A History of Sea Power

power long before the dawn of history. Since the records of Egypt are far better preserved than those of any other nation of antiquity, and the discovery of the Rosetta stone has made it possi

art of building sea-going ships for trade and war.[1] At all events, Crete may be regarded as the first great sea power of history, an island empire like Great Britain to-day, extending its influence from Sicily to Palestine and dominating the eastern Mediterranean for many ce

gypt, were not naval powers, because they arose in rich river valleys abundantl

now that 1000 years before the Ph?nicians began to write the Cretans had evolved a system of written characters-as yet undeciphered-and a decimal system for numbers. A correspondin

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TIAN

n of the island empire in about 1400 B.C. apparently was due to some great disaster that destroyed her fleet and left her open to invasion by a conquering race-probably the Greeks-who ravaged he

to the coast and settled, they found themselves in a narrow strip of coast between a range of mountains and the sea. The city of Tyre itself was erected on an island. Consequently these descendants

olies. Moreover, Ph?nicia lay at the end of the Asiatic caravan routes. Hence Ph?nician ships received the wealth of the Nile valley and Mesopotamia and distributed it along the shores of the Mediterranean. Ph?nician ships also uncovered the wealth of Spain and the North African coast, and, venturing into the Atlantic, drew metals from the British Isles. According to Hero

Cadiz and Tarshish, the latter commonly supposed to have been situated just north of Cadiz at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. Cadiz was their distributing point for the metals of northern Spain and the British Isles. The most famous colony was Carthage, si

tive peoples, we get an interesting picture from Herodotus,[1] who describes how the

ranslated by Geo. Rawli

ANCIENT

o much gold as they think the wares to be worth, withdraw to a distance. The Carthaginians upon this come ashore and look. If they think the gold enough, they take it up and go their way; but if it does not seem sufficient they go aboard their ships once more and wait patiently. Then the oth

were obtained from two kinds of shellfish together with an alkali prepared from seaweed. Ph?nicians were also pioneers in the art of making glass. It is not hard to understand, therefore, how P

d while the round ship was of deep draft and rode to anchor, the shallow flat-bottomed long ships were drawn up on shore. The Ph?nicians took the Egyptian and Cretan models and improved them. They lowered the bows of the fighting ships, added to the blunt ram a beak near the water's edge, and strung the shields of the fighting men along the bulwarks

difficulty in overrunning the country, but the inhabitants fled to their colonies. The great city of Tyre, being on an island, defied the invader, and finally the Assyrian king gave up and withdrew to his own country. Having realized at great cost tha

ians had free command of the sea, they had no difficulty in getting supplies of all kinds from their colonies. At the end of five years the Assyrians again returned home, defeated by the Ph?nician control of the sea. When, twenty years later, Ph?nicia was subjugated by Assyria, it was due to the lack of union among the scattered cities and colonies of the great sea empire. Widely separated, gove

ians refused on the ground of the kinship between Carthage and Ph?nicia. And the help of Ph?nicia was so essential to the Persian monarch that he countermanded the order. Indeed the rela

of the Ph?nicians that the Persian empire was saved. Thereafter, the Persian yoke was fastened on the Asiati

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WAR

t unless European Greece were subdued it would stand as a barrier between Persia and the western Mediterranean. Darius perceived the situation and prepared to destroy these Greek states before they should becom

ly built and to have presented a lower freeboard than those of the Ph?nicians. A hundred years later, about 330 B.C., the Greeks developed the four-banked ship, and Alexander of Macedon is said to have maintained on the Euphrates a squadron of seven-banked ships. In the following century the Macedonians had ships of sixteen banks of oars, and this was

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MERCHA

followed. In fact, the name trireme was used loosely for all ships of war whether they had two banks of oars or three. But the fleets that fought in the Persian war and i

80 feet long with a beam of 1/4 its length.) The trireme was fitted with one mast and square sail, the latter being used only when the wind was fair, as auxiliary to the

maller one for emergency in battle. Before action it was customary to stow the larger sail o

my, while the bronze beak at the waterline drove into her hull. This beak, or ram, was constructed of a core of timber heavily sheathed with bronze, presenting thre

wars stood only about ten feet above water. The covering of this rectangular structure formed a sort of hurricane deck, standing about three feet above the gangway that ran around the ship at about the level of the bulwarks. This gangway and upper deck

"trierarch," commanded implicit obedience. Under him were a sailing mas

hree cardinal virtues of the fighting ship, mobility, seaworthiness, and ability to keep the sea, or cruising radius, the oar-driven type possessed only the first. It was fast, it could hold position accurately, it could spin about almost on its own axis, but it was so frail that it had to run for shelter before a moderate wind and sea. In consequence naval operations were limited to the summer months. As to its cargo capacity, it was so small that it was unable to carry provisions to sustain its own crew for more than

destroy fleets and naval expeditions than battles during the entire age of the oar. The opposite extreme was reached in Nelson's day. His lumbering ships

iprocal relation that quickened civilization at both ends of his route. The cargo ships that left the Nile delta distributed the arts of Egypt as well as its wheat, and the richest civilization of the ancient world, that of Greece, rose on foundation stones brought from Egypt, Assyria, and Ph?nicia. It may be said of Ph?nicia h

e stagnant for thousands of years. Indeed, among the Hindus the crossing of the sea was a crime to be expiated only by the most agonizing penance. Hence these peoples of Asia, the most numerous in the world, exercised no influ

ays opened out for expansion, provided it possessed the stamina and the skill to win them. And in those days they were practically the only highways. Frail as the early ships were and great as were the perils they had to face, communications by water were far centuries faster and safer than communications by land. Hence civilization followed the path of the sea. E

ERE

of Crete, J.

he Nations Series, G

ip, E. Keble C

of Other Days, E. K

ips, Cecil

Navale, Augu

Buhmer, in Report of the U. S. National Museum, 1893. This articl

dom (chap. 2), Ger