Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/569



Various causes and circumstances rendered the middle of the fifteenth century a remarkable epoch in the annals of marine architecture, and not the least of these was the competition for maritime supremacy between the great Italian republics. But when Genoa and Venice wisely gave up quarrelling, there was a still more marked improvement in the form and equipment of their vessels. The rivalry of commerce took the place of those foolish contentions which invariably resulted in war. Each nation then strove to produce, not the best fighting ship, but the one most suited to yield remunerative returns. From that period the improvement steadily increased, until vessels not unlike those of our own time were constructed towards the middle of the sixteenth century.

The Genoese, though inferior in, perhaps, all other respects to the Venetians, then surpassed them in the art of ship-building; and they were, so far as can now be traced, the first to construct a ship approaching to the modern form and rig, of which any account and drawing has been preserved. The following, copied from Charnock, affords an excellent and, we believe, accurate illustration of the large Genoese merchant carrack of the first half of the sixteenth century, some of which are said to have been of no less than from fifteen hundred to two thousand tons burden.

The Genoese, more especially in the early part of their history, had, as we have seen, their lawless