Page:Boating - Woodgate - 1888.pdf/33

 the building of the Argo, the launching, the detail of the crew, and the starting of the vessel, we caunot help fecling that they are described con amore, not of the sea, or of ships, or of rowing, but of the literary beauty of similar descriptions by earlier poets. In a word, they are at second hand. But better this than none at all.

The ‘bireme,’ or two-banked vessel, does not appear in Homer. But, as we have seen, it was probably in existence before Homer's time, If of Egyptian parentage, it was adapted for use on the Mediterranean waters by the shipwrights of Sidon or Tyre. It is a curious reflection that this remarkable evolu- tion of banked vessels should, so far as we can judge, have

occupied about two thousand years ; the curve, if we may use the expression, of development rising to the highest point in the useless Tesseraconteres of Ptolemy, and after Actium de- clining to the dromons and biremes of the Byzantine Emperor Leo, and finally subsiding into the monocrota or one-banked vessels, the galleys of medieval times.

The problem which taxed the ingenuity of those early ship - wrights was briefly this, how to get greater means of propulsion by increasing the number of cars, without such increase in the length of the ship as would, by increased weight, neutralise the advantage and still further diminish that facility in turning