HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE.

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exporters, importers, and transporters, or carriers of all commodities from onepart of the world to another, from the barter or exchange of which any advan-tage could be derived. Their whole country was compared, by the ancients, toan immense storehouse, where all the different productions of the earth, that couldeither minister to the wants, the pleasures, or the luxury of mankind, were col-lected into one grand mass.

So jealous are they reported to have been of all foreigners, so fearful were they ofencroachment on those supposed benefits which they wished to monopoliseand engross entirely to themselves, that if at any time, when bound out on a fo-reign voyage, they observed a stranger in company with them, and found him en-deavouring to pursue the same track, they immediately altered their intendedcourse, using every possible means to avoid him, and prevent his following them;nay,it is even asserted, that they often purposely risked the loss of their vessels, andtheir own lives, rather than afford the inhabitants of any other country thantheir own the smallest opportunity of breaking into their monopoly, or holdingany share whatever in the commerce of the world. It is moreover related thatthey were so fearful of rivalship, and so pertinaciously bent on keepingevery thing to themselves, that, to add to the natural danger of the sea, andencrease such discouragement as might prevent other nations from exposing them-selves to it, they became pirates, and declared themselves at war, by turns,with every country in the universe, whenever they met with vessels to whichthey thought themselves superior in force, and, consequently, able to overcome.This particular conduct is stated by some authors in terms rather of praise, andrepresented as a master-stroke of policy in a people who grasped also injurious anappropriation of what may certainly be deemed the natural property of all man-kind.

As well in ostentation of their naval power and consequence as to remindtheir countrymen perpetually of the means which created their greatness, theircoins were, almost without exception, impressed with the figure of a ship’s prow,or, as it was afterwards termed by the Romans, the rostrum or beak. From theirantiquity, and the want of fkil] in the artists who executed them, very little infor-mation is to be derived from them: but on those which have been best preserved andtransmitted to us, their vessels appear to differ very little indeed, except in orna-ment, from those of the Romans, when practice in after times had introduced a vari-ety of improvements which added elegance to use, and taught mankind that it wasnot sufficient for the satisfaction of the human mind, if ingenuity was exerted to the

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