BOOKS.
SAILING SHIPS.*
MR. CHATTERTON has the right temper and inclinations for writing a book of this sort, and we congratulate him on the successful conclusion of his diligent—we must not say laborious—research. He has a true love for the sea, and is manifestly under its spell, and this is not true of all English- men. He has a practical knowledge of sailing, and an evident passion for what Stevenson called " the richest kind of idling,' —banging about harbours and docks and picking up sea-lore from communicative " shellbacks." Besides this, be is a scholar in naval learning, and the artist who puts, for example, in the picture of an early sixteenth-century ship triangular headsails consorting with a rectangular sail on the " bonaventure mizzen-mast" commits in his eyes an inaccuracy scarcely to be pardoned. In his preface be describes his purpose in writing the book :- "I trust that both the yachtsman and sailorman will find in these pages something of the same exciting pleasure which has been mine in tracing the course of the evolutions through which their ships have passed. Those whose work or amusement it is to acquaint themselves with the sailing ship and her ways, and for lack of time and opportunity are unable to seek out the noble pedigree of what Ruskin truly described as ' one of the loveliest things man ever made, and one of the noblest,' may care to learn what were the changing conditions which combined to bring about such a highly complex creature as the modern sailing ship. Perhaps at some time when handling a rope, a spar, a tiller or a sail, they may have wondered how it all began; what were the origins of all those various parts of a ship's ' furniture '; why some essential portions have scarcely changed ; and how other portions are the outcome of time, experiment, and science. I hope that to neither the amateur nor the professional sailor I shall seem impertinent if I have attempted to tell them something about their ship which they did not know before."
It is a common opinion that for nearly all serious purposes in the ocean traffic of the world the days of sailing-ships are
ended; human beings and perishable goods must all be carried at the highest possible speed. This may be true, and yet the history of sailing-ships makes one hesitate to feel sure. We remember that some time ago a reputable mathematician propounded the theory that the principles of sailing had been much too conservative, and that there
* Sailing Ships : the Story of their Development from the Earliest Times to ilia- Present Dag. By E. Roble Chatterton. With 130 Illustrations. London:. Sidgwick and Jackson. [16s. vet.]
were unsuspected powers in sailing-ships which had still to be developed. He argued that the lifting force of sails had never been laid under contribution. To take a simple illustration. A kite is a sail which has a lifting force ; but the sails of ships tend to bury the ship deeper in the water in proportion to the energy exerted. We doubt whether there is anything worth considering in this idea that ships might be lifted as well as driven by the wind and thus enabled to travel more easily through the water. Probably the lifting can come only from a power within the ship herself, but that there is a future for power so applied has already been proved, notably by the hydroplane which has been tried lately on the Thames at Chiswick. But there are other ways by which the days of sailing may be kept glorious. Let us remember that after the introduction of steam the new models of ocean ships known as clippers were introduced by the Americans, and that the rival ships built on the same model, but rather improved, by Green and other famous English builders gave a new lease of life to the trans-ocean trade by meaus of sailing-ships.
Other surprises may be in store. Mr. Chatterton supposes, and be has good reason, that motor auxiliary power will come to the rescue of sailing-ships. No one who has watched the use of petrol engines in small vessels round the British coast can question the reasonableness of what Mr. Chatterton says. The petrol engine is comparatively cheap and takes cp little room. When it is not being used there is absolutely no waste. Given fair wind the petrol is turned off, the propeller "telescopes " out of the way, and the ship proceeds under sail carrying only a small additional burden.
So far auxiliary motor power has been applied in the merchant service to no ship over seven hundred tons burden, but even this is an application on a larger scale than was dreamed to be possible at first.
Mr. Chatterton has been greatly aided in his research by studying old fonts in British churches, particularly in those churches dedicated to St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. His investigations have confirmed the scanty evidence for the period between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. But, as be says, perhaps the most interesting material of all is the illustration of an Egyptian sailing-ship of the XII. Dynasty.
For the Egyptians were the predecessors of the Phoenicians in the art of navigation, and the Phoenicians taught all the world. It is extraordinary how conservative the principles of naval architecture have been. As Mr. Chatterton justly says, there is less difference between the model of the ancient Egyptian ships, with their long overhang fore and aft, and that of the latest racing yachts of to-day than there is between the various types of small craft along the British coasts. In this book there are illustrations of the only model of an ancient Egyptian ship so far discovered—it was unearthed at Rifeh by Professor Flinders Petrie—which shows exactly how such vessels were rigged.
