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 before this they had passed Gibraltar and settled the colony of Tarshish, where they found silver in such abundance that "it was nothing accounted of in the days of Solomon." We do not know whether it was "the ships of Tarshish and of the Isles" that first felt the way north to France and England. But we do know that many Phoenicians did trade with the French and British Celts, who probably learnt in this way how to build ships of their own.

CHAPTER III

EAST AGAINST WEST
(480-146 B.C.)

For two thousand years Eastern fleets and armies tried to conquer Europe. Sometimes hundreds of years would pass without an attack. But the result was always the same—the triumph of West over East; and the cause of each triumph was always the same—the sea-power of the West. Without those Western navies the Europe and America we know today could never have existed. There could have been no Greek civilization, no Roman government, no British Empire, and no United States. First, the Persians fought the Greeks at Salamis in 480 B.C. Then Carthage fought Rome more than two hundred years later. Finally, the conquering Turks were beaten by the Spaniards at Lepanto more than two thousand years after Salamis, but not far from the same spot, Salamis being ten miles from Athens and Lepanto a hundred.

Long before Salamis the Greeks had been founding colonies along the Mediterranean, among them some on the Asiatic side of the Aegean Sea, where the French and British fleets had so much to do during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 against the Turks and Germans. Meanwhile the Persians had been fighting their way north-westwards till they had reached the Aegean and conquered most of the Greeks and Phoenicians there. Then the Greeks at Athens sent a fleet which landed an army that burnt the city of Sardis, an outpost of Persian power. Thereupon King Darius, friend of the Prophet Daniel, vowed vengeance on Athens, and caused a trusty servant to whisper in his ear each day, "Master, remember Athens!"

Now, the Persians were landsmen, with what was then the greatest army in the world, but with a navy and a merchant fleet mostly manned by conquered Phoenicians and Greek colonists, none of whom wanted to see Greece itself destroyed. So when Darius met the Greeks at Marathon his fleet and army did not form the same sort of United Service that the British fleet and army form. He was beaten back to his ships and retired to Asia Minor. But "Remember Athens!" was always in his mind. So for ten years he and his son Xerxes prepared a vast armada against which they thought no other force on earth could stand. But, like the Spanish Armada against England two thousand years later, this Persian host was very much stronger ashore than afloat. Its army was so vast that it covered the country like a swarm of locusts. At the world-famous pass of Thermopylae the Spartan king, Leonidas, waited for the Persians. Xerxes sent a summons asking the Greeks to surrender their arms. "Come and take them," said Leonidas. Then wave after wave of Persians rushed to the attack, only to break against the dauntless Greeks. At last a vile traitor told Xerxes of another pass (which the Greeks had not men enough to hold, though it was on their flank). He thus got the chance of forcing them either to retreat or be cut off. Once through this pass the Persians overran the country; and all the Spartans at Thermopylae died fighting to the last.

Only the Grecian fleet remained. It was vastly out-numbered by the Persian fleet. But it was manned by patriots trained to fight on the water; while the Persians themselves were nearly all landsmen, and so had to depend on the Phoenicians and colonial Greek seamen, who were none too eager for the fray. Seeing the Persians too densely massed together on a narrow front the Greek commander, Themistocles, attacked with equal skill and fury, rolled up the Persian front in confusion on the mass behind, and won the battle that saved the Western World. The Persians lost two hundred vessels against only forty Greek. But it was not the mere loss of vessels, or even of this battle of Salamis itself, that forced Xerxes to give up all hopes of conquest. The real reason was his having lost the command of the sea. He knew that the victorious Greeks could now beat the fighting ships escorting his supply vessels coming overseas from Asia Minor, and that, without the constant supplies of men, arms, food, and everything else an army needs, his army itself must wither away.

Two hundred and twenty years later the sea-power of the Roman West beat both the land- and sea-power of the Carthaginian East; and for the very same reason. Carthage was an independent colony of Phoenicians which had won an empire in the western Mediterranean by its sea-power. It held a great part of Spain, the whole of Sardinia, most of Sicily, and many other islands. The Romans saw that they would never be safe as long as Carthage had the stronger navy; so they began to build one of their own. They copied a Carthaginian war galley that had been wrecked; and meanwhile taught their men to row on benches set up ashore. This made the Carthaginians laugh and led them to expect an easy victory. But the Romans were thorough in everything they did, and they had the best trained soldiers in the world. They knew the Carthaginians could handle war galleys better than they could themselves; so they tried to give their soldiers the best possible chance when once the galleys closed. They made a sort of drawbridge that could be let down with a bang on the enemy boats and there held fast by sharp iron spikes biting into the enemy decks. Then their soldiers charged across and cleared everything before them.