shape and order, to offer them up to publick view; which is the subject matter of this ensuing treatise. FIRST, it is indisputably true from the authority of the sacred records, the structure of the ark owed and intituled its original contexture to the industrious precaution of Noah, who, by the immediate designation of God himself, brought that wooden island into shape and order, to rescue some part of mankind from the angry baptism of a publick deluge. And it is probable, that the posterity of Noah, having plantations which were contiguous to Mount Ararat, where the ark rested, and there viewing its skeleton, might, according to that original, form and build such ships, and other vessels (the art of navigation being not yet arrived to its solstice) as might make rivers and more spacious waters obvious to a passage, and maintain such a necessary intercourse, as might improve a commerce between nation and nation. The heathen records, and monuments of pagan antiquity, which were ignorant of the structure of the ark, according to the va riety of tradition, assign the invention of navigation to several persons. Diodorus Siculus attributes it to Neptune, who from thence contracted the appellation of God of the Sea. Strabo, to Minos king of Crete. And lastly, Tibullus consecrates it to the fame and memory of the city of Tyre. Minos indeed expelled malefactors out of the islands, and in most of them planted colonics of his own, by which means, they who inhabited the sea-coasts, becoming more addicted to riches, grew more constant to their dwellings; of whom, some, grown now rich, circumscribed and encompassed their cities with walls, and others by the influence of Minos built a navy, and by an active and noble diligence so secured commerce, that they rendered navigation free. But it is most probable, that, Tyre being, in elder times, a city as eminent for its wealth and traffick, as it was for its strength and magnificence, and enjoying with its bordering neighbours, the Phoenicians, a large extensive sea-coast, and many capacious havens, which had an aspect on the Mediterranean sea, found out at first the institution of shipping. From the Phoenicians and Tyrians, it was conducted down to the Egyptians, by whose industry and ingenuity, much was annexed to the advantage and perfection of it: For whereas the first vessels were framed out of the trunk of some large tree, made hollow by art, or else of divers boards, compacted into the fashion of a boat, and covered with the skins of beasts, the Phoenicians moulded them into a more elegant and convenient form, and secured them with greater additions of strength, whilst the Egyptians added, to the former structure, the supplement of decks. From the Egyptians, this art was transported to the Grecians; for when Danaus, king of Egypt, to decline the fury of his brother Rameses, made his approaches to Greece, he first instructed its inhabitants to sail in covered vessels, called Naves, who before perfected their voyages over those narrow seas, on beams and rafters fastened together, to whom they gave the appellation of Rates. Amongst the Grecians, those of Crete had the highest repute for the manage of navigation, which causeth Strabo to ascribe the invention of ships to Minos. In times subsequent to these, the Carthaginians, extracted from Tyre, grew most considerable in shipping, by the supply of which, they often disordered and distressed the affairs of the Romans: But the fury of a tempest, having separated a Quinqueremis, or galley of five banks of oars, from the residue of the Carthaginian navy, cast it on the coast of Italy; by a curious inspection into which, the Romans obtained the art of shipping; and, not long after, atchieved the dominion of the sea. That the Phoenicians and Greeks transmitted the knowledge of navigation to Spain and France, is without controversy, since Gades, in the first, was a colony of the Phoenicians, and Marseilles, in the last, a plantation of the Phocians. As for Belgium and Britain, they were, in ages of an elder inscription, very barren and indigent in shipping; for Cæsar, when he made his eruption on the last, found the circumambient seas so ill furnished, that he was forced, with the industrious assistance of his soldiery, to build and equip a navy of six-hundred and two and thirty vessels, to transport his army into Albion. The Phoenicians having, as is above recited, invented open ves. sels, and the Egyptians ships with decks, the last of these inforced the art of navigation, by adding to it the invention of gallies, with two banks of oars upon a side; which sort of vessels, in process of time, did swell into that voluminous bulk, that Ptolemy Philo. pater is said to have framed a galley of fifty banks. Ships of bur. then, stiled Ciræra, intitle their invention to the Cypriots; cockboats or skifts (scapha) owe their first structure to the Illyrians or Liburnians; Brigantines (Celoces) confess theirs to have been the artifice of the Rhodians; frigates, or light barks (lembi) acknow. ledge their original unto the