Flag and Fleet | Page 5

that has not as there is between animals which have
backbones and those which have not. By the time boats were first made
someone began to find out that by putting a paddle into a notch in the
side of the boat and pulling away he could get a stronger stroke than he
could with the paddle alone. Then some other genius, thousands of
years after the first open boat had been made, thought of making a deck.
Once this had been done, the ship, as we know her, had begun her
glorious career.
But meanwhile sails had been in use for very many thousands of years.
Who made the first sail? Nobody knows. But very likely some Asiatic
savage hoisted a wild beast's skin on a stick over some very simple sort
of raft tens of thousands of years ago. Rafts had, and still have, sails in
many countries. Canoes had them too. Boats and ships also had sails in
very early times, and of very various kinds: some made of skins, some
of woven cloth, some even of wooden slats. But no ancient sail was
more than what sailors call a wind-bag now; and they were of no use at
all unless the wind was pretty well aft, that is, more or less from behind.

We shall presently find out that tacking, (which is sailing against the
wind), is a very modern invention; and that, within three centuries of its
invention, steamers began to oust sailing craft, as these, in their turn,
had ousted rowboats and canoes.
CHAPTER II
THE FIRST FAR WEST
(The last 5000 years B.C.)
This chapter begins with a big surprise. But it ends with a bigger one
still. When you look first at the title and then at the date, you wonder
how on earth the two can go together. But when you remember what
you have read in Chapter I you will see that the countries at the Asiatic
end of the Mediterranean, though now called the Near East, were then
the Far West, because emigrants from the older lands of Asia had gone
no farther than this twelve thousand years ago. Then, as you read the
present chapter, you will see emigrants and colonies moving farther and
farther west along the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic shores of
Europe, until, at last, two thousand years before Columbus, the new Far
West consisted of those very shores of Spain and Portugal, France and
the British Isles, from which the whole New Western World of North
and South America was to be settled later on. The Atlantic shores of
Europe, and not the Mediterranean shores of Asia and of Egypt, are
called here "The First Far West" because the first really Western people
grew up in Europe and became quite different from all the Eastern
peoples. The Second Far West, two thousand years later, was America
itself.
Westward Ho! is the very good name of a book about adventures in
America when this Second Far West was just beginning. "Go West!"
was the advice given to adventurous people in America during the
nineteenth century. "The Last West and Best West" is what Canadians
now call their own North-West. And it certainly is the very last West of
all; for over there, across the Pacific, are the lands of southern Asia
from which the first emigrants began moving West so many thousand

years ago. Thus the circuit of the World and its migrations is now
complete; and we can at last look round and learn the whole story, from
Farthest East to Farthest West.
Most of it is an old, old story from the common points of view; and it
has been told over and over again by many different people and in
many different ways. But from one point of view, and that a most
important point, it is newer now than ever. Look at it from the seaman's
point of view, and the whole meaning changes in the twinkling of an
eye, becoming new, true, and complete. Nearly all books deal with the
things of the land, and of the land alone, their writers forgetting or not
knowing that the things of the land could never have been what they are
had it not been for the things of the sea. Without the vastly important
things of the sea, without the war fleets and merchant fleets of empires
old and new, it is perfectly certain that the world could not have been
half so good a place to live in; for freedom and the sea tend to go
together. True of all people, this is truer still of us; for the sea has been
the very breath of British life and liberty ever since the first hardy
Norseman sprang ashore on English soil.
Nobody