Hamilco, the Carthaginian, according to Festus Avienus, witnessed the ancient Britons “ploughing the ocean in a novel boat; for, strange to tell, they constructed their vessels with skins joined together, and often navigated the sea in a hide of leather.” Upwards of four centuries later, Cæsar found the same stormy sea navigated by the southern Britons in their coracles. When, in the sixth century, in the lives of the Irish Saints, we once more recover some glimpse of maritime arts, it is in the same coracles—sometimes made of a single hide, and in other cases, such as the ocean currach of St. Columba, of several skins sewed together,—that the evangelists of Iona crossed the Irish sea, visited the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and even, as there is reason to believe, preceded the Northmen in the discovery of Iceland. The old Scottish historian Bellenden, writing in the sixteenth century, asks: “How can there be greater ingyne than to make a boat of a bull’s hyde bound with nothing but wands? This boat is called a currock, with which they fish, and sometimes pass over great rivers.” This primitive boat is even now to be met with in the river-estuaries of Wales, and on various parts of the Irish coast: the counterpart of the Esquimaux _kaiak_, or the _baydar_ with which the Aleutian Islanders navigate the intervening ocean between Asia and America. Dr. Pickering remarks, on encountering the latter to the north of the Strait of De Fuca:—“From its lightness, elegance, and the capacity of being rendered impervious to both air and water, I could not but admire its perfect adaptation to the purposes of navigation; for it seemed almost to enable man to take a place among the proper inhabitants of the deep. Such vessels are obviously fitted to cope with the open sea, and, so far as the absence of sails permits, to traverse a considerable expanse of ocean.”