oo hot for them. If they were shepherds, a tyrant might seize
their flocks. If they were farmers, he might take their land away from
them. But it was not so easy to bully fishermen and hunters who could
paddle off and leave no trace behind them, or who could build forts on
islands that could only be taken after fights in which men who lived
mostly on the water would have a much better chance than men who lived
mostly on the land. In this way the water has often been more the home
of freedom than the land: liberty and sea-power have often gone
together; and a free people like ourselves have nearly always won and
kept freedom, both for themselves and others, by keeping up a navy of
their own or by forming part of such an Empire as the British, where
the Mother Country keeps up by far the greatest navy the world has ever
seen.

The canoe navies, like other navies, did very well so long as no enemy
came with something better. But when boats began to gain ground,
canoes began to lose it. We do not know who made the first boat any
more than we know who made the first raft or canoe. But the man who
laid the first keel was a genius, and no mistake about it; for the keel
is still the principal part of every rowboat, sailing ship, and steamer
in the world. There is the same sort of difference between any craft
that has a keel and one that has not as there is between animals which
have backbones and those which have not. By the time boats were first
made someone began to find out that by putting a paddle into a notch in
the side of the boat and pulling away he could get a stronger stroke
than he could with the paddle alone. Then some other genius, thousands
of years after the first open boat had been made, thought of making a
deck. Once this had been done, the ship, as we know her, had begun her
glorious career.

But meanwhile sails had been in use for very many thousands of years.
Who made the first sail? Nobody knows. But very likely some Asiatic
savage hoisted a wild beast's skin on a stick over some very simple
sort of raft tens of thousands of years ago. Rafts had, and still
have, sails in many countries. Canoes had them too. Boats and ships
also had sails in very early times, and of very various kinds: some
made of skins, some of woven cloth, some even of wooden slats. But no
ancient sail was more than what sailors call a wind-bag now; and they
were of no use at all unless the wind was pretty well aft, that