Reindeer in Scotland—North Sea and English Channel Land-bridges—Early River Rafts and River Boats—Breaking of Land-bridges—Coast Erosion—Tilbury Man—Where were first Boats Invented?—Ancient Boats in Britain—"Dug-out" Canoes—Imitations of Earlier Papyri and Skin Boats—Cork Plug in Ancient Clyde Boat—Early Swedish Boats—An African Link—Various Types of British Boats—Daring Ancient Mariners—The Veneti Seafarers—Attractions of Early Britain for Colonists.

The Maglemosian (Baltic) and Azilian (Iberian) peoples, who reached and settled in Britain long before the introduction of the Neolithic industry, appear, as has been shown, to have crossed the great land-bridge, which is now marked by the Dogger Bank, and the narrowed land-bridge that connected England and France. No doubt they came at first in small bands, wandering along the river banks and founding fishing communities, following the herds of red deer and wild cows that had moved northward, and seeking flints, &c. The CrÔ-Magnons, whose civilization the new intruders had broken up on the Continent, were already in Britain, where the reindeer lingered for many centuries after they had vanished from France. The reindeer moss still grows in the north of Scotland. Bones and horns of the reindeer have been found in this area in association with human remains as late as of the Roman period. In the twelfth century the Norsemen hunted reindeer in Caithness.[44] CÆsar refers to the reindeer in the Hercynian forest of Germany (Gallic War, VI, 26).

The early colonists of fair Northerners who introduced the Maglemosian culture into Britain from the Baltic area could not have crossed the North Sea land-bridge without the aid of rafts or boats. Great broad rivers were flowing towards the north. The Elbe and the Weser joined one another near the island of Heligoland, and received tributaries from marshy valleys until a long estuary wider than is the Wash at present was formed. Another long river flowed northward from the valley of the Zuyder Zee, the mouth of which has been traced on the north-east of the Dogger Bank. The Rhine reached the North Sea on the south-west of the Dogger Bank, off Flamborough Head; its tributaries included the Meuse and the Thames. The Humber and the rivers flowing at present into the Wash were united before entering the North Sea between the mouth of the Rhine and the coast of East Riding.

The Dogger Bank was then a plateau. Trawlers, as has been stated, sometimes lift from its surface in their trawl nets lumps of peat, which they call "moor-log", and also the bones of wild animals, including the wild ox, the wild horse, red deer, reindeer, the elk, the bear, the wolf, the hyÆna, the beaver, the walrus, the woolly rhinoceros, and the hairy mammoth. In the peat have been found the remains of the white birch, the hazel, sallow, and willow, seeds of bog-bean, fragments of fern, &c. All the plants have a northern range. In some pieces of peat have been found plants and insects that still flourish in Britain.[45]

The easiest crossing to Britain was over the English Channel land-bridge. It was ultimately cut through by the English Channel river, so that the dark Azilian-Tardenoisian peoples from Central and Western Europe and the fair Maglemosians must have required and used rafts or boats before polished implements of Neolithic type came into use. In time the North Sea broke through the marshes of the river land to the east of the Thames Estuary and joined the waters of the English Channel. The Strait of Dover was then formed. At first it may have been narrow enough for animals to swim across or, at any rate, for the rude river boats or rafts of the early colonists to be paddled over in safety between tides. Gradually, however, the strait grew wider and wider; the chalk cliffs, long undermined by boring molluscs and scouring shingle, were torn down by great billows during winter storms.

It may be that for a long period after the North Sea and English Channel were united, the Dogger Bank remained an island, and that there were other islands between Heligoland and the English coast. Pliny, who had served with the Roman army in Germany, writing in the first century of our era, refers to twenty-three islands between the Texel and the Eider in Schleswig-Holstein. Seven of these have since vanished. The west coast of Schleswig has, during the past eighteen hundred years, suffered greatly from erosion, and alluvial plains that formerly yielded rich harvests are now represented by sandbanks. The Goodwin Sands, which stretch for about ten miles off the Kentish coast, were once part of the fertile estate of Earl Godwin which was destroyed and engulfed by a great storm towards the end of the eleventh century. The Gulf of Zuyder Zee was formerly a green plain with many towns and villages. Periodic inundations since the Roman period have destroyed flourishing Dutch farms and villages and eaten far into the land. There are records of storm-floods that drowned on one occasion 20,000, and on another no fewer than 100,000 inhabitants.[46] It is believed that large tracts of land, the remnants of the ancient North Sea land-bridge, have been engulfed since about 3000 b.c., as a result not merely of erosion but the gradual submergence of the land. This date is suggested by Mr. Clement Reid.

