Ships & Ways of Other Days - E. Keble Chatterton

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had their dockyards, which were kept up at a great cost. And there is something curiously modern in the stringent regulations kept for preserving the dockyard secrets. Any unauthorised person who intruded into certain parts thereof was punished with death. And this strict rule was not peculiar to Rhodes, but obtained at Carthage and elsewhere. In order to protect their harbours against the assaults of the enemy, booms were laid across the entrances, and engines were mounted on merchant ships moored near the harbour-mouth.

      The Rhodians were great shipbuilders, and in their sheds was kept many a craft ready to put to sea. But as Britain to-day builds warships for nations other than herself, so it was with Rhodes, and to this end she used to have brought to her immense quantities of timber, iron, lead, pitch, tar, resin, hemp, hair (for caulking), and sailcloth. Even human hair was employed in the service of the ship, and at the time of need the ladies of Rhodes, Carthage, and Massilia cut off their tresses and yielded it up for the making of ropes. The Rhodian squadrons were usually of three ships or multiples of three, and every year a squadron went forth for its sea experiences. The trieres, which carried as many as two hundred men, each voyaged as far as the Atlantic. Fine swimmers, fine seamen, their sea prowess was the cause of the greatest admiration on the part of the Greeks. “It was a proverb,” says Mr. Torr in his “Rhodes in Ancient Times,”12 “that ten Rhodians were worth ten ships,” and we must attribute their natural instinct and acquired skill for marine matters to that fortunate accident of being an island nation—a circumstance which has always, in all parts of the globe, meant so much to the progress and independence of a nation. Furthermore, the port of Rhodes was an important point on the line of commerce, and this fact also must be taken into account in reckoning up the influences at work for encouraging the marine arts, especially in inculcating an interest and admiration for the things of the sea. For those great merchant ships which used to sail to Egypt and come back to Greece laden with corn were accustomed to make Rhodes their port of call, and we cannot doubt that the sojourn of these big vessels with their impressive bulk and remarkable spars would make a powerful appeal to the imagination of the local sailormen and shipwrights always on the look-out for new ideas. Then, too, they had their own overseas trade, for large quantities of wine were exported from Rhodes to both Egypt and Sicily. Even by the third century B.C. the Rhodians were strong both as a naval and commercial nation. Their maritime laws were so excellent that they were afterwards adopted by Rome, and even to-day much of the world’s best sea law can be traced back to the people of that Mediterranean island.

      

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