Additional to the crew there were carried a couple of scribes on each of these trading ships, for the purpose of keeping an exact account of the freights. The skipper, or _padrone_, was compelled to be on board his ship by the hour of departure, and was not allowed to quit his ship till she reached her port. The accommodation for passengers and crew was probably but primitive, and they apparently catered for themselves; for each man, whether one of the crew or the passengers, was suggestively permitted to bring with him a mattress and cushion, a trunk for his belongings, a flask of wine, a flask of water, together with flour and biscuit. Even in the early seventeenth century the men on the Spanish warships used to cook each for himself, in contradistinction to the English seamen, who had their meals prepared by the ship’s cook. Though the Venetian ships up till the fifteenth century did not dare to venture out into the “Green Sea of Darkness,” as the Arabs termed the Atlantic, yet we cannot afford to despise ships and men who regularly traded between the Adriatic and the Levant. Even a modern sailing ship would have some difficulty in beating the passage which one of these craft made in the year 1408, when she sailed from Venice to Jaffa in thirty-three days, calling at various ports on the way.
Venice might have continued to hold the supreme position on the sea had not Portugal and Spain taken to the ocean, and studied the problems of navigation on a much grander and more scientific scale. The discovery of America, and the doubling of the Cape of Good Hope, the opening up of a sea route to India, all combined to take away from Venice her commercial prestige, at any rate afloat. Relying partly on the newly adopted magnetised needle, partly on their crude astronomical instruments and tables of the movements of sun and moon; trusting also to the most careful observations of weather, colour of the sea, seaweed, tree branches and other objects found floating on the surface of the ocean; noting carefully by night, as mariners for centuries before them had been careful to notice, the north star and other stellar bodies; but at the same time lacking reliable knowledge of ocean currents and trade winds--the Portuguese discoverers were able to keep the sea for months, independent of and out of sight of land, an achievement which had not been brought about since the days when the Phœnicians circumnavigated Africa. Venice had had her day; just as Egypt, Phœnicia, Greece, and Rome before her, just as Spain, England, Holland, and France later on were to become great maritime Powers.