THE FIRST SAILOR

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 27 March 1926, Page 11

THE FIRST SAILOR

HIS RECORD LOST IN ANTIQUITY

ONE OF THE BOLDEST OF THE SONS OF MEN

T\HE man who first dared venture on the sea must, have had a heart of oak bound with triple brass, says the Daily Telegraph. It is bad enough to sail with Anson and be some 10 degrees out of your ' reckoning in rounding the Horn, but; long before Anson, men had sailed round the world, and his eighteenth century ship of the line Avas far more seaworthy and infinitely more comfortable than the carracks and caravels of Drake, and Vasco da Gama, and Columbus. ‘Yet Columbus, in that 200-ton ship of his, was lapped in luxury and ran no risk compared with the Norsemen who crossed the Atlantic centuries before. He had tolerable cabins. He jin cl ,a compass. But seafaring was already an mindent craft when the Viking ships began to harry the Saxon shore. More than once before that, time the Empire of the world had been won by sea power. The Romans, who never took kindly to the trade, had to learn to be sailors before they could cope with Carthage: the Greek ships saved Europe from Asia at Salamis. But many years earlier there were \ rich Spates which drew their strength from the sea. The old Greek tradition that King Minos' of Crete was the master of a great navy has been confirmed in our time by the discovery of the Minoan palaces. But the first sailor was

not a Cretan —whoever the Cretans of those days were. • Most of ns were brought up to think of the Phoenicians as the great sailors of the ancient world. It was they who taught the Greeks seamanship, they who founded the maritime trading empire of Carthage, they who opened the seas beyond Gibraltar to the men of the East. Did not Solomon nse the -ships of Tyre toibring him ivory, apes, and peacocks, and the gold of Ophir? 'Yet the Phoenicians were followers, not leaders. Five thousand years ago the Egyptians were building masted ships of some fifty oars. So big a craft implies many a simpler, smaller, earlier model. Egypt, with its great river highway and its early growth of civilisation, is a place which may well have produced that unknown hero, the first sailor. Or he may have been born in Babylonia, and his boat may have been such a primitive construction of reeds as still floats upon the Tigris Certainly they had such craft, in the days of Hammurabi. Whoever he was, whether he sailed on a Babylonian raft of reeds, or in a cradle of basket-work covered with skins and pitch, as Western Irishmen were doing till the other day, or in a tree trunk hollowed out to hold him, as A 7 irgil fancied and relics of the Stone Age testify, he was one of the boldest of the sons of men.