"The estimate", he says, "may have to be modified as we obtain better evidence; but it is as well to realize clearly that we are not dealing with a long period of great geological antiquity; we are dealing with times when the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Minoan (Cretan) civilizations flourished. Northern Europe was then probably barbarous, and metals had not come into use;[47] but the amber trade of the Baltic was probably in full swing. Rumours of any great disaster, such as the submergence of thousands of square miles and the displacement of large populations, might spread far and wide along the trade routes." It may be that the legend of the Lost Atlantis was founded on reports of such a disaster, that must have occurred when areas like the Dogger Bank were engulfed. It may be too that the gradual wasting away of lands that have long since vanished propelled migrations of peoples towards the smiling coasts of England. According to Ammianus the Druids stated that some of the inhabitants of Gaul were descendants of refugees from sea-invaded areas.

The gradual sinking of the land and the process of coast erosion has greatly altered the geography of England. The beach on which Julius CÆsar landed has long since vanished, the dwellings of the ancient Azilian and Maglemosian colonists, who reached England in post-Glacial times, have been sunk below the English Channel. When Tilbury Docks were being excavated Roman remains were found embedded in clay several feet below high-water mark. Below several layers of peat and mud, and immediately under a bank of sand in which were fragments of decomposed wood, was found the human skeleton known as "Tilbury man". The land in this area was originally 80 feet above its present level.[48] But while England was sinking Scotland was rising. The MacArthur cave at Oban, in which Azilian hunters and fishermen made their home on the sea-beach, is now about 30 feet above the old sea-level.

Before Dover Strait had been widened by the gradual sinking of the land and the process of coast erosion, and before the great islands had vanished from the southern part of the North Sea, the early hunters and fishermen could have experienced no great difficulty in reaching England. It is possible that the Azilian, Tardenoisian, and Maglemosian peoples had made considerable progress in the art of navigation. Traces of the Tardenoisian industry have been obtained in Northern Egypt, along the ancient Libyan coast of North Africa where a great deal of land has been submerged, and especially at Tunis, and in Algiers, in Italy, and in England and Scotland, as has been noted. There were boats on the Mediterranean at a very early period. The island of Crete was reached long before the introduction of copper-working by seafarers who visited the island of Melos, and there obtained obsidian (natural glass) from which sharp implements were fashioned. Egyptian mariners, who dwelt on the Delta coast, imported cedar, not only from Lebanon but from Morocco, as has been found from the evidence afforded by mummies packed with the sawdust of cedar from the Atlas Mountains.[49] When this trade with Morocco began it is impossible to say with certainty. Long before 3000 b.c., however, the Egyptians were building boats that were fitted with masts and sails. The ancient mariners were active as explorers and traders before implements of copper came into use.

Here we touch on a very interesting problem. Where were boats first invented and the art of navigation developed? Rafts and floats formed by tying together two trees or, as in Egypt, two bundles of reeds, were in use at a very early period in various countries. In Babylonia the "kufa", a great floating basket made watertight with pitch or covered with skins, was an early invention. It was used as it still is for river ferry boats. But ships were not developed from "kufas". The dug-out canoe is one of the early prototypes of the modern ocean-going vessel. It reached this country before the Neolithic industry was introduced, and during that period when England was slowly sinking and Scotland was gradually rising. Dug-out canoes continued to come during the so-called "Neolithic" stage of culture ere yet the sinking and rising of land had ceased. "That Neolithic man lived in Scotland during the formation of this beach (the 45-to 50-foot beach) is proved", wrote the late Professor James Geikie, "by the frequent occurrence in it of his relics. At Perth, for example, a dug-out canoe of pine was met with towards the bottom of the carse clays; and similar finds have frequently been recorded from the contemporaneous deposits in the valleys of the Forth and the Clyde."[50]

