[Illustration: AN ESKIMO UMIAK _This boat is structurally similar to the kayak except that it has no deck. It is a larger boat, and will carry heavy loads and perhaps as many as a dozen people. It is made by covering a frame with skins._] These ships—for they had by this time grown to such size that they are more than canoes or boats—often extended far out over the water both forward and aft, and any concentration of weight on these overhanging extremities had a tendency to strain the hull amidships. This was offset, as it sometimes is to-day on shallow draft river boats, by running cables from bow to stern over crutches set amidships. While the Egyptians were the first to picture their ships, it is not certain that they were the first to have ships of real size and sea-going ability, for the very temples and tombs on the walls of which are shown the ships that I have described have also the records of naval victories over raiders from other lands who must have made the voyage to the Egyptian coast in order to plunder the wealth of that old centre of civilization. The Egyptians, however, were never a sea-going people in the sense that the Phœnicians were. But strange as it may be, the Phœnicians, despite the fact that they probably invented the alphabet, did not make the first record, or, as a matter of fact, any very important records, of their great development in the ship-building art. The earliest picture of which we know of Phœnician ships is on the wall of an Assyrian palace and dates back only to about 700 B. C. which was after the Assyrians had conquered the Phœnicians and had for the first time (for the Assyrians were an inland people) come in contact with sea-going ships. By this time the Phœnicians had had many years of experience on the sea, and the Assyrian representation shows a ship of more advanced design than the Egyptians had had. There are few records, however, from which we can gain much knowledge of Phœnician ships, although we know they ventured out of the Mediterranean and were familiar with the coasts of Spain, Portugal, France, and even England, where they went to secure tin. And as I mentioned earlier, they may even have circumnavigated Africa, and it seems likely that they invented the bireme and the trireme, thus solving the question of more power for propulsion. A bireme is a boat propelled by oars which has the rowers so arranged that the oars overlap and form two banks or rows, one above the other. A trireme is similar except that there are three banks. With this arrangement a boat may have twice or three times as many rowers (in these old boats there was never more than one man to an oar) without lengthening the hull.