The sceptics are no less ignorant of seamanship: nothing was more easy than concealment. We must not start by picturing a binnacle, exposed by day, and lighted by night--a quartermaster conning by it, and a steersman looking at it, second by second, in presence of ship’s company, passengers, and strangers. We must bring before us habits of navigation formed without this aid; mariners guiding themselves by night by the stars, and lying to, when these could not be seen; or perhaps with the instinct of the islanders of the Pacific, finding their path through darkness, by watching the angle of incidence of waves and wind, rating the effect of one on the direction of the other, and thus by approximation holding on till the lights reappeared. The heaven or the ocean was the binnacle. They would seek from the needle what we seek from the Sextant,--conference and counsel. The instrument so used by master or mate, is to our sailors as unknown as the astrolabe or divining-rod. The navigator works out his place upon the surface of the globe, and lays down the course; but the formulæ are to him as much a secret as the instrument is a mystery to the crew. The Phœnician skipper might refer to his magic _Cup_ in secret: an approximation was all that, without the sextant and dead reckoning, could be desired, and that only in case of doubt or difficulty arising from bad weather. Modern writers make a sad jumble whenever they touch ancient navigation. They transfer--but not as a sailor would do--the ideas derived from our practice, which in most things is changed, in some reversed. Men-of-war now exceed merchantmen in dimensions, as much as the merchantmen formerly exceeded the men-of-war. A Phœnician vessel was able to stow 500 emigrants, with provisions for a long voyage, and required for masts the cedars of Lebanon. They carried, in the earliest period, heavy substances from the farthest points; the timber of India is found amongst the tombs of Egypt. To apply to _their_ navigation, the passages descriptive of the row-boats of the Greeks and Romans, is a solecism and an anachronism:[129] they neither made their way by the speed of oars, nor sheltered themselves by hauling up their vessels upon the beach; their craft stood in the same relation to the μάκρη ναυς the _longa navis_, as the trading vessels of Spezzia and Hydra during the Greek war to the pirate _Mysticoes_: one of these darting from under a low reef, would scatter a convoy of the largest vessels, like a wolf among a flock of sheep. How could commerce have been carried on in vessels that required oars to pull them, at the rate of ten men to a ton, the crews of which had to land for their meals?