Sea-travel in those mediæval times was thus no pleasure cruise: it was comparable only to the anxious experiences of passengers at the height of the recent submarine campaign. Except for religion or trade, no one ever thought of going to sea. It was too dangerous an undertaking, so punctuated with storms, and in all respects so thoroughly uncomfortable, that it was to be avoided as far as possible. Consequently those who used it as a living expected to be paid very handsomely. It is difficult in these modern times, with all the safety and luxury which a steamship connotes, to realise the horror with which all seafaring was regarded. The result was that artists hesitated to depict marine subjects; and even when they did, it was usually to show a ship having a dreadful time in heavy weather. It is for that reason that illustrations of mediæval ships are so few, either in stained-glass windows, carvings, devotional books, or paintings. People had no wish to be reminded of what was to them a very unpleasant subject, except to those hardened few who preferred ship-life to agriculture or trade ashore. Unlike present-day conditions, the merchant himself was compelled to go to sea. There was no other means of his reaching his markets; but he was heartily thankful to get himself and his goods safe into port. FOOTNOTES: [1] _The Early History of Venice_, by F. C. Hodgson. London, 1901. I wish also to acknowledge indebtedness to the same author’s _Venice in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries_. CHAPTER III THE MEDITERRANEAN MERCANTILE MARINE It is fortunately possible to obtain from various sources an insight into life as it was endured in a mediæval Mediterranean merchant ship, and this will assist us considerably to form a sympathetic interest in the development which was going on towards the ideal craft that was to evolve five or six hundred years later. On a tomb in a church at Milan, a Pisan artist named Balduccio in the year 1339 sculptured, fortunately for our knowledge, a merchant ship of his time, and we may regard her as typical alike of Venice, Genoa and Pisa. There is remarkably little difference in essentials between her and a Roman merchant ship of about A.D. 200: that is to say, the trading shipmen, having once found out a suitable type, stuck to it, just as to-day there is a more or less standard type of tramp steamer or steam trawler or steam drifter. Time had tested and given its approval. Thus in Balduccio’s illustration we have a round, beamy vessel not unlike the shape of a very fat banana, and with a stern sweeping up from the water-line not altogether unlike that of the so-called modern “cruiser stern.” The essential difference is that this stern culminates in two small decks—a stern-castle, in fact, and a forecastle, much smaller, overhanging the bows. There is also a fighting-top.