Ships & Ways of Other Days

In “Sailing Ships and their Story” I endeavoured to trace the evolution of the ship from the very earliest times of which we possess any historical data at all down to the canva...

Of all the activities of human nature few are so interesting and so insistent on our sympathy as the eternal combat which goes on between man on the one side and the forces of N...

But when we come to the Phœnicians we are in touch with a veritable race of seamen who to the south are in just the same relation as the Vikings are to the north. Whether they t...

But before we proceed further, it is essential that we look carefully into the building, administration, and handling of those fleets of vessels which made history as they scudd...

The transportation of goods across the seas was conducted by shipowners, who formed themselves into corporations under the style of _navicularii marini_, but from the middle of...

War has always been a great incentive to shipbuilding. But this statement requires modification by excluding both civil war and the merchant ship. Of the former, no better insta...

When we consider all the wondrous achievements on the part of the Ancients, when we consider how many centuries they were engaged in maritime matters, it is a matter for some su...

It is curious to observe, as one reads history, that many an invention, or a practical idea belonging to modern times, has really existed for century and century, though in an u...

I make no apology to the reader for having taken up so much of his time in a consideration of the methods which obtained during the time of Christopher Columbus, not merely beca...

The seamanship, the navigation, and the gunnery of the Elizabethan age will ever be memorable, not merely because they attained such excellence after centuries of imperfection,...

The only danger attaching to a fine achievement is lest the next may appear insignificant by its side. The dramatist who has created a splendid climax has little to fear except...

The lot of the modern seaman is of a vastly different order of things from that of the eighteenth-century sailor. Hardships though there may be in this twentieth century, yet th...

The first sixty or seventy years of the nineteenth century saw the art of the seaman at its highest state of perfection. There was never anything to equal it either before or si...