The origin of sails is buried in the darkness of prehistoric days. Perhaps some hunter, paddling his dugout canoe before the breeze, had his loose skin cape distended by the wind which continued to propel him even when he stopped paddling in order to fasten his garment more closely about him. No doubt something of this kind occurred many times before some prehistoric observer noticed the cause and related to it the effect. Perhaps, then, he held the skin up on his paddle or on his staff, and sat back in comparative comfort while the breeze did his work for him. Certainly such an origin is possible, and man’s desire to accomplish certain ends without expending his energy unnecessarily may, in this as in many other things, have led him to take so important a step toward civilization. From using a skin held on his staff to spreading the skin on a stick which in turn was held up by another stick was but a step, and an excellent means of propelling his canoe had been developed. The perfection of this method of propulsion, however, was slow. How many years before the dawn of written history such sails were in common use we do not know, nor can we guess with any accuracy. It is probable, however, that the time was long, for the very first accounts we have of ships tell us, too, of sails. I have already traced the development of ships from this early time, and it is not my desire to retrace my steps more than is necessary, for ships have always progressed as their propulsion progressed, and consequently the story of ships is also the story of propulsion. But sails, it would almost seem, had less to do with the early development of ships than oars, which for many thousand years after the dawn of history were apparently more important in the eyes of men of the sea than sails. Because of this attitude toward oars, and perhaps, too, because of the comparatively restricted waters in which ships originated, the inventive genius of early designers seems to have been expended almost wholly upon the perfection of the use of oars, until, as I have explained, truly great ships were built in which much thought was given to the proper seating of hundreds of oarsmen. [Illustration: AN EGYPTIAN BOAT OF THE 5TH DYNASTY _The double mast, shown in this drawing, was in common use in Egypt about 3000 B. C. It is occasionally to be seen on native boats in the Orient to-day._] Sails, then, progressed little, save in size, beyond the skin that first was stretched before the breeze in some remote savage genius’s canoe, and, until the Crusades began at the end of the 11th Century, sails and spars remained simple and, from the viewpoint of to-day, comparatively inefficient. With a favouring wind ships could hoist their sails and proceed merrily enough, but with a wind even mildly unfavourable sailors sometimes lay in sheltered harbours for weeks or got out their oars and proceeded on their way with strenuous labour.