Kitabı oku: «The First Days of Man», sayfa 9
He built a deck of wood over the forward part of the boat, and across the middle part he put five board seats. These seats were for the paddlers to sit on, but the paddles were so long, in order to reach the water, that they were like oars, and it was hard to handle them against the ocean waves. So Modor drove pegs into the edges or gunwales of the boat to hold the oars in place, and men thus began to row boats, instead of paddling them, as they had their canoes and rafts.
As we have seen, the tribe had almost forgotten how to weave, because they no longer had the tough marsh grasses to make cord from. But Modor twisted the fibres from the bark of certain trees into strong cords, and took them to some of the old women, who knew how to weave, and they wove him a sail from them. Then he put a mast in the middle of his boat, with a pole or yard across it, and hung the sail from this yard, with strong cords tied to its lower corners to hold it down.
In this boat Modor and his companions made many voyages along the coast, fishing, and hunting. On one of these trips he found a marsh covered with reeds and rushes, but he did not gather them, for the tribe had no use for them now. On another voyage Modor's boat was carried by the wind across the water to a low shore. It was the same shore from which Tul-Ab and his companions had fled hundreds of years before. When Modor's boat came in sight of the beach, he saw many men running along the sand, waving their spears and shouting. Several canoes crowded with fighting men came out from the shore. Then Modor lowered the sail of his boat, and the rowers bent to their oars, and soon left the canoes and the shore far behind.
When Modor got back to the village he told the old men what he had seen, and that night around the camp fires they told again the story of Tul-Ab, and sang a song about him, and his coming to the island.
The next day the chief of the tribe, whose name was Gudr, told the watchers on the cliffs to be very careful, and to keep their eyes always on the sea, for he feared that the people from across the water might come to attack them. But for a long time none came.
Other men in the tribe also built boats like the one made by Modor, larger ones, and they carved the heads of animals, or birds, or fish, out of wood, and fastened them at the bows of their boats, and this was the first use of figureheads, which you can see on some sailing ships even now. They painted the boats with red, and yellow and blue earths, mixed with fish oil, and stained the sails different colours with the juices of berries and plants.
One day, while digging along the bottom of the cliffs for red earth with which to make paint for his boat, Modor came across a lump of something that he at first thought was stone. It was yellow in colour, and very heavy. He laid it on a rock, and beat it with the head of his axe, expecting it would break. But instead of breaking, it flattened out, and began to shine, where the axe head struck it, like the rays of the sun. Modor was very much pleased with his find, because it was so pretty, and he beat it out into a thin strip, and rubbed it bright with a stone, and bent it like a bracelet about his upper arm. His companions, when they saw it, liked its pretty, bright colour, but beyond that, they paid no attention to it. They did not know that Modor was the first man in the world to discover a metal. The bracelet he had bent around his arm was made of pure gold.
CHAPTER XIX
THE FIRST SEA FIGHT
The Stone Age on earth lasted for a very long time; much longer than you would think, as you read this story. From the time when Ra made his first stone-pointed spear many, many thousands of years had passed, and still men knew nothing of the use of metals. In some parts of the earth, as the tribes migrated, and spread to new countries, stone weapons and tools were used for thousands of years longer; in fact, they are still used, even to-day, by certain savage tribes. But in other parts of the earth, men discovered metals, and how to use them, and soon the age of bronze began.
In Nature's great storehouse metals are found in two different ways. Some of them, such as gold, tin, and copper, occur free, that is, they are found in the rocks in solid veins. When these rocks are broken up by the action of the weather, or by swift-flowing streams, the bits of metal, being very heavy, fall to the bottom, and are found in lumps, or nuggets in the sand and earth along the shores.
Other metals, such as iron, are usually found in nature in the shape of ores, and can only be gotten out of these ores by smelting, that is, by heating the ores in a hot fire.
Early man, of course, found the free metals first, and it was a very long time before he learned how to smelt ores, and make iron, and steel. The ancient Egyptians carved their wonderful statues, their huge obelisks, with tools of copper, hardening the soft metal in some way, so that it would cut the toughest stone. The secret of hardening and tempering copper in this way has been lost, and the most skilful metal workers to-day do not know how to do it.
