CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
A short time ago one of our Naval Museums came into possession of a certain model of a sailing ship. She was a fine vessel, one of the first of the old “wooden walls” to be built in the reign of the late Queen. The Curator wisely determined to have this model fully rigged with all her spars, sails, and gear, just as the original had been in her days of active service. Every detail was correct; every halyard and brace were made of proportionate thickness. Even the right kind of “stuff” was found, after some difficulty, for the cable. An efficient rigger, too, was found, who happened to have served on this same ship.
Finally, when the model was completed the Curator looked at it and said, “Now it will be possible for those who come after us to tell exactly how a sailing ship was rigged; in a few years’ time there won’t be a man alive who will know how to do it.”
It is with a similar desire, to preserve all that can be gathered, that an attempt is made in the present book to collect into one continuous narrative the historical data available concerning the evolution of that fast-disappearing object—the sailing ship. With the advent of steam was hoisted the signal for abolishing sail; and although for a long time the famous old clippers put up a keen fight, yet for commercial purposes, when passengers and mails, merchandise and perishable food, had to be hurried from one side of the world to the other without loss of time, it became impossible for a sailing ship, that depended so entirely on the mercy of wind and weather, to compete successfully with the steamship. By 1840, it will be remembered, steamers had commenced crossing the Atlantic, and within the next ten or fifteen years the sailing ship, except for such long voyages as to China, Australia, and other distant countries, was for ever doomed. Perhaps these beautiful creatures, oversparred and undermanned though they are nowadays, will be allowed, in spite of competition and low freights, to remain with us a little longer. It is probable that the introduction of the motor, instead of assisting to complete the departure of sails, will help in their being retained: for it has now been found commercially profitable to instal the internal-combustion engine in ships of a size not exceeding about seven hundred tons. By this means sail can be used in a fair wind, and the motor can take her along in calms, as well as in tolerable weather against a head wind. In entering harbours and leaving there will also be a saving of the charge for a tug. Perhaps when the marine-motor industry has become more perfect it will be possible to fit a sufficiently powerful motor to a 4000-ton barque.
If that should be possible, then it would be indeed welcome news to hear that the sluicing ebb of sailing ships and sailormen had stopped. (For, of course, no one nowadays, except perhaps the lady passenger, would ever think of honouring the marine mechanics on board a liner or battleship with the title of “sailor,” whose knowledge of seamanship is so elementary that they can as a rule neither sail a boat nor make a splice, let alone go up aloft.) But at present, when it is difficult to get enough officers and men for the steam merchant service, it is doubtful if the sailing ship, except in the case of a few deep-sea vessels and the coasters, fishermen, pilots, and yachts round our coasts, will be encouraged to remain with us.
In setting forth whatever may be of interest in the following pages I have, following the example of that illustrious Elizabethan, Richard Hakluyt, taken “infinite cares,” travelled many miles from port to port to talk with every kind of sailorman—deep-sea, coaster, or yacht’s hand—with fishermen, pilots, shipbuilders, riggers, marine architects, and sail-makers. In addition to this, I have been fortunate in gaining access to libraries containing, in various languages and of both ancient and modern date, invaluable accounts of ships of earlier days. The study of coins (curiously overlooked by some writers on ancient ships) has enabled me to submit some definite knowledge concerning craft of the classical age. The study of old fonts in this country, especially in those churches which were dedicated in the name of St. Nicholas, the patron of sailors, has helped to confirm the otherwise scanty evidence for the period between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. But perhaps the most valuable and interesting material is the illustration of an Egyptian sailing ship of the XII. Dynasty. This model, rigged for sailing up and rowing down the Nile, will be discussed in Chapter II. Hitherto we have had to depend for our knowledge of Egyptian ships on the illustrations found on the tombs. Although in recent years some models of boats have been discovered in these tombs, yet that which I am enabled to reproduce (Figs. 5 and 6) is the only one showing the boat properly rigged that has hitherto been unearthed. This model was discovered in the season of 1906-1907 at Rifeh, by Professor Flinders Petrie, and is the finest example that has yet reached England. It is now in the Manchester Museum, and I am indebted to Dr. Hoyle, the Director of the Museum, for his courtesy in enabling me to reproduce this very interesting model here.
