Romans became exceedingly fond of
representations of sea-fights, and Julius Caesar dug a lake in the
Campus Martius specially for these exhibitions. They were not by any
means sham fights. The unfortunates who manned the ships on these
occasions were captives or criminals, who fought as the gladiators did--
to the death--until one side was exterminated or spared by imperial
clemency. In one of these battles no fewer than a hundred ships and
nineteen thousand combatants were engaged!

Such were the people who invaded Britain in the year 55 B.C. under
Julius Caesar, and such the vessels from which they landed upon our
shores to give battle to the then savage natives of our country.

It is a curious fact that the crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries were the chief cause of the advancement of navigation after
the opening of the Christian era. During the first five hundred years
after the birth of our Lord, nothing worthy of notice in the way of
maritime enterprise or discovery occurred.

But about this time an event took place which caused the foundation of
one of the most remarkable maritime cities in the world. In the year
476 Italy was invaded by the barbarians. One tribe, the Veneti, who
dwelt upon the north-eastern shores of the Adriatic, escaped the
invaders by fleeing for shelter to the marshes and sandy islets at the
head of the gulf, whither their enemies could not follow by land, owing
to the swampy nature of the ground, nor by sea, on account of the
shallowness of the waters. The Veneti took to fishing, then to making
salt, and finally to mercantile enterprises. They began to build, too,
on those sandy isles, and soon their cities covered ninety islands, many
of which were connected by bridges. And thus arose the far-famed city
of the waters--"Beautiful Venice, the bride of the sea."

Soon the Venetians, and their neighbours the Genoese, monopolised the
commerce of the Mediterranean.

The crusades now began, and for two centuries the Christian warred
against the Turk in the name of Him who, they seem to have forgotten, if
indeed the mass of them ever knew, is styled the Prince of Peace. One
of the results of these crusades was that the Europeans engaged acquired
a taste for Eastern luxuries, and the fleets of Venice and Genoa, Pisa
and Florence, ere long crowded the Mediterranean, laden with jewels,
silks, perfumes, spices, and such costly merchandise. The Normans, the
Danes, and the