we shall soon see. They
did use sails; but only when the wind was behind them, and never when
it blew really hard. The mast was made of two long wooden spars set
one on each side of the galley, meeting at the head, and strengthened
in between by braces from one spar to another. As time went on better
boats and larger ones were built in Egypt. We can guess how strong
they must have been when they carried down the Nile the gigantic blocks
of stone used in building the famous Pyramids. Some of these blocks
weigh up to sixty tons; so that both the men who built the barges to
bring them down the Nile and those who built these huge blocks into the
wonderful Pyramids must have known their business pretty well a
thousand years before Noah built his Ark.

The Ark was built in Mesopotamia, less than five thousand years ago, to
save Noah from the flooded Euphrates. The shipwrights seem to have
built it like a barge or house-boat. If so, it must have been about
fifteen thousand tons, taking the length of the cubit in the Bible
story at eighteen inches. It was certainly not a ship, only some sort
of construction that simply floated about with the wind and current
till it ran aground. But Mesopotamia and the shores of the Persian
Gulf were great places for shipbuilding. They were once the home of
adventurers who had come West from southern Asia, and of the famous
Phoenicians, who went farther West to find a new seaboard home along
the shores of Asia Minor, just north of Palestine, where they were in
the shipping business three thousand years ago, about the time of the
early Kings of Israel.

These wonderful Phoenicians touch our interest to the very quick; for
they were not only the seamen hired by "Solomon in all his glory" but
they were also the founders of Carthage and the first oversea traders
with the Atlantic coasts of France and the British Isles. Their story
thus goes home to all who love the sea, the Bible, and Canada's two
Mother Lands. They had shipping on the Red Sea as well as on the
Mediterranean; and it was their Red Sea merchant vessels that coasted
Arabia and East Africa in the time of Solomon (1016-976 B.C.). They
also went round to Persia and probably to India. About 600 B.C. they
are said to have coasted round the whole of Africa, starting from the
Red Sea and coming back by Gibraltar. This took them more than two
years, as they used to sow wheat and wait on shore till the crop was
ripe. Long bef