When Man first discovered gold, the only use he made of it was for ornaments, just as Modor twisted the golden bracelet about his arm. Tin, too, although harder than gold, was of little use to him. Even copper, the hardest of the three, was too soft in its natural state to be used for anything but knives, or swords, and even these were not so good as those made of very hard stone. But when it was found that copper and tin, melted together, would form what is known as bronze, hard, tough and strong, a new era or age began, known as the Age of Bronze.
It was long after Modor found the lump of gold, however, that the use of bronze began.
The island men kept watch from their village on the cliffs for many years, expecting each day to see a fleet of canoes come across the water from the far-off mainland, but as time passed they forgot about their enemies, and went on fishing and hunting and building boats in peace.
Then, one day, when the sea was quiet and smooth, a watcher on the cliffs saw a boat far off on the horizon, and as it came closer, others appeared behind it until there were forty or more in sight. He gave the alarm, and soon the smoke went up from the signal fires, calling all the fishing and hunting parties home as quickly as possible.
The attacking fleet was made up of many large log canoes, driven by both paddles and sails. The hill men whom Ban had led to conquer the tribe by the sea knew little or nothing about making boats when they came, but the prisoners they had taken, women, and a few men, they made their slaves, and from these they learned how to make canoes of wicker and skins, and also how to burn them out of logs. As time went on Ban's tribe became great fishermen, just as the sea people had been before them, and travellers came down from the valley, bringing grain, and fine pottery, and many other new things that the sea people had known nothing about. This made the tribe of Ban very powerful and strong; from the slaves they had learned to make fish hooks, and nets, and grass cloth and boats, and from the hill people, and the dwellers in the valley, they learned how to make bread, and wine, and to plant things for food, and make clothing of leather and skins instead of grass cloth, and much besides. Soon all the country between the valley and the sea was covered with people, and now the new tribes that wandered away from the valley went inland, settling new country, for there was no longer any room for them, in the direction of the sea.
When the tribe of Ban, and the other tribes that now lived along the seacoast, wanted to find new places where there was plenty of game, there was nowhere for them to go. The sea stopped them. But they knew, when they saw the boat of Modor sail along their coast, that the old legend about the land of the flying birds was true, and that somewhere across the Great Water was a new country, where there might be plenty of game, and room for them to live. So a thousand of them, in fifty great canoes, twenty men to a canoe, set sail on a voyage of discovery. It was their boats that the watchers on the cliffs saw coming toward them.
When the smoke signals went up, all the boats of the island men came flying home, and gathered in the bay below the cliffs. The entrance to the bay was narrow, and they decided to fight from their ships, and keep the enemy's boats out. Unless these could get into the bay, there was no way in which the men in them could climb up to the village on the high ground above, for the cliffs on the ocean side were much too steep to climb.
The invaders lowered their sails and paddled about the mouth of the bay, trying to make up their minds what to do. They had not expected to find such a rocky shore, for their own coast was flat and sandy. Then suddenly they decided to sail into the bay and attack the ships of the island men inside.
The island men's ships were larger and higher out of the water than the log canoes, but there were not nearly so many of them; less than thirty in all, some large and some small. Their sails were lowered, but rowers manned the oars, while on the decks forward stood fighting men, with spears, slings and heavy rocks, and bows and arrows. Along the shore of the bay, at the foot of the cliffs, more fighting men stood, while above, in the village on the plateau, were the women, the old men and children, all ready to roll great stones down the path which led up the cliff, in case any of the enemy should try to climb up that way.
The canoes of the invaders swept into the bay through its narrow mouth, and at once dashed toward the opposing fleet, their crews cheering and shouting. At the same time the boats of the island men advanced to meet them, led by Modor, who had become the chief of the tribe, now that Gudr was dead. Modor, whose vessel was in the lead, told his men to row as hard as they could, straight at the first canoe. The tall prow of his boat hit the canoe and crushed in its side, so that it sank, and all the crew were thrown into the water. This battle was the very first sea-fight, and Modor was the first man to ram an enemy's ship.