How did early man come to invent the dug-out? Not only did he hollow out a tree trunk by the laborious process of burning and by chipping with a flint adze, he dressed the trunk so that his boat could be balanced on the water. The early shipbuilders had to learn, and did learn, for themselves, "the values of length and beam, of draught and sweet lines, of straight keel; with high stem to breast a wave and high stern to repel a following sea". The fashioning of a sea-worthy, or even a river-worthy boat, must have been in ancient times as difficult a task as was the fashioning of the first aeroplane in our own day. Many problems had to be solved, many experiments had to be made, and, no doubt, many tragedies took place before the first safe model-boat was paddled across a river. The early experimenters may have had shapes of vessels suggested to them by fish and birds, and especially by the aquatic birds that paddled past them on the river breast with dignity and ease. But is it probable that the first experiments were made with trees? Did early man undertake the laborious task of hewing down tree after tree to shape new models, until in the end he found on launching the correctly shaped vessel that its balance was perfect? Or was the dug-out canoe an imitation of a boat already in existence, just as a modern ship built of steel or concrete is an imitation of the earlier wooden ships? The available evidence regarding this important phase of the shipping problem tends to show that, before the dug-out was invented, boats were constructed of light material. Ancient Egypt was the earliest shipbuilding country in the world, and all ancient ships were modelled on those that traded on the calm waters of the Nile. Yet Egypt is an almost treeless land. There the earliest boats—broad, light skiffs—were made by binding together long bundles of the reeds of papyrus. Ropes were twisted from papyrus as well as from palm fibre.[51] It would appear that, before dug-outs were made, the problems of boat construction were solved by those who had invented papyri skiffs and skin boats. In the case of the latter the skins were stretched round a framework, sewed together and made watertight with pitch. We still refer to the "seams" and the "skin" of a boat.

The art of boat-building spread far and wide from the area of origin. Until recently the Chinese were building junks of the same type as they did four or five hundred years earlier. These junks have been compared by more than one writer to the deep-sea boats of the Egyptian Empire period. The Papuans make "dug-outs" and carve eyes on the prows as did the ancient Egyptians and as do the Maltese, Chinese, &c., in our own day. Even when only partly hollowed, the Papuan boats have perfect balance in the water as soon as they are launched.[52] The Polynesians performed religious ceremonies when cutting down trees and constructing boats.[53] In their incantations, &c., the lore of boat-building was enshrined and handed down. The Polynesian boat was dedicated to the mo-o (dragon-god). We still retain a relic of an ancient religious ceremony when a bottle of wine is broken on the bows of a vessel just as it is being launched.

After the Egyptians were able to secure supplies of cedar wood from the Atlas Mountains or Lebanon, by drifting rafts of lashed trees along the coast line, they made dug-out vessels of various shapes, as can be seen in the tomb pictures of the Old Kingdom period. These dug-outs were apparently modelled on the earlier papyri and skin boats. A ship with a square sail spread to the wind is depicted on an Ancient Egyptian two-handed jar in the British Museum, which is of pre-dynastic age and may date to anything like 4000 or 5000 b.c. At that remote period the art of navigation was already well advanced, no doubt on account of the experience gained on the calm waters of the Nile.

(a) Sketch of a boat from Victoria Nyanza, after the drawing in Sir Henry Stanley's Darkest Africa. Only the handles of the oars are shown. In outline the positions of some of the oarsmen are roughly represented.

(b) Crude drawing of a similar boat carved upon the rocks in Sweden during the Early Bronze Age, after Montelius. By comparison with (a) it will be seen that the vertical projections were probably intended to represent the oarsmen.

The upturned hook-like appendage at the stern is found in ancient Egyptian and Mediterranean ships, but is absent in the modern African vessel shown in (a).

These figures are taken from Elliot Smith's Ancient Mariners (1918).