"j^ : The Atlantic 



accounts with the Greek Hterary tradition. It is clear however that 

 the Homerian Greeks were not the first sailors though we have ac- 

 cepted them as our point of departure. At the time of the siege of 

 Troy, large fleets of ships were already in existence. It is clear there- 

 fore that there must have been a very long previous history of ship 

 building and at least coastwise sailing in the Mediterranean. 



In considering how far back the earlier histories of shipping may 

 run, there is an important point that can guide our thinking and 

 what will help to make the span of history intelligible to us. This 

 point of view, accepted by most major historians, anthropologists 

 and archaeologists, may be stated in this way: the farther back we go 

 in time the slower will be the rate of technical progress. The corol- 

 lary to this is that the farther down we come in time toward our 

 own day and the more numerous are the peoples and nations that 

 have access to a common body of knowledge, the faster are the steps 

 by which our arts develop. 



We may illustrate these points by referring to the development 

 of types of vessels. The ordinary Mediterranean merchant vessel 

 changed very slowly. Though it was a Httle larger and heavier, the 

 commercial vessel of Julius Caesar's day was not radically different 

 from the early Greek sailing ships though a period of almost a thou- 

 sand years lay between them; but on the other end of the scale, be- 

 tween the time that the packet ship was first developed and the time 

 when the clipper ship emerged there was a mere span of forty years; 

 and the period between which the clipper ship emerged and the time 

 when it was superseded by the steamer is still shorter. So when we 

 ask how long was the period of history of ships that preceded the 

 Homeric Age, we have to make allowance not in terms of hundreds 

 of years, but of thousands of years. 



Homer never acknowledged his debt to other storytellers and like- 

 wise the Greek shipbuilders never acknowledged where they got 

 their art. Rudyard Kipling put it in a ballad that is pure Cockney: 



"When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin lyre 

 E'd 'card men sing by land and sea, 

 And wot 'e thought 'e might require 7 



'E went and too\ — the same as me!' 



Both the stories and the ships seem to have owed a part of their ori- 

 gin to Greek contacts with the Minoan civilization. The Minoans, 

 of course, occupied the island of Crete and made it the heart of a 

 considerable Mediterranean empire long before the emergence of 



