Flag and Fleet | Page 6

knows how the Egyptians first learnt ship-building from the
people farther East. But we do know that they were building ships in
Egypt seven thousand years ago, that their ninth king was called Betou,
which means "the prow of a ship", and that his artists carved pictures of
boats five hundred years older than the Great Pyramid. These pictures,
carved on the tombs of the kings, are still to be seen, together with
some pottery, which, coming from the Balkans, shows that Betou had
boats trading across the eastern end of the Mediterranean. A picture
carved more than six thousand years ago shows an Egyptian boat being
paddled by fourteen men and steered with paddles by three more on the
right-hand side of the stern as you look toward the bow. Thus the
"steer-board" (or steering side) was no new thing when its present name
of "starboard" was used by our Norse ancestors a good many hundred
years ago. The Egyptians, steering on the right-hand side, probably
took in cargo on the left side or "larboard", that is, the "load" or
"lading" side, now called the "port" side, as "larboard" and "starboard"
sounded too much alike when shouted in a gale.

Up in the bow of this old Egyptian boat stood a man with a pole to help
in steering down the Nile. Amidships stood a man with a
cat-o'-nine-tails, ready to slash any one of the wretched slave paddlers
who was not working hard. All through the Rowing Age, for thousands
and thousands of years, the paddlers and rowers were the same as the
well-known galley-slaves kept by the Mediterranean countries to row
their galleys in peace and war. These galleys, or rowing men-of-war,
lasted down to modern times, as we shall soon see. They did use sails;
but only when the wind was behind them, and never when it blew
really hard. The mast was made of two long wooden spars set one on
each side of the galley, meeting at the head, and strengthened in
between by braces from one spar to another. As time went on better
boats and larger ones were built in Egypt. We can guess how strong
they must have been when they carried down the Nile the gigantic
blocks of stone used in building the famous Pyramids. Some of these
blocks weigh up to sixty tons; so that both the men who built the barges
to bring them down the Nile and those who built these huge blocks into
the wonderful Pyramids must have known their business pretty well a
thousand years before Noah built his Ark.
The Ark was built in Mesopotamia, less than five thousand years ago,
to save Noah from the flooded Euphrates. The shipwrights seem to
have built it like a barge or house-boat. If so, it must have been about
fifteen thousand tons, taking the length of the cubit in the Bible story at
eighteen inches. It was certainly not a ship, only some sort of
construction that simply floated about with the wind and current till it
ran aground. But Mesopotamia and the shores of the Persian Gulf were
great places for shipbuilding. They were once the home of adventurers
who had come West from southern Asia, and of the famous
Phoenicians, who went farther West to find a new seaboard home along
the shores of Asia Minor, just north of Palestine, where they were in
the shipping business three thousand years ago, about the time of the
early Kings of Israel.
These wonderful Phoenicians touch our interest to the very quick; for
they were not only the seamen hired by "Solomon in all his glory" but
they were also the founders of Carthage and the first oversea traders

with the Atlantic coasts of France and the British Isles. Their story thus
goes home to all who love the sea, the Bible, and Canada's two Mother
Lands. They had shipping on the Red Sea as well as on the
Mediterranean; and it was their Red Sea merchant vessels that coasted
Arabia and East Africa in the time of Solomon (1016-976 B.C.). They
also went round to Persia and probably to India. About 600 B.C. they
are said to have coasted round the whole of Africa, starting from the
Red Sea and coming back by Gibraltar. This took them more than two
years, as they used to sow wheat and wait on shore till the crop was
ripe. Long before this they had passed Gibraltar and settled the colony
of Tarshish, where they found silver in such abundance that "it was
nothing accounted of in the days of Solomon." We do not know
whether it was "the ships of Tarshish and of the Isles" that first felt the
way north to France and England. But we do know that