PIRACY UPON THE SEA. 



105 



their inhabitants but a few of the articles which they needed : 

 they were led, therefore, to increase their power by sea, in order to 

 establish themselves in more favored climes, or at least to obtain 

 from them by plunder what their own country could not furnish. 

 Thus they neglected the arts of agriculture, and became inured 

 to a life of piracy upon the sea. They spent their lives in plan- 

 ning and executing maritime expeditions. Fathers gave fleets 

 to their sons, and bade them seek their fortune on the ocean- 

 highway. The ships, at first small, — being mere barks propelled 

 by twelve oars, — came at last to be capable of carrying one hun- 

 dred or one hundred and twenty men. They were supplied with 

 stones, arrows, ropes with which to overset small vessels, and 

 grappling-irons with which to come to close quarters. 



It would be remote from our purpose to notice these piratical 

 excursions, were it not that they sometimes resulted in discovery 

 or commerce. Many of the marauders settled permanently in 

 England in the seventh century, and established there the 

 Anglo-Saxon dominion. Alfred, their most celebrated king, 

 obliged to defend his territory from the Danes, turned his at- 

 tention zealously to every thing connected with ships, commerce, 

 discovery, and geography, and became the first founder of that 

 naval power which was at a later period to be the world's dread 

 and admiration. The idea of ship-building once conceived, it 

 was prosecuted with astonishing vigor. Alfred not only multi- 

 tiplied their number, but introduced material improvements. 

 Towards the fetter part of his reign, his fleet numbered one hun- 

 dred sail : it was divided into small squadrons and stationed at 

 various places along the coast. 



The oldest epic in any modern language, the Anglo-Saxon 

 poem of "Beowulf," the Sea-Goth, written in forty-three cantos, 

 and containing some six thousand lines, is occupied mainly in 

 narrating the marvellous exploits of its hero, his combats with a 

 pestilential fire-drake, and his slaying of " a grim giant named 

 Grendel, a descendant of Cain." It incidentally describes a 



