Page:Boating - Woodgate - 1888.pdf/23

 afforded by platforms raised upon its central surface, or by planks laid edgewise so as to make a defence, a breastwork against the wave.

And no doubt by this time the use of the sail for propulsion had become familiar, and man had already prayed his god for ‘the breeze that cometh aft, sail-filler, good companion.’ But interesting as it would he to trace the effect of the sail upon the construction of vessels and their development, we must leave that pleasant task to those who, in the present series, will treat of the yacht and its prototypes (dkaror).

The earliest method of propulsion was with the human hands. In the picture of Ulysses seated on the mast and keel of his shipwrecked vessel, which he had lashed together with the broken backstay made of bullhide, paddling with his hands on either side, Homer, as we have seen, has presented us with the hero of the highest civilisation known te him reduced to the straits of the merest savage; and he has again enforced this idea in his picture of the same hero of many wiles and many counsels devising for himself the means of escape from the island of Calypso, and, not without divine suggestions, constructing for himself, like an ancient Robinson Crusee, a primitive raft, with certain improvements and additions; a broad raft be it remembered, and not a boat. A boat would mar the conception which presents to us the civilised man driven back to the straits of barbarism by the unique circum- stances in which he is placed.

This is the point which ingenious commentators, who have given elaborate designs and figures of Ulysses’ doa¢ and written pages upon its construction, seem to have missed. The poet has added colour to his picture by bringing the new and the old together. And of a truth new and old exist together and continue throughout the ages of man in marvellous juxtaposi- tion. The fast screw liner off the Australian coast may pass the naked-savage oaring himself with swarthy palms upon his buoyant log, and almost every stage of modem invention in ship-building and ship propulsion has had alongside it the