Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/566

 Throughout the whole of the middle ages, and even until the seventeenth century, every vessel was provided with trumpets and bugles, which were played during fêtes and battles or used in foggy weather as signals: such instruments are very distinctly represented on the Corporation seal of Dover.

Nor, indeed, do writers of nautical experience, who describe the vessels of the Genoese even so late as the fifteenth century, supply information on which reliance can be placed. For instance, Napier, in his "Florentine History," furnishes the following description of one of the largest vessels of the period. "The vessels built during this century for commercial purposes," he remarks, "were large in size, but it would be difficult to ascertain their exact capacity; and by the description of one belonging to the Genoese family of Doria, which anchored at Porto Pisano in 1452, this was quite unequal to their