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Small coasting, and incidentally sea-ranging, vessels must be of great antiquity, for the record of great ships capable of carrying hundreds of men and prolonging their voyages for years extends very far back indeed. We may recall the Scriptural item incidentally given of the fleets of Hiram, King of Tyre, and Solomon, King of Israel: “For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.”3 Tharshish is generally understood to have been Tartessus by the Guadalquivir beyond the western end of the Mediterranean. The elements of these exotic cargoes indicate, rather, traffic across the eastern seas. No doubt “ship of Tharshish” had come (like the term East Indiaman) to have a secondary meaning, distinguishing, wherever used, a special type of great vessel of ample capacity and equipment, named from the long voyage westward to Spain, in which it was first conspicuously engaged. But this would carry back we know not how many centuries the era of huge ships sailing from Phoenicia toward the Atlantic and seemingly able to go anywhere; with the certainty that lesser craft had long anticipated them on the nearer laps of the journey at least.

Corroboration is found in the utterances of a Chinese observer, later in date but apparently dealing with a continuing size and condition. “There is a great sea [the Mediterranean], and to the west of this sea there are countless countries, but Mu-lan-p’i [Mediterranean Spain] is the one country which is visited by the big ships.... Putting to sea from T’o-pan-ti [the Suez of today] ... after sailing due west for full an hundred days, one reaches this country. A single one of these (big) ships of theirs carries several thousand men, and on board they have stores of wine and provisions, as well as weaving looms. If one speaks of big ships, there are none so big at those of Mu-lan-p’i.”4

This statement is credited to only a hundred years before Marco Polo. One naturally suspects some exaggeration. But a parallel account, nearly as expansive and very circumstantial, is given in the same work concerning giant vessels sailing in the opposite direction some six hundred years earlier. It begins: “The ships that sail the Southern Sea and south of it are like houses. When their sails are spread they are like great clouds in the sky.” Professor Holmes, drawing attention to these passages (which he quotes), very justly observes, “who shall say that the mastery of the sea known to have been attained in the Orient 500 A.D. had not been achieved long prior to that date?”5