t it from the seaman's point
of view, and the whole meaning changes in the twinkling of an eye,
becoming new, true, and complete. Nearly all books deal with the
things of the land, and of the land alone, their writers forgetting or
not knowing that the things of the land could never have been what they
are had it not been for the things of the sea. Without the vastly
important things of the sea, without the war fleets and merchant fleets
of empires old and new, it is perfectly certain that the world could
not have been half so good a place to live in; for freedom and the sea
tend to go together. True of all people, this is truer still of us;
for the sea has been the very breath of British life and liberty ever
since the first hardy Norseman sprang ashore on English soil.

Nobody knows how the Egyptians first learnt ship-building from the
people farther East. But we do know that they were building ships in
Egypt seven thousand years ago, that their ninth king was called Betou,
which means "the prow of a ship", and that his artists carved pictures
of boats five hundred years older than the Great Pyramid. These
pictures, carved on the tombs of the kings, are still to be seen,
together with some pottery, which, coming from the Balkans, shows that
Betou had boats trading across the eastern end of the Mediterranean. A
picture carved more than six thousand years ago shows an Egyptian boat
being paddled by fourteen men and steered with paddles by three more on
the right-hand side of the stern as you look toward the bow. Thus the
"steer-board" (or steering side) was no new thing when its present name
of "starboard" was used by our Norse ancestors a good many hundred
years ago. The Egyptians, steering on the right-hand side, probably
took in cargo on the left side or "larboard", that is, the "load" or
"lading" side, now called the "port" side, as "larboard" and
"starboard" sounded too much alike when shouted in a gale.

Up in the bow of this old Egyptian boat stood a man with a pole to help
in steering down the Nile. Amidships stood a man with a
cat-o'-nine-tails, ready to slash any one of the wretched slave
paddlers who was not working hard. All through the Rowing Age, for
thousands and thousands of years, the paddlers and rowers were the same
as the well-known galley-slaves kept by the Mediterranean countries to
row their galleys in peace and war. These galleys, or rowing
men-of-war, lasted down to modern times, as