Notwithstanding the deplorable fact that there are gaps existing at those critical stages where information would be the most welcome, it is nevertheless possible to construct a fairly continuous narrative of the development of the sailing ship. It will be noticed that in addition to the information to be found in ancient tombs of Egypt we have the evidence of ancient coins, vases, terra-cotta and wooden models, lamps, monuments, excavations in Scandinavia, England, Scotland, Germany. Coming to more modern times, there is the Bayeux Tapestry, with its excellent copy in the South Kensington Museum. We have, too, the pictorial representations on ancient seals and coins of this country. There are some reproductions of ships in old manuscripts; but it is an unfortunate fact that, except in comparatively modern times, it is rare to find the ship commemorated in paintings. Even when it is found, it is often represented with less regard to marine accuracy than to pictorial effect. When one considers the high position both Venice and Genoa occupied during the Middle Ages, alike in respect of art and maritime pursuits, it is difficult to understand why so remarkably few pictures of ships remain to us among the Old Masters. In both religious and secular paintings the ship is conspicuous by its absence. Perhaps it may be that artists had not received sufficient encouragement to paint marine subjects and that the gulf which to-day exists between the landsman and the sailor was equally great then.
However, various painters have seen fit to take the Pilgrimage of St. Ursula as their theme. Memling’s celebrated panels on the reliquary of that saint, now in St. John’s Hospital, Bruges, are of interest for our purpose, for no fewer than four of the six panels contain pictures of ships belonging to the period of the artist. The date of these miniatures is some time not later than the year 1489. Old printed books of the sixteenth century onwards frequently contain illustrations of ships of the time. Among the books, for instance, presented to the South Kensington Museum on the death of Lady Dilke will be found an interesting illustrated French translation of the Acts of the Apostles. The ships (of mediæval design) illustrating the Voyages of St. Paul are of value as showing the rig and details of the craft contemporary with the artist. These and similar illustrations, excepting always when the artist has become too fantastic and imaginative, are important links in connecting the story of the ships of ancient days with the modern full-rigged ship. Coming down to the seventeenth century, the paintings of the Dutch artists Jan Van de Cappelle, of Willem Van de Velde the younger, Bakhuizen, Ruisdael, and Cuyp give us the most interesting details as to rigging and hull. Claude’s picture, in the National Gallery, of the “Embarkation of St. Ursula,” painted towards the end of the seventeenth century, shows the high-pooped ship of his own day. Charles Brooking of the eighteenth century, Turner and Clarkson Stanfield of the nineteenth, show us in their pictures many invaluable minutiæ of sailing ships. And even if Ruskin’s criticism hold good, that Stanfield’s ships never look weather-beaten but “always newly painted and clean,” yet for our purpose this is no disadvantage; and it will be appreciated still more in a few years when our descendants go into art galleries to seek out from contemporary paintings the appearance of ships of the Victorian period.
Happily the ships of our day have been perpetuated by such admirable marine artists as Moore, Wyllie, Vicat Cole, Napier Hemy, Dixon, Somerscales, Tuke, and others. But in addition to pictures, we have at hand some hundreds of models of vessels in the South Kensington Museum, the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, the Royal United Service Museum, Whitehall, in the Louvre, in Continental churches, museums, and arsenals, and in many private collections. Some of these models in Greenwich and South Kensington have been rigged from historical information in the museums themselves. It is impossible to deny the important influence that these wonderful little ships may have on the youthful minds of our nation, which has had the privilege for so many years of being called maritime. But to the student of ships of any age they are the greatest aid in assisting him—far greater, indeed, than pages of description, far greater also than the work of any painter—to realise the vessels that carried our ancestors across the seas. I am as certain that we owe to the Government the greatest thanks for putting these facilities before the public as I am uncertain that the same public appreciates them in the manner they deserve.
