness, and coated with pitch. They were punted along the shallows with a pole, or paddled. They could carry only a couple of people, and were practically ferry-boats or dinghies. But the larger boats were built of wood, and probably sometimes of acacia. The masts were of fir which was imported from Syria, the sails being occasionally of papyrus, but probably also of linen.
The lotus plant played a conspicuous part in Egyptian shipbuilding. We see the smaller craft being strengthened by the stalks of this plant, bundles of which are depicted being carried down to the yard on the backs of the shipwright’s men. The tail-piece, even of the biggest sea-going craft, is shown to be in the shape of a lotus bud or flower. That they knew how to build ships of great tonnage at these dockyards is evident from the fact that Sesostris had a sacred barge constructed that was 280 cubits long. And it was doubtless owing to the great length of the Nile sailing ships, and their consequent inability to turn quickly, that we find it unusual for the Egyptian ships to have only a single steering oar; very frequently there was one each side at the quarter.
More than this it is difficult to state regarding the manner in which they employed their ships. There is indeed very much that we should like to know, and we cannot be too thankful that modern exploration has actually revealed so many pictorial representations. The Egyptians were not instinctively seamen as the Phœnicians and the Vikings, and if there had been no Nile it is probable that the sea and its coast might have meant even less to them than was actually the case. Nor was it any different with the Assyrians, whose kings feared the sea for a long time. They never ventured on its surface without being absolutely compelled. At a later stage, when their victories brought them to the shores of the Mediterranean, they were constrained to admire its beauty, and presently even took a certain amount of pleasure in sailing on its bosom, but nothing would tempt them far from land or to make a voyage.
But then there came a new precedent when Sennacherib embarked his army on board a fleet and went in search of the exiles of Bit-Iakin. The only ships that were at his disposal were those belonging to the Chaldean States. These craft were in every way unsuitable; they were obsolete, clumsy, heavy, bad sea-boats, and slow. During his wars, however, he had seen the famous sailors of Sidon, and noted alike the progress which these seafarers had made in actual shipbuilding, and in the handling of their craft at sea. These were of course Phœnicians, and among his prisoners Sennacherib found a sufficient number of Phœnicians to build for him a fleet, establishing one shipbuilding yard on the Euphrates and another on the Tigris. The result was that they turned out a number of craft of the galley type with a double row of oarsmen. These two divisions of newly built craft met on the Euphrates not far from the sea, the Euphrates being always navigable. The contingent from the Tigris, however, had to come by the canal which united the two rivers. And then, manned with crews from Tyre and Sidon, and Cypriot Greeks, the fleet went forth to its destination; Sennacherib then disembarked his men and rendered his expedition victorious.
Here, then, is just another instance of a non-seafaring people taking to the sea not from choice, not from instinct, but from compulsion—because there was no other alternative; and all the time employing seafaring mercenaries to perform a work that was strange to landsmen, just as in later days at different periods (until they themselves had grown in knowledge and experience), the English had to import sailors from Friesland in the time of Alfred, or Italians in the early Tudor period. The sea was still hardly more than a half-opened book, and few there were who dared to look into its pages.
CHAPTER III
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MARINE INSTINCT
But when we come to the Phœnicians we are in touch with a veritable race of seamen who to the south are in just the same relation as the Vikings are to the north. Whether they took to the sea because they longed to become great merchants, or whether they were seamen first and employed their daring to commercial benefit needs no discussion. They had the true vocation for the sea, and it was inevitable that sooner or later they must become mighty explorers and traders.
They had the real ship-love, which is the foundation of all true seamanship; they were in sympathy with the life and work, and they knew how to build a ship well. They furnished themselves with the finest timber from Lebanon and surpassed the Egyptian inland sailors by making their craft stronger, longer, more seaworthy, and more able to endure the long, daring voyages which it delighted the Phœnicians to undertake. Similarly, their crews were better trained to sea-work, were more daring and skilful than the Nile-dwellers. They minded not to sail out of sight of land, nor lay-to for the darkness to pass away. They were wont to sail the open sea fearlessly direct from Tyre or Sidon to Cyprus, and thence to the promontories of Lycia and Rhodes, and so from island to island to the lands of the Acheans, the Daneans, and further yet to Hesperia. How did they do it? What were their means and methods for navigation?
The answer is simply made. They observed the position of the sun by day. They would watch when the sun rose, when it became south, when it set, and then by night there was the Great Bear by which to steer. Their ships they designated “sea-horses,” and the expression is significant as denoting strength, speed, and reliability. By their distant voyages the Phœnicians began to open out the world, and they contributed to geographical knowledge more than all the Egyptian dynasties put together had ever yielded under this category. Their earliest craft were little more than mere open boats which were partially decked. Made of fir or cedar cut into planks, which were fashioned into craft all too soon before the wood had sufficient time to become seasoned, they were caulked probably with bitumen, a poor substitute for vegetable tar. We know from existing illustrations that the Egyptian influence as to design was obvious in their ships. We know also that the thirty or more oarsmen sat not paddling, but rowing facing aft, and that they used the boomless squaresail and shortened sail by means of brails.
“The first considerable improvement in shipbuilding which can be confidently ascribed to the Phœnicians,” says Professor Rawlinson,1 “is the construction of biremes. Phœnician biremes are represented in the Assyrian sculptures as early as the time of Sennacherib (700 B.C.), and had probably then been in use for some considerable period. They