Other ships belonging to the island men came up, and other canoes were rammed. The men in the water tried to climb aboard the ships, but they were struck with axes, or pierced with spears, so that the water of the bay was red with blood. But the island men did not have things all their own way. Some of the canoes attacked the ships in pairs, one on each side, and their crews sprang aboard and fought with the island men on the decks, so that many were killed on both sides.
Some of the sea people ran their canoes ashore, and jumped out on the sand. Here they were met by the defenders on the beach, who fought with them to protect their homes.
The battle raged with fury for two or three hours, but at last, when many of their boats had been sunk, and the crews killed, the sea people gave up the fight and paddled out of the bay.
Modor now gave a great shout and called to his men to follow in pursuit. The ships, with their long oars, were faster than the canoes, in the rough water outside the bay, and rammed and sank many of them. Only twelve out of the fifty that came, managed to escape; their crews paddled away with all their might, and soon they were mere specks in the distance.
Then Modor and his ships came back to the bay, the wounds of his men were washed and bound up, and a great feast was held that night to celebrate the victory.
In the enemy's canoes that had been driven up on the shore they found all sorts of provisions; cakes made of grain meal, and jars of wine, neither of which they had ever seen before. They also found round wicker baskets, for holding fish, and strong cords of twisted grass, and many pottery jars and bowls.
They ate the bread cakes, and drank the wine, which made them very merry and gay. The old men, who later on were called bards, made a song in honour of Modor's victory, and one of them played the first music that man had ever heard. He had taken the shell of a sea turtle, and stretched some thin strings of gut across it and he picked these strings with his fingers while singing his song. Many hundreds of years later these bards, with their rude harps, wandered all through the country, from village to village, entertaining the people around the fires at night with songs of the mighty deeds of Modor and other great chiefs and leaders of the past. In those days, before people had learned to write, these bards were the ones who kept the history of the past, and even to-day we can find some of their songs and stories in the ancient sagas and legends of almost every people and country. Some of the deeds of these ancient heroes as told by the bards were so wonderful that the people came to look upon them as gods.
One of the young men in Modor's boat made a new discovery, while the battle was going on. When the attacking canoes came alongside, he sprang into one of them, followed by some of his companions, and fought the crew with his axe. A shower of sling stones from another canoe flew about him. To protect his face and head from the stones he snatched up the round wicker top of one of the fish baskets, and held it before him, so that the sling stones bounced off and did him no harm. This was the first shield.
Later on, when the battle was over, he took one of these round wicker tops, and stretched a piece of heavy leather over it. Then he fastened two leather thongs on the inside, so that he could slip his arm through them and so hold the shield before him while still having his hand free to grasp his bow.
Modor, who was a great chief, as well as a skilful carpenter, saw how useful this was at once. He sent a party up the coast to where he had seen the reeds growing, and had them bring back many bundles of them. With these he showed the women how to make frames of basket-work, and cover them with tough hide, so that each man had a shield to defend himself with.
Another thing that came from this battle was the beginning of the use of armour. One of the sea folk had struck Modor a heavy blow across the arm, that would have cut it to the bone, had not the axe fallen upon the thick band of gold Modor wore on his arm. After this, Modor hunted for more of the gold, and when he found it, he made many more wide gold bands, and put them on each arm from the elbow to the shoulder, and this was the first use of metal armour. But it was a very long time before men came to use heavy armour of brass, and iron and steel.
Modor loved adventure, and he made up his mind to gather a fleet of ships, and cross the water to the land of the sea people, and attack them. But he did not live to do this. One day, while hunting in the marsh of the reeds, up the coast, a great beast like a rhinoceros, with long woolly hair, and sharp horns on its snout, charged down on him and his companions. They fought bravely, but Modor and two of his men were killed, and the rest fled to their boat, afraid.