From all these sources, then, already enumerated, we are to begin to reconstruct as far as possible the ships of all ages. If we should be accused of arguing at times by inference without actual facts before us, let us be allowed to say this much: there are signs in a ship’s lines and rigging which, to the landsman, are devoid of meaning, but to the man who has been wont to handle ships, and perhaps to design and build them, they are full of significance. Generally speaking, to the former a model is a nicely-carved piece of wood, adorned with a maze of complicated strings. Curves of hull, the position of the masts, the amount of sail area aft or forward, go for nothing. To the expert every inch of rope has its definite value, every line of her design speaks of speed or seaworthiness, or of the opposite. The careful balance of sails will show whether she is, to use sailor slang, “as handy as a gimlet” or as hard-mouthed a beast as ever was governed by a rudder. Therefore, if, in looking at the lines and rig of a ship of the Phœnicians, we should say, without being able to quote any historian of antiquity, that she would never go to windward because her sail area was deficient and her draught of water too slight, and assume from this that the Phœnicians always waited for a fair wind or rowed with oars, we must not be accused of proving too much. This is not a matter for the archæologist, but for the practised mariner with some knowledge of the theory of his art. Any sailor, for instance, on looking at a model or illustration of a Burmese junk (see Fig. 1), would tell you at once that her lines and rig are such as would make her useless for going against the wind. He knows this by inference. As a fact, he learns afterwards that, like the boats of the Egyptians—which she much resembles in general shape, in mast, and in sail—these junks can only sail before the wind (which is usually favourable) in ascending the river Irawadi, and return with the current.
A nation exhibits its characteristics, its exact state of progress and degree of refinement in three things: its art, its literature, and its ships. Indeed we might go so far as to affirm that these last are but a branch of the first. Just as the house was at first merely a thing of utility, becoming in the course of time adorned with carvings and decoration, so the ship, from being the rough, clumsy dug-out, with the advance of civilisation becomes adorned at first with animals’ heads, with eyes, with a human head, with coloured hull, and at a subsequent stage with sails bearing devices of high artistic merit. Finally, gilded portholes and gilded sterns were added to the ship, so that, to quote the description of Charles I.’s Sovereign of the Seas, “she was so gorgeously ornamented with carving and gilding that she seemed to have been designed rather for a vain display of magnificence than for the service of the State.”
The development of the ship, then, is parallel to the development of the State. In the rude ages she is a rough creature, remaining more like the tree out of which she is made than a thing of being. In the hands of a nation that has reached a high degree of civilisation, though she is still made of oak from the forest, yet she has lost all resemblance to the tree-trunk. Instead, she has acquired a most wonderful personality of her own. The wood of the tree has become merely the means of expressing the most admirable combination of delicacy and strength, of slender lines and powerful masses.
Thus we must go to the East, the birthplace of civilisation, to trace the beginnings of our subject. We shall for this reason start from Egypt and Phœnicia, and, tracing the development through Greek and Roman times, advance to Northern and Western Europe and further west still to America. And in covering a period of roughly 8000 years, in spite of the enormous difference in time, in nations, in geographical and other conditions, we shall find that no feature is more amazing than the extraordinary spirit of conservatism which has spread itself universally over both ships and their sailors. So remarkable are the examples of this, even under widely opposed conditions, that I have thought it worth while here to submit some of the more important ones as being worthy of special consideration.
First, let us take the shape of the Egyptian ship, from which the Greeks and Romans eventually obtained their shipbuilding ideas. The high poop and the rockered bow with its bold sweep aft have, it is not too much to assert, influenced the whole world’s shipping ever since. True, the ancient galleys of the Greeks and Romans possess a straighter keel and a pointed bow. But this was done for a purpose. These galleys were fighting ships; and as the ram had to be placed forward in such a manner that keel, stempost, and strut-frames centred their combined force at the extreme point, the shape of the bow could not follow that of the Egyptians. The keel, too, was flat and straight, because it was the custom of the Greeks and Romans to haul their galleys ashore nearly every night. Again, we must bear in mind that the Roman or Greek war vessel was primarily a rowing boat and not a sailing ship, and that mast and sail were always lowered before going into battle. Yet, for all that, the Greek vases bearing pictures of war galleys still show the Egyptian stern. But when we come to consider the Greek and Roman merchant ships, we find the Egyptian stern and a modified Egyptian bow unmistakably present. And we must remember that the merchant ships were primarily sailing ships and only used their oars as auxiliaries.
