At first, merely to preserve the wood, the ship-builders covered every part of the vessel exposed to the action of the air or water with a coating of pitch, but this sombre and uniform tint soon wearied the eye. A more brilliant colour, prepared with wax, was painted over the pitch; the costlier class of ships glistened in all the splendour of white, ultramarine, and vermilion, while pirates, and occasionally men-of-war, were covered with a coat of green paint, which, blending with the colour of the sea, prevented them from being distinguished at any distance. Gilding glistened on the vessels of the rich, and the sculptor’s chisel added busts and figures to the decoration of their bows and sterns. Even in this respect the Middle Ages still followed the traditions of antiquity. The decorations of ships varied according to the caprice of owners and the fashion of the times. The Saracen dromon boarded and taken by Richard Cœur-de-Lion had one side coloured green and the other yellow. The Genoese at first painted their ships green; but in 1242, when they were at war with the Pisans, they coloured them white spotted with vermilion crosses, that is, “red crosses on a silver ground,” which resembled the arms of “Monsieur Saint-Georges.” Red was the colour generally adopted for ships’ hulls in the sixteenth century, though a pattern in black and white was sometimes added, and sometimes the ground was painted black and the pattern only vermilion. [Illustration: Fig. 93.--Pontifical Galley with Sails and Oars, and provided with heavy Artillery.--Drawn by Breugel the Elder, and engraved by Fr. Huys (1550).] In 1525, when Francis I., made prisoner at the battle of Pavia, was taken to Barcelona, the six galleys which carried the captive sovereign and his suite were painted entirely black from the top of the masts to the water-line. This was not, however, the first time that ships had been known to put on mourning: for instance, the Knights of St. Stephen, in the fifteenth century, hid the brilliant hues of their _Capitane_,[6] and painted its sails, pennants, awnings, oars, and hull with black, and swore never to alter the sombre hue till their order had recaptured from the Turks a galley lost by the Pisans in an engagement which, however, had not been altogether inglorious for the vanquished. [Illustration: Fig. 94.--Seal of Edward, Count of Rutland (1395).]