366 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

souffles, il emmagasine le vent dans sa voile, il est precis dans I'immense
diffusion des vagues, il flotte et il regne.'1

This Modern Western ship was the offspring of a happy marriage
between divers traditional builds and rigs, each of which had peculiar
excellencies but also consequent limitations. The Western ship that
was brought to birth between A.D. 1440 and A.D. 1490 was a felicitous
harmonization of the strong points of an age-old Mediterranean oar-
propelled 'long ship*, alias galley, and a coeval Mediterranean square-
rigged 'round-ship*, alias 'carrack', with a lateen-rigged Indian-Ocean-
faring 'caravel* whose forerunner is depicted in the visual records of an
Egyptiac maritime expedition to the East African land of Punt in the
reign of the Empress Hatshepsut (imperdbat 1486-1468 B.C.), and with
a massively built Atlantic-Ocean-faring sailing-ship which caught
Caesar's eye in 56 B.C. when he occupied the territory of the insurgent
Veneti around the city that afterwards came to be known as Vannes in
Britanny.3 The fifteenth-century Western harmonization of these far-
fetched elements was felicitous in the sense that their diverse excellencies
were combined in a new pattern in which their respective limitations
were transcended.

The carrack—which was introduced from Mediterranean into Atlantic
waters, and was there blended with the local indigenous Ocean-faring
type of craft, at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries3—had
the right rig to serve as the main equipment of ships of the large dimen-
sions to which the coming West European Indiamen must run, because
the carrack's square rig allowed the sail to be broken up into units of a
manageable size, and therefore allowed the total spread of sail to be
progressively increased by multiplying the number of these units.4 At
the opening of the fifteenth century the standard Western square-rigged
ship had only a single sail, since it had only a single mast, and this mast
carried no top-sail.5 By the middle of the century the standard number
of masts had risen from one to three in West European Atlantic waters ;6
and, though the sixteenth-century addition of a fourth mast was dis-
continued in the seventeenth century and was not reintroduced until the
nineteenth,7 the spread of sail was nevertheless increased by the alterna-
tive method of progressively raising the number of tiers of sail on each
mast to six and by supplementing the regular sails with studding sails.
This advantage of the square rig was, however, offset by the drawback
that it gave the navigator no choice but to sail before the wind ;8 and no
doubt this was one reason why 'the square-rigged ship—the nau—
played no considerable part in the early discoveries. The Portuguese
preferred a borrowed alternative, the lateen caravel—a highly individual
craft which betrayed Asiatic influence in its every line.'9

1 Hugo, Victor: Les Miserable!, Part II, Book II, chap. 3.

2 See Caesar: Belhtm GalKcum, Book III, chap. 13.

s See Bowen, F. C.: From Carrack to Clipper (London 1948, Staples Press), p. 8.
Cp. ibid., p. 12. 4 See Parry, op. cit., pp. 21-33.

s See ibid,, p. 32. & See Bowen, op. cit., p. 8. Cp. ibid., p. 13.

7 See Clowes, G. S. L.: Sailing Skips, their History and Development: Part I: Historical
Notes (London 1933, H.M. Stationery Office), p. 107. Cp. Parry, op. cit., p, 35, and
Prestage, E.: The Portuguese Pioneers (London 1933, Black), p. 332.

8 See Parry, op. cit., pp. 21-22. o Ibid., p. 22.