“These facts induced me to ask myself this question. If we can trace the same unimproved canoes through such a series of years, how happened it that ships were ever built? How did those persons who first discovered the people possessing these canoes, get the ships which conveyed them to those distant regions? Or why should one set of men turn their canoes into ships (if our ships grew out of canoes), and other sets of men never make any improvement in theirs? Why have not the natives of the coasts of Africa turned their canoes into ships, as well as the natives of Britain? To solve these questions I had to trace back the history of shipping from century to century――rising and falling with the nations to which it belonged, varying in size and form as adopted by newly civilized countries, but maintaining the same principle of construction; and when I searched from nation to nation in the Mediterranean, and thence up the Nile to Thebes, I could not find any period of time in which it did not appear that ships have existed――that is, vessels composed of ribs and planks with beams and decks, as are seen at the present day. We may pass over the more recent time and go back 1000 years before the birth of Christ. We then find Solomon with a fleet of ships in the Red Sea, and we read in the 1st of Kings――‘And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon.’ Hiram, therefore, had long possessed a fleet; and 450 years before Solomon’s time we find Balaam saying――‘And ships shall come from the coast of Chittim and shall afflict Asshur,’ from which it is clear that Balaam must have known that those whom he addressed understood what he meant by ships, or his prophecy would have been useless. But there is little doubt but that at that time there was a large fleet of ships in the Red Sea. Sesostris is said to have had about four hundred sail of war ships, with which he carried his army to the conquest of various countries down the coast, and which are represented on the walls of his palace at Thebes. The pictures on the walls of the tombs also afford much information on this subject, as well as some on the inside of mummy cases.