References
- Caesar took 9 days, going at that rate, from Baias to Alexandria. Proconsul Scipio went from Pisa to Marseille in 5 days at 4 miles an hour. According to Xenophon it appears that the Milesian carried the tidings of the victory of Ægospotami, 405 B.C., from the Hellespont to Sparta in 3 days; and Thucydides declares that a trireme covered the distance from Athens to Mytilene, about 186 miles, in 24 hours at forced speed—at a rate, therefore, of more than 7 miles an hour; but this was quite exceptional speed even for a warship.The average speed on Columbus's voyage was 4½ miles an hour, the same as that of British sailing ships between Liverpool and Bombay, which often took 100 days for the voyage.If the wind failed and sufficient oarsmen were lacking, as was the case with merchant ships, the voyage might be greatly delayed by calms, as happened to Marcus Tullius Cicero who, if he does not exaggerate in his letters to Atticus, spent 16 days in the Ægean sine nausea (without being seasick), that is, in absolutely flat calm. But exactly the same happened to the big sailing ships of the eighteenth century, and even later
- Terentius Varrò, who was a commander of a Roman fleet, actually set out on a sea trip to Epirus with the object of reconnoitring the places passed by Æneas, and even found here and there traces of his passage
- Gulfs of Sidra and Khabs
- The progress of the seafarer's art was in ancient times exceedingly slow. In navigation and in the build of their ships, the Greeks, and later the Romans, did not differ widely from the Cretans, the men of Mesopotamia, the Egyptians and Phœnicians who preceded them. Keble Chatterton questions if in 1400 years there was any progress at all, and if we can design a stern or bow more elegantly than those of the Greek ships. Nautical science passed from Greece to Rome, as it passed from the Phœnicians to the Vikings. The seacraft of the Romans followed in the wake of the Greeks, not only in regard to nautical terms (e.g. κμβερνητης = gubernator), but in the shape of vessels, and the number and disposition of oarsmen (there being, for instance, 25 in the Roman bireme, exactly as in the Greek). Ships were caulked with tar or wax even prior to the Trojan war, so much so that Homer calls them black; and the hull was painted red, white, or more often, blue; the latter colour being also used for the sailors' clothes.Both Greek and Roman ships had masts and yards. The mast was sustained by shrouds and backstays; it could be lowered and the weight taken by a special support. The sails were bent to the yards; they were made of various materials, and cloths were reinforced with strips of skin; they were rigged, reefed and furled in the same way as to-day, for the physical laws governing the winds have remained unchanged. Neither Greek nor Roman ships had rudders of modern design balanced on the stern pintles; for this industrious discovery we owe to the Genoese Zerbi, who is nowadays forgotten, but who was, in his own day, praised and rewarded by the great Ligurian Republic. In place of the rudder, the old ships of the Egyptians or Phœnicians had one or two big oars (or sweeps). These, made fast to the transom, were held in place by a stanchion whose head was forked or perforated to receive the loom of the oar; this in its turn being actuated by the pilot (gubernator) with the aid of a rope as he sat in a kind of tabernacle at the stern. According to some writers, a more striking difference is to be found in the Greek (or rather Homeric) ships in that they were not fully decked amidships; but had decks at bow and stern connected by bridges and gangways. However, there are writers who hold that even in Homer's time there existed some full-decked vessels; while others (Chatterton, for example) object that not even by Cæsar's time was the Homeric fashion entirely obsolete. Whatever the fact, the two caravels in Columbus's fleet of three ships were not full-decked. Two points peculiar to Homeric seacraft may be mentioned merely for the sake of historical accuracy: Greek ships had only one mast, and the colour of their sails was always white; Roman fighting ships had the rostrum with its three-toothed ram. These differences, however, are not sufficient to impress the general student, who even nowadays is unable to distinguish between a barque and a schooner. We can, therefore, speak generically of ancient vessels, referring to the ancient Greek as well as the Roman world, without being considered responsible for ignoring the difference between the two civilisations
- Storm clouds enveloped the light of heaven; misty darkness robbed us of the sky; and frequent lightning flashed from the riven clouds. We were forced from our course and wandered in waters unknown to us
- Cn. Scipio, the conqueror of Hannibal, threw into the sea “according to custom” the entrails of the augur's victims and immediately afterwards the horn was sounded, the signal for the departure for Africa
- The first thing that seamen did on reaching the shore was to haul up their ships, to preserve them from the waves and also to utilise them as barracks, as the Greeks did when besieging Troy. Usually ships were placed with the prow facing seawards, the stern resting on the shore, all ready for launching, the anchor being cast into the water from the bow. This was not a difficult task, for the ships were not of heavy draught—not more than 25 tons each in burden. Virgil often describes the procedure normally followed; for instance, when Æneas landed in Crete, or when in Thrace his comrades hastened to launch the ships after the pitiable episode of Polydorus
- Illi robur et aes triplexCirca pectus erat, qui fragilem truciCommisit pelago ratemPrimus. (Horace, Odes, I, 3.)
- The ship's bottom, whence the French “carène” and the English verb “to careen.”
- Æneid Book III, i. 207
- Considunt transtris, intentaque brachia remis, Intenti exspectant signum. (Æneid, v, 136–7.)
- Do you ask peace for your dead, by chance of battle slain? Fain would I grant it to the living too!