industry of the Cyrenians; the Phaselus and Pamphyli, ships instructed for war, were the invention of the Pamphylians, and the inhabitants of Phaselis, a town of Lycia in Asia minor. Vessels for transporting of horse, stiled Hippagines, are indebted, for their first institution, to the Salaminians. Grappling-hooks, for theirs, to Anacharsis. Anchors confess their first knowledge to have been from the Tuscans. The rudder-helm, and art of steering, is ascribed to Typhis, principal pilot in Jason's eminent ship, called the Argoe, who, having observed that a kite, when she divided the air, steered her whole body and flight with her tail, perfected that in the designs of art, which he had discovered to have been effected by instinct in the works of nature. If we please to trace out the first inventors of tackle, we shall discover, that the primitive institution of the oar is attributed to the Boeotians, and the original discovery and use of masts and sails ennoble the memory of Dedalus, and his son Icarus; the last of which, confiding too much in the dexterity of this invention, giving too large and spreading a sail to the bark he was engaged in, over-set the vessel, and perished, and adopted the sea, in which he miscarried, into his own name. But, though the supplement and addition of decks of ships intitles itself to the original artifice of the Egyptians, as is before recited; yet had they others of a more narrow dimension, both for use and transportation; for the Egyptians, anciently, (says Pliny, lib. xii. Nat. Hist.) used to make boats of reeds and bulrushes; which assertion he again justifies in another place, Papyraceis navibus (says he) armamentisque Nili navigamus; and to these vessels Lucian alludes, lib. iv. Phars. Sic cum tenet omnia Nilus, Conseritur bibula memphitica cymba papyro. Which fashion of boat Moses was engaged in, when Pharaoh's daughter rescued him from the danger of the river. The Prophet Isaiah records such utensils in that periphrasis of Egypt, "Wo to the land shadowing with wings, that sends ambassadors by sea in bulrushes." Strabo sailed to Egypt in a small vessel made of wicker, as his own relation discovers to us, in the seventeenth of his Geography. Juvenal also makes mention of earthen boats in Egypt, used and employed also there to sail with; for, recording the deadly feud and superstitious conflicts, commenced between Ombos and Tentyra, in relation to their Gods, he speaks thus, Sat. XV. Hac sævit rabie imbelle & inutile vulgus, The Britons had anciently their naves vitiles in Pliny's stile; the natives of Ireland call them Corroghs, and some Corracles; they were little vessels covered with leather, in their dimensions scarce exceeding the bulk of a basket; and these kind of boats, or baskets, were used by Julius Cæsar, to transport his army over the river Sicoris against Petreius, and other rivers elsewhere; and he had learned the making of them, it seems, from the Britons, when he was in this island, as himself attests in his first book De Bello Civili: Cujus generis, says he, cum superioribus usus Britanniæ docuerat. And, in a subsequent discourse, he describes them thus: Carina primum ac statumina ex levi materia fiebantur, reliquum corpus navium viminibus contextum integebatur. They have the like vessels on the river Euphrates, to transport commodities to Babylon; and their proportion is so conformable to these British ones (according to the pattern discovered to us by Herodotus) that a man would judge, that either the Britons extracted the description of these vessels from the Babylonians, or the Babylonians from them. For Herodotus, in Clio, that is, the first book of his History, affirms, that they had boats, made of osier or willows, of an orbicular form, and in the fashion of a buckler, without prow or poop, and covered over on the outside with the head of a bullock tanned. In these, besides their native commo dities, they used to conveigh palm-wines in tuns, to be sold or vended at Babylon; two men, with an oar a-piece in their hands, conducting and managing the vessel. These vessels were so portable, that the owners were accustomed to transport them on their backs to and from the water; the master would carry his boat by land, and the boat would waft the master on the water; as the Arabian fisherman uses to do with his tortoise-shell, which is his shallop by sea, and his house on land; under which he sleeps, and in which he sails. Proportionate in their dimension to these are those which the Egyptians use at this day upon the Nile, which they take upon their backs, when they approach the cataracts and steeper falls of that river. Boterius calls them Naves plicatiles, and which they employ in some places of the West-Indies: For, in the year 1509, we read, that there were brought to Roan seven Indians, confined to one small vessel or boat, which was so portable, that one man could raise it up with his hand, as the same Boterius, in his Relations, seems to intimate. In some places of the West-Indies they fish with faggots com, posed of bulrushes, in their