From these diverse channels of information we find that the Phœnicians who invented the bireme and the trireme, who had adopted the Egyptian stern and rigging for their ships, handed these features on to the Greeks, and they, in turn, to the Romans. The earliest Greek ships were afloat in the thirteenth century B.C., and by about the year 800 B.C. maritime matters had taken the greatest hold on the dwellers in the Greek peninsula and the western coasts of Asia Minor. The fierce race for wealth which to-day we see going on in America had its precedent in the eighth century before the Christian era in the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean. Very quickly the contestants found that the shortest route to affluence was _viâ_ the sea. Indeed, following the example of their first teachers, the Phœnicians, so zealously did they keep to their ships that the Milesian sea-traders formed a party in the State known as “the men never off the water.” In the seventh century, if not earlier, the Greeks were prosperously fishing in the Black Sea; and though the dangers of rounding Mount Athos in the Ægean were in those days to some extent analogous to the perils which a sailing ship to-day suffers in doubling Cape Horn, yet in the fourth century B.C., Xerxes, rather than risk a series of shipwrecks to his fleet in the stormy seas at the foot of this mountain, had the sandy isthmus connecting the mainland pierced with a canal. Greece lacked the advantage to be found in a Tigris, a Euphrates, or Nile. Her rivers are so short, and their descent to the sea so rapid, that navigation was utterly impossible. But for what she missed in rivers she was amply compensated in respect of the peculiar formation of the coast. Endowed with the same blessing that makes the west coast of Scotland so attractive (but happily without the drawback of the Atlantic immediately outside the lochs), Greece had her delightful inlets and arms of the seas running far up into the land. The peaceful waters of the Grecian archipelago, the mildness of its climate, the absence of tides, the comparative smoothness of the water—except for occasional squalls with a nasty short sea—these were factors every bit as encouraging for the art of navigation as ever the conditions that smiled on the Egyptians. In some respects they were more stimulating in proportion as the sea makes a better sailor than even the biggest river. Add to this that there was at hand an ample supply of good wood and that the southern shores of the Euxine were rich not merely in timber but in iron, copper and red-lead. Could the shipbuilder’s paradise possibly be more complete?