Throughout the ages many of these general lines of the Egyptian ships have been followed. We see them appearing in the prehistoric ships of Norway, in the Viking ships of old, and in the ships of the Baltic to-day. We see this conservatism in the ships of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, in the caravels and caracks and galleons of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We see it down to about the time of the Royal George in 1746; and even since then, when the great sweep from bow up to the extreme height of the poop-deck was modified until it practically disappeared, yet we find traces of it in the forecastle and raised quarter-deck of the modern sailing ship. And to continue the argument one step further, I suppose if you could by sending a current of electricity through one of the Egyptian naval architects, now lying as a mummy in one of our museums, bring him to life, so that you might take him to see the yachts racing during Cowes Week, he would not hesitate to say that such ships as White Heather II. and the newest Shamrock were based on the designs he had made for his masters under the Twelfth Dynasty. If the reader will take the trouble of comparing the Rifeh model (Figs. 5 and 6) with the lines of the latest British yachts now being built under the new universal rule, and then recollect how many years have passed in the interim, he will not cease to wonder that the same “overhang” at bow and stern is as prevalent on the Solent as it was on the Nile. Whatever else these facts may prove, they certainly show what a high state of civilisation the Egyptian had attained; more, perhaps, than we realise at present. The naval architects of that time must indeed have lacked as little that we could teach them in design nowadays as—we know from subsequent excavations—the shipbuilders of Viking times could learn from our shipbuilders of to-day.
An additional proof of the wisdom and knowledge of the ancients is to be found in the rig of their ships. The squaresail of the Egyptians was very like that used subsequently by the Greeks and Romans, and afterwards by the Vikings and many of the Norwegian and Russian ships to-day. It survived, moreover, beyond the Middle Ages, the only important difference being that three and sometimes two additional masts were provided with squaresails, with a lateen sail on the mizzen and a spritsail and sprit topsail forward. Thus, though the headsails of a modern full-rigged ocean ship have been altered during the last hundred and fifty years, yet the arrangement of her lower courses is practically that of the single sail of the Egyptians, omitting for the present certain details which do not alter the method of harnessing the wind as a means of propulsion. They had in these early times learned the value of stretching a sail on yards. They had, besides, understood where to place backstays and a forestay to support the mast, and they had adopted the use of braces to the yards as well as of topping lifts.
The eyes painted on the ships of the Greeks and Romans still survive to-day in the hawse holes on either side of a ship’s bow. And this belief of the ancients that by means of these eyes the vessel could see her way was but one article in the general creed still shared by every sailor, amateur and professional alike, that a ship, of all the creations of man, is indeed a living thing. Mr. F. T. Bullen, in a delightful little essay, has demonstrated the varying ways in which a ship will manifest her personality. In “The Way of the Ship” Mr. Bullen also remarks: “Kipling has done more, perhaps, than any other living writer to point out how certain fabrics of man’s construction become invested with individuality of an unmistakable kind, and of course so acute an observer cannot fail to notice how pre-eminently is this the case with ships.”
Though you may build two ships on the same yard from the same plans by the same builder, yet their personalities are different. The yachtsmen who elect to have a one-design class know very well that though you may raffle as to the ownership of each ship, yet there will always be one or two of the fleet that will be superior to the rest. But the ancients were before the yachtsmen in discovering that a mere contrivance of wood and metal should have a distinct character of its own.
The decoration of the bow and stern of the ship has existed for many hundreds of years; and though the figurehead was especially prominent during the Middle Ages, it is now fast disappearing both from sailing ships of commerce and from yachts also. On steamers it is hardly ever seen except on the steam yacht. The decorated stern, too, so prevalent up to the eighteenth century, has now vanished; although the final traces of this may be noticed in the old-fashioned architecture to which the modern Royal steam yachts of this country still cling, and in the gold beading which frequently ornaments the name of a steamship under her stern.
In Northern latitudes we find the most extraordinary cases of historical obstinacy; the rig and hull of the Scandinavians have remained practically unaltered for some two or three thousand years. The very word “snekkja,” applied to the ancient longships of the Scandinavians, is still used to-day. Moreover, the “bonnet,” which was attached to the foot of the sail to give additional area—unlaced, of course, in dirty weather—was used by the Vikings; was adopted from them by the ships of mediæval England; and is still used to-day by the ships of Scandinavia, and in England by the Lowestoft “drifters” that go forth to fish in the North Sea, as well as by the pleasure and trading wherries that sail up and down the Norfolk Broads. Fig. 2 shows a Norwegian “jaegt,” with bonnet and bowlines.