dialect stiled Balsa's: Having sustained them upon their shoulders to the sea, they there cast them in; then leap upon them, and after row into the main, with small reeds on either side, themselves standing upright, like Tritons or Neptunes; and in these Balsa's they are accustomed to carry those cords and nets, they employ in fishing. The Indians likewise have long boats, called Canoo's, made hollow, and artificially framed out of one tree. In Greenland the fishermen's boats are composed into the shape of weavers shuttles, covered outwardly with skins of beals, and inwardly fashioned and fortified with the bones of the same fishes; which, being sewed together with many doubles and sutures, are so secure, that, in foul and stormy wea ther, they will shut themselves up in the same, being rescued, by the aid of these, from the fury and imminent prejudices of rocks, winds, and tempests: These are about twenty feet in length, and two feet and an half in their breadth, and so swift, that no ship is able to outvy them in speed; and so light of portage, that one man may support many; and they are furnished but with one oar. Before I wind up this discourse, I shall winnow and discuss that question, Whether or not antiquity had any discovery or notice of the compass, which, in this latter age, hath contributed so much to the improvement of Navigation? Those, who do assert, that it had some imperfect glimmering, or rather some gloomy cognisance of it, do establish their opinion on the authority of Plautus, where they find mention of the Versoria: And, secondly, because the load-stone, which sways and manages the compass, was anciently, by the Greeks, stiled Magnes, and Lapis Heraclius; both which names remain instated upon it until this day. But to the first it is answered, that the Versoria of Plautus is no other, thau that piece of tackle, which, in the modern dialect of our mariners, falls under the appellation of a Bolin, by which they used to turn their sails, and proportion them to the changeable vicissitude of every wind. And so much is manifest from Plautus himself, in the Comedy which he stiles Mercator, saying, Hinc ventus nunc secundus est, cape modo versoriam; so called from verso, to turn often; or else it may borrow its extraction and nativity from versum, the first supine of verto; whence velum vertere is a customary term amongst the Latins, used to express the shifting of the sail, as the wind does vary. As for the load-stone, it was, indeed, by the Greeks, called Lapis Heraclius, not because Hercules Tyrius, to whom the sea-faring Phoenicians, in storms and tempests, offered up their orisons for protection, first traced out the vertue and energetical effluviums of it, as some contend; but because it was discovered near Heraclea, a city of Lydia, called for the same reason, and upon the same account, Lapis Lydius also, and, by the ancients, known only under the notion of a touch-stone. Nor does the name of Magnes, used under that appellation promiscuously both by the Greeks and Latins, owe its original etymology to any other root or cradle, than that it was found near Magnesia, a city of Lydia, of which Heraclea, above-mentioned, was likewise a part; from whence it hath ever since purchased the constant denomination of Lapis Magnes; so Suidas asserts for the Greeks, and old Lucretius affirms the same for the Latins. Hav. ing evinced, from these demonstrations, the ignorance of antiquity, both in the notional knowledge, and practical application of the compass, it now remains my task to unwind, to whom, in times of a more recent inscription, this excellent instrument intitled its first discovery. And, if we will traverse and peruse records of a modern aspect, we shall find, that the invention of the Pyxis Nautica, or Compass, is generally ascribed to John Goia, or Flavio Goia, as others stile him, of Amalphi in Campania, in the kingdom of Naples. But all rare and curious artifices are, in their first productions, like the designs of chymistry, much in projection, but little in perfection; for his discovery reached but to eight winds only, which made up his compass, that is, the four principal, and four collateral; and left the improvement of this invention' to be attempted by posterity, which indeed did add shape and just perfection to this ingenious design. For, in some few ages subsequent to this, the people of Antwerp and Bruges compleated this invention, by annexing to the compass twenty-four other subordinate winds, or points. Before this invention, pilots were directed in their right voyages by certain stars, they took notice of, especially the Pleiades, or Charles's Wain, and the two stars in the tail of the bear, called Helice and Cynosura, which are therefore called load-stars, or leading-stars. As travellers, in the desarts of Arabia, and those of Tartary, were always guided by some fixed stars, in the night-time, to steer their courses in those pathless, disordered, and inhospitable ways; so seamen were directed by the like heavenly guides, in the untractable wilderness of |