Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/36

 lead nailed over the outside with copper nails was sheathing, and that in great perfection; the copper nails being used rather than iron, which, when once rusted in water with the working of the ship, soon lose their hold and drop out."

Ships in ancient times were known by a great variety of names, most of which are descriptive of the purposes for which they were built, or of the services in which they were employed.

Omitting triremes, the most usual ships of war, the following list enumerates their chief varieties:—

Thus olkas was a large heavy tow-barge; ponto—a word of Gallic or Celtic origin —a punt.

Gaulos, a round heavy merchant vessel, named probably so originally by the Phœnicians, and preserved to modern days in the galleon or galeass of the Middle Ages, and the galley of later times.

Corbitæ, slow sailing ships of burthen—so called because they carried baskets at their mast-heads. Hippagogi, as their name implies, carried horses. The characteristic of all these vessels was that their structure was bulky, their sides and bottom rounded from the flat, and, though not without rowers, that they were chiefly dependent on their sails.

Of a lighter class, and for greater speed, were the scapha (or skiff); the acation, or acatus; and the linter, which, though like ratis, often used for any kind of vessel, was more strictly a light boat or wherry. Generically, merchant vessels were called