The influence of this dogged conservative spirit of the Norwegians is to be seen extending over Great Britain in other ways. No one who has visited the Orkney and Shetland Isles can have failed to have noticed the close similarity between their boats and those of the Norwegian. Until about forty years ago their fishing boat was exactly a Norwegian “yawl,” the most obvious descendant from the lines of a Viking ship. Indeed, until about the year 1860 all the larger fishing boats of the Shetlands were imported in boards direct from Norway ready for putting together at Lerwick. The type is still farther preserved in the whale-boats that are despatched from the mother ships in various parts of the world to harpoon the cachalot. And, not to weary the reader with yet more examples of the great influence which these Viking ships have had on the naval architecture of our country, it is interesting to remark that the latest fashion in yacht design is the so-called “canoe-stern” or “double-ender.” This, of course, derives its inspiration from the Norwegian ships of the present day; and, as we have already said, they in their turn have conservatively held to the models of their ancestors. Whether, as some have thought, the Viking “double-ender” can trace a direct descent from the ships of Egypt is a point that we must defer to another chapter.
Next to the squaresail rig, none has survived so persistently as the lateen. I think that in all probability it was adapted, a few centuries before the introduction of Christianity, from the Egyptian squaresail. Its very appearance and the corner of the world in which it is found as the prevailing rig both suggest that. It is reasonable to assume that in the course of years, when the more experienced Easterns began to discover the art of sailing against the wind and to find that the rig of the Nile boats was not suitable for this, there would be evolved a modification of the Egyptian sail to allow of tacking. This, probably, was the origin of the lateen sail of the dhow. It is of extreme antiquity, and has endured with but little alteration from the time of Alexander the Great, about 350 B.C. The prevalence of this kind of rig in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, off the East Coast of Africa, especially as far south as Zanzibar, is well known. The fact that it is still found everywhere up and down the Mediterranean, on the Nile and on Swiss lakes, shows how firmly established did this lateen rig become in the course of time. As we shall see, at a subsequent stage the lateen sail was adopted by our mediæval ships for the mizzen, and this continued right down till the close of the eighteenth century. It will assist us to realise this conservatism if we remember that the ships of St. Paul’s time were of a similar kind to these Eastern ships of which we are now speaking. Let me here be allowed to quote again from an author who has sailed in every sea and been preserved to tell us in so many charming records what many others have seen but not troubled to notice. In a further essay on “The Sea in the New Testament” Mr. Bullen, referring to the ships in which St. Paul voyaged, remarks:
“On the East African coast, even to this day, we find precisely the same kind of vessels, the same primitive ideas of navigation, the same absence of even the most elementary notions of comfort, the same touching faith in its being always fine weather as evinced by the absence of any precautions against a storm.
“Such a vessel as this [i.e., St. Paul’s] carried one huge sail bent to a yard resembling a gigantic fishing-rod, whose butt, when the sail was set, came nearly down to the deck, while the tapering end soared many feet above the masthead. As it was the work of all hands to hoist it, and the operation took a long time, when once it was hoisted it was kept so if possible, and the nimble sailors, with their almost prehensile toes, climbed by the scanty rigging and, clinging to the yard, gave the sail a bungling furl.” Again, referring to the sailors’ activities on the ship in which St. Paul was sailing, Mr. Bullen goes on: “They sounded and got twenty fathoms, and in a little while found the water had shoaled to fifteen. Then they performed a piece of seamanship which may be continually seen in execution on the East African coast to-day—they let their anchors down to their full scope of cable and prayed for daylight. The Arabs do it in fair weather or foul—lower the sail, slack down the anchor, and go to sleep. She will bring up before she hits anything.” I have received a like testimony from one who has also cruised in those parts within recent years.
The prevalence of the fighting top has been maintained from the time of the Egyptians down to the present day. To mention but a few instances, the fighting top is seen in a battleship of Rameses III. (about B.C. 1200), and it is found on ancient seals of the thirteenth century of the present era, and so on, of course, through the Middle Ages to our latest battleships.
From the times of the Egyptians the stern was always reserved for the owner or captain and officers. This custom was that of the Greeks, the Romans, the Vikings, and the English right down to the building of H.M.S. Dreadnought a short while ago, when the longstanding practice of the officers being quartered aft and the men forward was for the first time broken, to the satisfaction, I understand, of neither officers nor men. There has always been a sense of reverence on the part of the sailor for the poop-deck, and though in the Merchant Service many of the old ways have recently disappeared, yet the custom in the Navy, of “saluting the deck” in honour of the Sovereign is, of course, well known. In ancient illustrations we see the place of honour always placed aft.
