The steamship, however, we can safely claim as our own, "The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" have nothing in common with this. Between the Roman war galley which carried Julius Cæsar to the shores of Britain and our modern battleship, there is a great gulf. The twenty-knot steamer is one of our modern wonders. All the resources and scientific appliances of the age have been called into requisition to produce the Atlantic liner.
However, when we read of some record-breaking Atlantic passage, where time and space have been abridged and the very elements subjected to our use, let us not forget that there were brave men before Agamemnon; that there were brave old ships which did great deeds, long before steamships were dreamt of; long before the China clipper, robed in studding sails, raced across the Indian Ocean; even long before Captain Cook existed, and he represents, to the average Australian, everything connected with our maritime history.
As there have been phases of civilisation long anterior to our own, so the sea of our ancestors has a history rivalling in interest, if not in importance, that of the present.
In those days when the world was wide, in that period which we still fondly call "the good old times" (although we have no desire for its return); when Australia and New Zealand, with their populous cities, and marvellous goldfields, were alike unknown, when the United States and Canada did not exist; when China and Japan were names inseparably connected with Marco Polo and Prester John, the records of our early maritime history were full of tragic interest. To the modern pioneers of the sea might be applied the old Biblical summing up, that "there were giants in the earth in those days."
Their ships were what we would term small; perhaps about the average size of the now extinct collier brig. We read of Bartholomew Diaz. who first rounded the Cape of Good Hope, in 1486, that his two vessels were 50 tons each, and to him the Cape was a veritable Cape of Storms. Ten years later, Vasco di Gama performed the same voyage in two crafts of 150 and 120 tons. John Davis, towards the end of the 16th century, penetrated the Arctic regions to almost 73° North latitude, in a clinker-built yawl of 20 tons, and discovered the strait which bears his name. The famous Drake, in the earlier part of his career, made a voyage to the Spanish Main in two vessels of 70 and 25 tons respectively. In 1576 Martin Frobisher voyaged to the Arctic regions in search of a N.W. passage to China, with a vessel of 25 tons and a pinnace of 10 tons. Columbus discovered the New World and encountered the winter storms of the North Atlantic in small vessels not any larger than our river and coasting craft.
