SHIP. 



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Vie, as they were drawn on shore at the termina- ( 

 tion of every voyage, and had but a single mast and ! 

 sail of cloth, or at first of leather, managed with 

 ropes of the same, or of bark, broom, or hemp. 

 When, however, the keel was added, and the size 

 increased, stranding became no longer practicable, 

 and the anchor and cable were invented to confine 

 the ship at a due distance from the land. At first, 

 this useful machine was but a large stone ; it was 

 afterwards of wood and stone combined, and lastly 

 of iron, having teeth; the largest anchor, called 

 the sacred, was only cast in extremity. In the 

 progress of enlarging their ships, there is no doubt 

 that the ancients attained, at length, a size quite 

 equal to the most monstrous of modern times. 

 Even deducting much from the recorded size of the 

 cedar ship of Sesostris, and the Isis of Ptolemy 

 Philopator ; or from the more wonderful ship which 

 Archimedes constructed at the order of Hiero, with 

 its wood for fifty galleys ; its banqueting rooms, 

 galleries, stables, baths, fish-ponds ; its floors inlaid 

 with scenes from Homer's Iliad; its temple of 

 Venus, and many other wonders, the subject of a 

 whole book ; deducting much from this as fabu- 

 lous, or even rejecting the whole, there remains a 

 testimony to the occasionally enormous size of the 

 ancient ships, which it is impossible to evade. 

 This is the account of the ship in which the largest 

 of the obelisks of Heliopolis was removed to Rome. 

 We are told that Augustus, having removed two, 

 dared not venture upon a third, of still vaster pro- 

 portions, which stood before the temple of the sun. 

 The enterprise, which was too great for Augustus, 

 did not deter Constantine, who ordered the enor- 

 mous block to be removed to Byzantium. He died 

 before this was done, and his son Constantius en- 

 larged upon the idea, and undertook to convey it to 

 Rome. In this he succeeded; for the obelisk, 

 though weighing fifteen hundred tons, was safely 

 erected in the circus of the Vatican, where it still 

 stands. We read that, besides the obelisk, the 

 vessel carried eleven hundred and thirty-eight tons 

 of pulse ; this undoubtedly was all placed towards 

 one end of the ship, to aid the decreasing size and 

 weight of the upper part in balancing the base. 

 Thus we have a Roman ship laden with twenty-six 

 hundred tons ; the Santissima Trinidad could have 

 carried no more. These enormous productions, 

 like the obelisks themselves, owed their existence 

 not less to the hardy genius than the despotic in- 

 stitutions of the times; that they were unmanage- 

 able masses, and were regarded in those times as 

 monsters, may be gathered, not merely from their 

 names of Cyclades or JEtna, but from the single 

 fact that a ship of only fifty-six tons is instanced, 

 by Cicero, for her magnitude. 



Such was naval architecture in the ages prior to 

 the Gothic invasion, which drove this art, with 

 every other, back into barbarity. We are told that 

 the ships in which the Saxon pirates cruised in the 

 German ocean, and invaded Britain, were made 

 with a wooden keel, sides and upper works of 

 wicker, and an exterior of hides. Though they 

 may have improved somewhat on this primitive 

 construction, yet it is certain that much of the pre- 

 vious advances in ship-building, the accumulations 

 of many centuries, was forgotten, and to be redis- 

 covered and tested anew. The brisk trade carried 

 on in the Mediterranean, and the naval enterprises 

 connected with the crusades, occasioned some im- 

 provements; yet the art advanced little, if at all, 

 beyond the condition in which the Carthaginians j 



left it. It was not until the middle of the four- 

 teenth century that the inconsiderable war galleys 

 of former times began to be superseded by larger 

 vessels, in which oars were not entirely exploded, 

 but which were chiefly moved by sails. These 

 were crude enough ; of crooked, half-moon shape, 

 very high at the stem and stern ; the planks nailed 

 with iron, not set edge to edge and calked, but 

 overlapping. They had usually but one mast, never 

 more than two, with square sails attached to yards, 

 and were only capable of advancing with a favour- 

 able wind. What a contrast between these rude 

 machines and the noble production now called a 

 ship, in which art and science are exhausted, the 

 result of the gradually accumulating improvements 

 of many generations! Sir Walter ftaleigh well 

 says, " Whoever was the first inventor of ships, 

 every age has added somewhat to them ; and in my 

 time they have been greatly bettered. It is not 

 long since striking the top-masts has been devised, 

 together with the chain pump, which taketh up 

 twice as much water as the old one : we have now 

 studding sails, and the weighing of anchors with 

 the capstan ; moreover, we have fallen into consi- 

 deration of the length of cables, and by it we resist 

 the malice of the greatest winds; for true it is that 

 the length of cable is the life of the ship." 



Ship-building made, indeed, but a snail-pacea 

 progress until the introduction of the compass; 

 and the application of astronomy to nautical pur- 

 suits at once set the mariner free from dependence 

 on the land. The discovery of America resulted 

 from these improvements and the inspiration of a 

 single man. Thenceforward the mariner, thrown 

 upon the wide ocean, was brought into contact with 

 unknown perils, and to obviate them was led to 

 untried expedients. The art has since strode for- 

 ward with giant steps. To the Italians, Catalans, 

 and Portuguese, belong most of the advances in 

 the earlier days of its revival; the Spaniards fol- 

 lowed up the discovery of the new world with a 

 rapid improvement in the form and size of their 

 ships, some of which, taken by the cruisers of 

 Elizabeth, carried twenty hundred tons. In modern 

 times, to the Spaniards and French belongs the 

 entire credit of the progress which has been made 

 in the theory of the art. Strange as it may seem, 

 few improvements have originated with the greatest 

 naval power of this or any other time. We have 

 the authority of our own authors for the singular 

 fact, that Britain has added little to the beauty, 

 speed, and excellence of ships, the wooden walls to 

 which she is indebted for her security. In America, 

 ship-building has made unprecedented progress; 

 with, however, little aid from theoretical princi- 

 ples and abstract science. And hence it may well 

 be questioned, whether a blind attachment to arith- 

 metical results modified, as they must be in prac- 

 tice, by many causes escaping calculation does not 

 often serve to sanction error. The example of 

 buildeis sufficiently proves that the artist, guided 

 by experience and a practised eye, may dispense with 

 elaborate theories; which, after all, are but the 

 demonstration and systematic utterance of ideas 

 which already exist in the untutored mind, and are 

 daily acted upon. Experiment, though it may gain 

 something from theory, is the only infallible guide. 



In order to appreciate the extent and value of 

 modern improvements, we have only to refer to 

 the figure of the old ships, preserved in pictures of 

 the most famous, and which may be found engraved 

 in Charnock's valuable work on naval architecture. 



