Without the vastly
important things of the sea, without the war fleets and merchant fleets
of empires old and new, it is perfectly certain that the world could
not have been half so good a place to live in; for freedom and the sea
tend to go together. True of all people, this is truer still of us;
for the sea has been the very breath of British life and liberty ever
since the first hardy Norseman sprang ashore on English soil.
Nobody knows how the Egyptians first learnt ship-building from the
people farther East. But we do know that they were building ships in
Egypt seven thousand years ago, that their ninth king was called Betou,
which means "the prow of a ship", and that his artists carved pictures
of boats five hundred years older than the Great Pyramid. These
pictures, carved on the tombs of the kings, are still to be seen,
together with some pottery, which, coming from the Balkans, shows that
Betou had boats trading across the eastern end of the Mediterranean. A
picture carved more than six thousand years ago shows an Egyptian boat
being paddled by fourteen men and steered with paddles by three more on
the right-hand side of the stern as you look toward the bow.
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