And there is still another reason, it seems to me, why the Phœnicians might have felt tempted to go eastward after Cornwall. Ignorant as they were of the world’s geography, might they not have thought that, just as by sailing round always to the starboard they had encircled Africa, so having performed roughly a semi-circle from the Mediterranean to the English Channel, if they kept their course over the wilderness of sea in front of them, they would ultimately find that Europe, like Africa, was an island, too, and that the nearer they approached the rising of the sun the sooner would they see their homes again? And if we are told to explain the differences between, on the one hand, the ships of the Phœnicians or their later descendants the Greeks and Romans, and on the other, those of the Vikings, it is but natural that, given a general design which has originated in the smoother waters of the Mediterranean, it must necessarily be somewhat modified for the nasty seas of the Baltic and German Ocean, where sudden changes of wind are but the harbingers of the rapid approach of bad weather. Cæsar, when he came north into Brittany, was struck, in comparing the ships of the Veneti with his own, by the superior seaworthiness of the former, and adds significantly that “considering the nature of the place and the violence of the storms, they were more suitable and better adapted.”[25] There is to-day a far greater difference in England between the sailing ships of one port and another than there was between the old Viking vessels and those of the Phœnicians. If you cruise round from one coast of Great Britain to another, you will find in the Scotch fishing craft, the Yorkshire cobble, the Yarmouth fishing smack, the Lowestoft “drifter,” the Thames “bawley,” the Deal galley, the Itchen Ferry transom-sterned cutters, the Brixham “Mumble Bees,” the Falmouth Quay-punt, the Bristol Channel pilot, and the Manx lugger, a wonderful complexity of designs and rigs, but the reason is always that that particular design and rig have been found to be the most suitable adaptation for each particular coast. So it was with the Vikings. They modified the Phœnician design to their local requirements, without, nevertheless, neglecting those features essential to a good ship. After they had been shipbuilders for some time they would rapidly learn for themselves the values of length and beam, of draught and sweet lines, of straight keel, with high stem to breast a wave, and high stern to repel a following sea. Double-ended as they were, there was a reason for this essential difference from the Phœnicians. Such seas as they had in the North would not suffer their ships to be beached always in fine weather. So in order that they could be brought to land with either end on, and in order, too, that in sea-fights they might easily manœuvre astern or ahead, the Viking ships were built with a bow both forward and aft.