This ballad was afterwards known as “The Song of the Compass.” Doubtless this crude compass was used only when the sailors could not see the sun in cloudy weather, or it may have been also used when making night passages. It certainly cannot have been more than a frail aid in stormy weather, when these clumsy ships were pitching and rolling in the trough of the sea. Still, excepting this innovation, there is not between the time of the ancient Greeks and that of the fourteenth century more than the slightest advance in the seaman’s art. Frankly, they hardly needed the compass in their coasting voyages, and when its utility was demonstrated they declined, for a long time, to put to sea in any ship having such an infernal and superstitious article on board. Although the date 1190 has just been given as the approximate period when the lodestone was employed in European navigation, yet it was not till the beginning of the fourteenth century that a Neapolitan pilot suspended the needle on a fixed pivot in a box, though some authorities deny that this man accomplished so much. The origin of the fleur-de-lys, which the reader still sees on every compass card to this day--flower-de-luce, as the rude Elizabethan sailors used to call it--is variously attributed to the fact that this pilot was a subject of the King of Naples, who was of the junior branch of the Bourbon family. Or it is possibly a conventional representation of the dart which the Arabians called the needle. Let us then sum up. Thanks to the Vikings and Crusaders, the warriors and the traders, there was a greater knowledge of the world’s geography. And now also men had the instrument which would enable them to find their way across trackless oceans and reach home again in safety. Concerning those places which they had never seen, they had much hopeful curiosity, but there was little actual information. All the time the East was calling in its magical way to the European adventurers. The land travellers of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries had drawn back the veil hiding the golden harvest of the East. Those who had been and seen related such wondrous yarns that men of action and ambition longed to be away thither at once. The effect of the Crusades had not yet passed away. The desire for travel which has spread so enormously till it has reached the present-day obsession was growing rapidly.