SHIPS AND SEAMEN 



Aids 10 Navigation. 



When shipping did its utmost never to venture out of sight of land 

 and to snug down and anchor at night wherever it was possible, light- 

 houses and other aids to navigation were not necessary but when 

 voyages began to be more ambitious it was another matter. In the 

 early days there were several erected, the first ones being those main- 

 tained in Egypt some six or seven hundred years before Christ. Among 

 the Wonders of the World was the Pharos of Alexandria, and if this 

 really was six hundred feet high — as was reported in the old manuscripts 

 — there was a good deal of reason for it. When the Romans com- 

 menced to build lighthouses Pharos was the generic name for them all, 

 the ruins of one of them being still visible beside the Castle at Dover. 

 After the thirteenth century there appears to have been a lull in light- 

 house building until the early sixteenth when towers, mostly carrying 

 huge open braziers of burning coal, began to spring up all over the 

 coasts of Western Europe. In James I's reign it was proposed to erect 

 a light on the Lizard, but the Trinity House immediately objected to it 

 because it would help pirates to make their landfall and prey on British 

 shipping. About the same time, however. Sir Edward Howard was 

 granted a licence to build a lighthouse at Dungeness, his bargain being 

 that he should receive a penny per ton from all ships passing the point. 

 The claims of Trinity House in this matter led to protracted legislation, 

 but the lighthouse was built. 



The Buss. 



Busses began to be mentioned in shipping histories in the early days 

 of the sixteenth century and they appear to have existed almost 

 unchanged well into the nineteenth. They were used principally for 

 fishing ; in fact soon after their introduction they are mentioned in this 

 connection only, and had a very full body on the water line with a 

 narrow high poop. Generally speaking they were three-masted, the 

 foremast and mainmast lowering for fishing purposes and the mizzen 

 being used for riding. Some of them were certainly quite sizable and 

 at the time of the Dutch Wars the herring busses on which Blake preyed 

 ran from sixty to two hundred tons, although the average appears to 

 have been round about eighty to a hundred. 



The Dogger. 



A fishing boat associated with the buss, but generally rather earlier, 

 was the Dogger which was flourishing at the time of Edward III. What 

 she was originally can only be surmised as a high sterned, full-lined boat 

 with a tall mast and single sail amidships and a mizzen on the poop, but 

 in later days she developed into something very much like the bomb 

 ketches later used by the Navy. In the time of the Tudors and 

 Charles I Doggers were frequently commissioned for naval purposes, 

 but they do not appear to have been particularly successful and were 

 dropped in favour of other small types, although they were often used 

 later for privateering and smuggling as well as for fishing. 



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