The Cruise of the Branwen

FROM ITALY TO GREECE old history upon its breezes : at any moment might have risen on the horizon the black ship of the old sea-rover, faring homeward from Troy's ruins to Penelope. So it was the charts in the deck-house and the captain's tracings of our course that had most of all attracted me, and the condensed literature of the "Medi– terranean Pilot " at his elbow. It is strange that in this oldest sea of all the " Pilot " has ever been written by the power that held the seas by right of strength. The French "Pilot " is but the translation of our own, for England, owning so little land, yet holds the coaling-stations of this inland sea froin west to east. Before her came the French, inheritors of Dutchmen and Van Tromp, who profited in turn by the Venetians and Turks. In like manner had the sailors of old Rome inherited the sea-lore of the Greeks, who took their commerce, as they took their "Pilot's Guides," from the Phrenicians of yet older days, And the strange thread that runs through all this history is that the " Instructions to Navigators " in every century were edited by the sea power that was strongest = her sailors' notes were copied by the rest ; her maps and chart~ were repro– duced by all the others. The Odyssey, as Victor Berard showed, is based on the Phre– nician "Pilot's Guide" ; and that is why Homer may be more clearly understood in the deck– house of an English yacht to-day than in the– study of the greatest scholar ever bred. In so smal1 a boat, with no pilot but our capt_ain,. we were nearer Homeric conditions of 43