derous enough to set their galleys a
streak deeper in the water, fancy them in a brisk sea with a nor'wester
brewing to windward, watching off the port of Carthage for Admiral
Hasdrubal and his fleet to come out. They were good hand-to-hand
fighters,--none better; and so they won their victories, no doubt; but,
having won them, they dropped sea-going, and made the conquered nations
transport their corn and troops, while they went back to their
congenial camps and solemn Senate-debates.

But Italy was not settled by the Roman alone. A black-haired,
fire-eyed, daring, flexible race had colonized the Sicilian Islands,
and settled thickly around the Tarentine Gulf, and built their cities
up the fringes of the Apennines as far as the lovely Bay of Parthenope.
Greek they were,--by tradition the descendants of those who took
Troy-town,--Greek they are to this day, as any one may see who will
linger on the Mole or by the Santa Lucia Stairs at Naples. At Salerno,
at Amalfi, were cradled those fishing-hamlets which were to nurse
seamen, and not soldiers. Far up the Adriatic, the storm of Northern
invasion had forced a fair-haired and violet-eyed folk into the
fastnesses of the lagoons, to drive their piles and lay their keels
upon the reedy islets of San Giorgio and San Marco; while on the
western side an ancient Celtic colony was rising into prominence, and
rearing at the foot of the Ligurian Alps the palaces of Genoa the
Proud.

Thus upon the Italian stock was begun the language of the seas. Upon
the Italian main the words "tack" and "sheet," "prow" and "poop," were
first heard; and those most important terms by which the law of the
marine highway is given,--"starboard" and "larboard." For if, after the
Italian popular method, we contract the words _questo bordo_ (this
side) and _quello bordo_ (that side) into _sto bordo_ and _lo bordo_,
we have the roots of our modern phrases. And so the term "port," which
in naval usage supersedes "larboard," is the abbreviated _porta lo
timone_, (carry the helm,) which, like the same term in military usage,
"port arms," seems traditionally to suggest the left hand.

But while the Italian races were beginning their brief but brilliant
career, there was in training a nobler and hardier race of seamen, from
whose hands the helm would not so soon be wrested. The pirates of the
Baltic were wrestling with the storms of the wild Cattegat and braving
the sleety squalls of the Skager Rack, stretch