SHIPPING, HISTORY OF. From the dawn of history all that is adventurous and inventive in man has responded to the challenge of the sea. It was, no doubt, on inland waters that the art of navigation had its birth, in the discovery that a fallen tree would bear a man's weight down stream, and that, by the use of a pole or a rough paddle, he could check, accelerate and direct its course; but once equipped with the knowledge that what would float could also be propelled and steered, man was led irresistibly, by the quest for ,food and the instinct for discovery, to venture out upon the great waters.
The transition from the dug-out or the Egyptian reed-raft to the ship proper, from the river ferry service to the trading voyage, was achieved in prehistoric times. Recorded history rings up the curtain on sea-going ships equipped with oars or sails as alternative means of propulsion and with some rudimentary form of steering gear; capable of repeated voyages, with cargo as well as with passengers, between port and port. Shipping, as an in dustry, is as old as civilization itself. Without shipping, indeed, civilization must have been still-born. Seas and straits, moun tains, marshes and deserts, set definite limits to the range and volume of migration and intercourse by land. Even to-day, water transport is easier and cheaper than land transport for the car riage of heavy or bulky commodities over long distances, and in ancient times the advantages were still more decisively in its favour. So the earliest civilizations grew up on the sea coasts or on the banks of navigable rivers, and the development of shipping, as a means for exchanging the products of distant countries, and establishing contact between races of varied cultures, has been a prime factor in all subsequent progress.
fore Solomon chartered ships from Hiram of Tyre to bring him gold from Ophir, ivory, and apes and peacocks, they had begun to plant trading depots and colonies round the shores of the Medi terranean, and to distribute from their great emporiums, Tyre and Sidon, the products of Asia, collected by overland or coastal routes. The Phoenicians, indeed, although manufacturers as well as traders, were the first people whose greatness depended primarily on their shipping. Ezekiel's lament for Tyre presents a graphic picture of a State deriving its prosperity, like I 7th cen tury Holland, from a highly developed carrying and entrepOt trade.
The rise of Tyre and Sidon was due to their position at the meeting point between East and West. By the 6th or 7th cen tury B.C., the overland route to the East had been supplemented by the development of a regular sea trade following the coastal routes from India to Egypt, Chaldaea and up the Tigris to Babylon. For many centuries the Levant remained the great focal centre of world commerce. The trade of the Mediterranean itself, in classical times, was shared by the Greeks with the great Phoenician colonies, such as Carthage and Utica in Africa and Gades (Cadiz) in Spain; but it was not till the pax Romany re moved the impediments presented by perpetual wars and the scourge of piracy, that the Mediterranean era in the history of shipping could reach its full height.
The Roman Empire.—For shipping, as for other branches of industry and commerce, the earlier empire was a golden age. The Roman legions, the Roman laws, and the Roman roads made possible the manufacture and exchange of goods on a greatly in creased scale, and the Roman fleets were strong enough to sup press or at least to curb, the activities of pirates. Imperial Rome itself depended, like Great Britain to-day, on oversea supplies of food-stuffs, and the annual import of 20,000,000 bushels of corn from Egypt, later supplemented by supplies from Africa, stimu lated the activities of shipbuilders and shipowners.