I make no apology for giving so full a quotation, for there is in the narrative something so sincere and yet so curiously modern: the whole picture is so full of sparkling bits of colour that it is most pleasing, and we can almost see this mammoth ship with her hefty spars and beautiful curves and “flame-coloured” sails. The intervening space of nearly two thousand years seems to have made but little difference in the type of skippers. I am sure that to many a sailing man to-day the delightful little sketch of the captain of the _Goddess Isis_ corn-carrier as “the little old man,” “a bald-pated fellow with a fringe of curly hair” sitting at his tiller, will at once suggest the very counterpart in the style and appearance of the skipper of a corn-barge--“an honest fellow, and good company.” And the account of the bad weather encountered successfully, the use of stellar navigation, the good seamanship employed, and the proof of the corn-ship’s seaworthiness are all too interesting to be lightly dispensed with. In the present days of accurate charts, ingenious nautical instruments, and big, sound ships, one is a little too apt to imagine that the ships and the ability of their crews in ancient times were scarcely worthy of serious consideration--deserving of little more than ridicule. So many ill-informed artists, who have drawn on their imagination in the past to depict what they believed to be the ships of olden times, have been shown to be wrong and misleading, that there has been such a reaction as to make it difficult to obtain any definite legitimate picture in one’s mind. It is just such accounts written by contemporaries as that of the _Goddess Isis_ that enable us once more to see the ships of the past in their true likeness and proportions.