The whole village mourned Modor with songs and cries of grief, and the next day a party went to the marsh and brought back his body. They buried it in a grave on the plateau, with great stones over it to mark the place. With his body they buried the dead chief's spear, and axe, and his gold armlets and shield, for these people believed that the dead would live again, and would need their weapons in the other world.
For hundreds and hundreds of years after this the island people lived in peace. The tribe grew very large, and spread far inland, where they found pleasant meadows, and forests, and banks of clay from which to make pottery. They built many stone villages and temples, and made armlets of gold, as Modor had done, and sewed plates of it to their belts, and ornamented the handles of their spears and knives with it. They also found tin, from which they made ornaments of a shining colour like silver, and copper, from which they made spear heads, and axes, beating them into shape with hammers of stone. With coloured clays, and the juices of plants, they stained their bodies in strange patterns, and coloured the shafts of their arrows and spears.
In the forests of the island were many wild animals, bears, great horned deer, and savage wolves, while along the rivers that flowed through the marshy country were huge beasts like the rhinoceros, and wild boar and snakes. From fighting these enemies they became fierce and brave, and when the bards sang of the men who came to attack them from over the sea, they would beat their weapons on the ground, with a loud noise, and talk of setting out to conquer them, as Modor had planned to do. But it was not until long after, when a chief named Mor came to be head of the tribe that they crossed the Great Water.
The twelve boats that escaped from the sea fight never reached home again. They had no compass to steer by, and the wind and tide drove them to a far-off shore, where no man had ever been. Here they settled, just as the island men had done before, and grew into a new tribe and people.
CHAPTER XX
THE SEA ROVERS
Mor and his men at last made up their minds to sail out across the Great Water and see what was on the other side. The island people were very strong and brave, and thought it much better to fight and have adventures, than to stay at home in peace all the time. So they made ready a fleet of twenty large boats, each one big enough to hold forty men, and one bright morning, with the wind blowing straight across the water, they raised their coloured sails, red, and blue, and yellow, and set out.
Each man carried with him a wicker shield, covered with tough hide, which he hung over the side of the boat within easy reach of where he sat at his oar. Many wore rings of gold and copper and tin about their arms. Their caps were made of leather, with the wings of birds in them, one on each side. They carried bows and arrows, long spears with points of polished flint, or copper, and stone axes and knives. Some of the chiefs had axes with heads of copper.
They took water with them in great bottles made of the skins of animals, and plenty of smoked meat and fish. When they set sail, hundreds came down to the shore to see them off. Mor, a big strong man, almost a giant, waved his glittering copper axe in farewell, then turned his eyes toward the sea and led his little fleet out of the bay on its journey.
For a day and a night they sailed without seeing anything but a few birds. Some of the men, when they saw nothing but the ocean in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, were frightened and wanted to turn back, but Mor told them to wait, that they would soon reach land.
On the afternoon of the second day one of the men on watch gave a cry, and soon they saw stretching along the horizon a thin grey line of shore. A little later they could make out hills, and clumps of trees, and the smoke from a village.
It was evening and the people of the village were cooking supper about their fires. Mor led his boats into a little cove some distance away, and as soon as they grounded on the sand he and his men sprang ashore. Five men were left in each boat, to guard it, and the others, nearly seven hundred in all, with Mor at their head, went to attack the village.
The village men had sprung for their bows and spears as soon as they saw Mor's ships nearing the land, and were now drawn up in front of the village, ready to defend it. The two sides rushed at each other, shouting fierce cries. A shower of arrows and stones met Mor and his men, but the tough hides of their shields kept them from being much hurt, and not many were lost. The village people, who did not have any shields, suffered very much, and many of them fell.
Their chief, a huge man as big as Mor, came out, carrying a heavy spear, and he and Mor began a terrible fight. The village chief aimed a heavy blow at Mor with his spear, but Mor caught it on his shield. When the sharp stone point of the spear cut through the shield it got caught in the wicker-work, and would not come out. Then Mor jerked his shield back and pulled the spear clear out of his enemy's hand. The village chief drew a knife, but Mor rushed at him and killed him with his copper axe.