Considering the vast importance of the conquest of the sea to every nation, one is astonished that nautical subjects have not entered more into the art of the world. The truth seems to us to be that painters have left ships alone unless they were under the fascination of the sea to such an extent that they found it worth while to master all the necessary technicalities. Venice and Genoa produced great artists and mighty sea-captains, yet few of the masterpieces which have come down to us deal with ships. As Mr. Chatterton says, there is, and always has been, a gulf between the landsman and the sailor.
For ocean-going ships there can be no comparison between square sails and fore-and-aft sails. Tue former avoid all the danger and inconvenience of gybing. It is related that Columbus on his way to America changed the fore-and-aft sails on one of his ships to square sails. The persistence of the lateen in certain waters, where it sometimes seems to be justified more by sentiment than practicality, is, however, remarkable. Mr. Chatterton says of this rig :— " I think that in all probability it was adapted, a few centuries before the introduction of Christianity, from the Egyptian square. sail. Its very appearance and the corner of the world in which it is found as the prevailing rig both suggest that. It is reason- able to assume that in the course of years, when the more -experienced Easterns.began to discover the art of sailing against the wind and to find that the rig of the Nile boats was not suit. able for this, there would be evolved a modification of the Egyptian sail to allow of tacking. This, probably, was the origin of the lateen sail of. the dhow. It is of extreme antiquity, 'and has endured with but little alteration from the time of .Alexander the Great, about 35rn.c. The prevalence of this kind of rig, in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, off the East Coast of Africa, especially as far south as Zanzibar, is well known. The fact that it is still found everywhere up and down the- Mediterranean,- on the Nile and on Swiss lakes, shows how firmly established did this lateen rig become in the course of time."
One very interesting break with ancient tradition is the arrangement in the new 'Dreadnought' ships of the British Navy; in which the officers for the first, time live forward and the men in the afterpart of the ship. But, on the whole, one hardly knows whether to wonder more at the manner in which the designs of the masterly naval architects of the ancient world made themselves known in all parts of the world or at the tenacity with which these ideas were preserved when once they had been adopted. Mr. Chatterton speculates that the Phoenicians visited Scandinavia, and in this way accounts for the striking likeness between a Phoenician galley and a Viking ship. There is nothing incredible in the hypothesis. If the Phoenicians reached Cornwall and there worked the tin mines, it would have been natural for them to take advantage of the prevailing westerly winds to sail up the Channel and across the North Sea. English shipbuilders, as Mr. Chatterton shows, have been remarkable not so much for their inventive. ness as for their skill in adapting other nations' ideas. Surely it is impossible not to apply the lesson to other branches of invention. In aerial navigation we are notoriously behind France, Germany, and. America, and we must direct our attention now not to crying over our want of inventiveness, but to overtaking the dangerous arrears into which we have fallen.
We have left till the end of this notice an interesting .point in naval tactics. Many readers who have not closely followed the history of naval design will be surprised to learn how recently oars were used in sailing-ships. Well-known pictures of the Spanish Armada, of which one is pro- duced here, show at least one of the ships with oars in action. The fact, of course, is that oars were employed long after sails were common and sufficient for all ordinary purposes. In naval fighting the whole secret of success lies in manoeuvring for position, and the ancients, who could not sail very -close to the wind, naturally depended upon their oars to get to windward of their opponents. The Phoenicians and Greeks lowered their sails before an action. Thus oars were almost indispensable in certain small fighting ships-till the invention of steam,—they gave independence of the wind -which was later given for the first time satisfactorily by steam. No doubt there was little, scientific manoeuvring in the earlier naval battles; the ships. closed together and there was what might be called a land battle—a hand-to-hand affair—at sea. The Athenians were • probably the first to develop naval tactics. Herodotus says the Ionians introduced the tactics of breaking the line by a concerted and calculated movement, but as about fifty years after the date of which Herodotus speaks we find the Ionians according to other evidence fighting in the old way, it is not unnatural to doubt the word of Herodotus. The Athenians, then, were probably the inventors not only of the practice of breaking the line, but also of that of rowing round the enemy and ramming the broadside of his ships.
The illustrations in the book are excellent. We wish, how- ever, that something more impressive could have been given to represent Greek naval architecture. Such a noble figure as the "Flying Victory of Samothrace" was matched, as we know from medals and coins, by figureheads on actual Greek triremes. But this and similar small defects cannot prevent us from saying that this book should be in every naval library. It has information which in the nature of things is not con- tained even in Mr. Warington Smyth's fascinating book, Masi and Sail in Europe and Asia.
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