Finally we must needs refer to the extraordinary longevity of the Mediterranean galley. Adapted from the Egyptians by the Greeks and afterwards the Romans, it flourished, especially in the Adriatic, up to the sixteenth century in a modified form, and only the advent of steam finally closed its career. Even now the gondola will be recognised as bearing a family likeness, and the prow of the latter still shows the survival of the spear-heads which were used in the manœuvre of ramming.
These, then, are some of the characteristics that have been persistent during the course of development of the sailing ship. Each national design and each nation’s rig are the survival of all that has been found to be the best for that particular locality. The more ships a nation builds, the more they sail to other ports—seeing other kinds of ships, comparing them with their own, and adopting whatever is worth while—so much the faster does the ship improve. This, indeed, has been the custom throughout the history of the English nation. When she sent her ships to the Mediterranean at the time of the Crusades, her sailors returned home with new ideas. Thus, the ships in which Richard, with his large fleet, voyaged to Palestine in 1190 would be still of the Viking type. Only a hundred and thirty years had elapsed since William the Conqueror landed in similar boats, as we know from the Bayeux tapestry. When Richard was in the Mediterranean he was joined by a number of galleys. It is not assuming too much to say that an exchange of visits would be made between the crews of the respective ships. The difference in ships would most certainly be criticised, for of all people who inhabit this planet, none are more critical of each other’s possessions than sailormen. The Mediterranean inhabitants, having reached civilisation earlier than the dwellers of Northern Europe, and having had the advantage of living nearer, both historically and geographically, to the first builders of ships, would no doubt have been far in advance of the shipbuilders of Northern Europe. Therefore, it is fairly certain that the English returned from the Crusades knowing far more of maritime matters than when they had set out. At any rate, it is significant that the illustrations of ships of the date of 1238, or about fifty years after Richard set forth to the East, show the Viking-like ship greatly modified. The beginnings of the stern-castle and fore-castle and of fighting top are now seen. It seems to me highly probable that the idea for these was obtained from the galleys, still influenced in their architecture by the methods of fighting adopted by the Greeks and the Romans.
The English nation, more than perhaps any other, has been characterised not so much by her inventiveness as by her skill in adapting other nations’ ideas. The present age of electricity and other inventions illustrates the general truth of this statement. Thus, her ships of to-day are the result of continually improving on the designs of other nations. From Norway she got her first sailing ships; from the Mediterranean she assuredly derived considerable knowledge in maritime matters generally. Certainly from Spain she learned much of the art of navigation, of rigging and of shipbuilding. From the French, as we go down through time, she acquired a vast increase of her knowledge of ship-designing and shipbuilding. Not the least of this was the importance to a vessel of fine lines. The Dutch taught us a good deal of seamanship and tactics, as we know from Pepys’s Diary. Finally, about the year 1850, after the American clippers had raced all our big ships of the mercantile marine off the ocean, England learned to build clippers equally fast and superior in strength, and so regained the sea-carrying trade she had lost. In yacht designing also she has learned much from American architects, as the Germans within the last few years have learned from us.
Sailing ships are the links which bind country to country, continent to continent. They have been at once the means of spreading civilisation and war. It is a fact that the number of new ships to be built increases proportionately as the trade of a country prospers, and one of the first signs of bad trade is the decrease in the shipbuilder’s orders. But, good trade or bad trade, peace or war, there will always be a summons in the sea which cannot be resisted. It summoned the Egyptians to sail to the land of Punt to fetch incense and gold. It summoned the Phœnicians across the Bay of Biscay to the tin mines of Cornwall. It called the Vikings to coast along the Baltic shores for pillage and piracy. It called the Elizabethans to set forth from Bristol and London in order to find new trade routes, new markets for their goods, fresh sources of their imports. It calls some for trade, some for piracy, some for mere adventure, as in the case of the yachtsman of to-day. It seduces ships from the safety of snug harbours only to be tossed about by the billows of a trackless expanse. The sea ever has been, ever is, and ever will be, uncertain, fickle, unkind. In spite of the fact that for 8000 years and more shipbuilders, designers, and seamen have by experience and invention sought every possible means to overcome its terrors and to tame its fury; in spite of the fact that these men have never succeeded in getting the upper hand, yet the call of the sea will ever be obeyed. When once she has fascinated you, when once you have consented to her cry and got the salt into your veins, you become as much the slave of the sea as any Roman underling that pulled at the oar of an ancient galley. The sea calls you; you hoist up your sails, and come.