At this the village people were discouraged, and the men from the island set up a loud shout and rushing at them, killed many of them. The rest, seeing their leader killed, ran away. Then Mor and his men went into the village and captured the women, and took great stores of grain, and wine, and furs back to the ships. After that they set the village on fire.
By this time the village people had secured help, and were coming back to renew the fight, so Mor called his men together, and guided by the light from the blazing huts of the village, they pushed their boats off the sand, sprang aboard, and rowed swiftly away. In a little while they had vanished in the darkness.
When they got back home, Mor and his men had a feast, and all the people thought him a hero. After that, he made many voyages, and so did others of the island chiefs, and the people of the mainland were afraid of them.
These rovers of the sea were no more than pirates, of course, but they did a great deal of good. Year after year they would descend on the people of the coast, burning and robbing, carrying off their women and animals and taking them back to their island home, but sometimes they could not get back, but were driven by storms to other lands, where they settled and built new homes, taking with them all that they had learned about metals, about building boats, and many other things. In this way the knowledge they had gained was spread to other peoples. Sometimes they would land in peace and trade with the people on the mainland, giving them gold and copper and tin in exchange for grain and cattle and pottery. They sailed great distances in their stout ships and not only learned the things that other races knew, but at the same time brought to these other peoples their own knowledge of metal working, and carpentry, and the building of boats. Thus, through these sea rovers, the different arts spread from tribe to tribe, and from people to people, which was what Mother Nature intended.
When man discovered metals, and how to use them, the Stone Age began to draw to a close. There was of course no exact time when the use of stone stopped, and the use of metals began, for in some parts of the world men were using metals for hundreds and even thousands of years, while others, in other countries were still using stone. When Columbus came to America, only a few hundred years ago, the Indians in North America knew nothing of tools or weapons of metal, they were still living in the Stone Age.
Another discovery which came about the same time as the use of metals was the art of making glass. Just when men began to use glass we do not of course know, but in some of the most ancient tombs, along with weapons of copper, and ornaments of gold, we find beads and other small objects made of glass.
How it came to be discovered is another thing we do not know, or by what race. It is very likely that it was made by many different peoples, at different times in the world's history. Over and over we find that some race which had gone far along the road to civilisation, would be swept away by savage tribes and its discoveries lost for many centuries. We know this, because sometimes we find, when digging in the earth, the remains of savage peoples, with thick skulls and rude weapons, and under these are the skulls and polished weapons and ornaments of a much more highly civilised race. The road which man followed in his progress toward the civilisation we have to-day did not run smoothly upward, like a path up a hill, but dipped up and down and around in many circles, always rising a little higher, however, as the ages went by.
It is thought that the sea people first discovered glass. Ordinary glass is made of lime, soda-ash and sand, three very common substances. Because sand is the thing most needed in making glass, we think it must have been discovered by a people living on the seashore. It must have been first made by accident, because man could not have set out to discover something he did not know anything about.
The most common story about the first glass is that it was made by some sailors belonging to the Phœnicians, one of the early sea-going tribes living on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It is supposed that these sailors, building a fire on the seashore to cook food, may have propped their pots up on pieces of limestone, which furnished the lime, just as the beach furnished the sand, and the fire, the ash and the heat. Probably they found in the ashes of their fire a hard, greenish lump of glass. They did not know what it was, of course, but carried it away because it was clear and bright and pretty in colour, like a jewel. Wiser men, hearing their story, may have learned in this way how to mix sand, lime and soda-ash together and by heating it form glass.
The earliest things made of glass were coarse beads, and little bottles and vases. Later on, man came to make very beautiful glass vases and bowls and drinking cups, such as those found in ancient tombs in Egypt, and in the ruins at Troy, and on the Island of Cyprus. These cups and bowls and other objects are tinted the most wonderful colours, blue and green and gold, like the feathers of a peacock. It is said that the ancient Egyptians knew how to make glass that would not break, so that a vase, dropped to the floor, instead of being shivered to pieces, would be only bent out of shape. This secret, like the way the Egyptians had of hardening and tempering copper, has been lost, and the most skilful glass makers to-day could not make glass like that.
