To the Greeks we owe the first detailed accounts of the art of ship-building and of ship construction. In early Greek history the vessels were small and were usually without decks, although some of them had decks that extended for part of their length. They carried crews that ranged up to a hundred or more, and, in the democratic fashion of the early Greeks, they all took part in the rowing of the ship, with the possible exception of the commander. At this early period great seaworthiness had not been developed, and there are many accounts of the loss of ships in storms and of the difficulty of navigating past headlands and along rocky coasts. Later, Greek ships cruised the Mediterranean almost at will, but ship design and construction had first to develop and the development took centuries. Even in those days there was a marked difference between the ships intended for commerce and those intended for war. The war vessels—and the pirate vessels, which of course were ships of war—were narrow and swift, while the ships of commerce were broad and slow: broad because of the merchant’s desire to carry large cargoes, and slow because the great beam and the heavy burdens prevented speed. [Illustration: AN ESKIMO KAYAK _These small canoes are made of a light frame covered with skins._] During the period at which Athens reached her prime the trireme, or three-banked ship, was the most popular. As a matter of fact, its popularity was so great that its name was often given to all ships of the same general type whether they were designed with two, three, four, five, or even more banks of oars. These many-oared ships reached a very high state of perfection during the supremacy of Greece, and the most careful calculations were made in order to utilize every available inch by packing the rowers as closely together as was possible without preventing them from properly performing their tasks. The rowers, as I have suggested, sat in tiers, those on each side usually being all in the same vertical plane, and the benches they used ran from the inner side of the hull to upright timbers which were erected between decks, slanting toward the stern. That is, in a ship with three banks of oars, three seats were attached to each of these slanting timbers and the footrests of the rower occupying the topmost seat were on either side of the man who occupied the second seat in the next group of three. The vertical distance between these seats was two feet. The horizontal distance was one foot. The distance between seats in the same bank was three feet. I have gone into some detail in describing this arrangement, for rowers—and from the later days of Greece on they were generally slave rowers—were the motive power of ships for three thousand years or more, and for more than a thousand years the many-banked ship was supreme. [Illustration: A BIRCH-BARK CANOE