We are less concerned with the evolution of design and build of ships in this present book than with the manner of using these craft. How, for example, on those Viking ships which were scarcely decked at all, did the crew manage to eat and sleep? Did the ancients understand the use of the sounding lead? how did they lay their ships up for the winter? what was the division of labour on board?--and a thousand questions of this sort are answered here, for this is just the kind of information that the reader so often asks for, and so rarely gets, frequently being disappointed at the gaps left in historical works. Believing firmly that a knowledge of the working and fighting of the ships in history is worthy of every consideration, I have for years been collecting data which have taken shape in the following narrative. Seamanship, like the biggest sailing craft, cannot have much longer to live if we are able to read the signs of the times. _Steam_anship rather than seamanship is what is demanded nowadays; so that before long the latter will become quite a lost art. It is therefore time that we should collect and set forth the ways and customs of a fast-dying race. Seamanship is, of course, a changing quality, but at heart it is less different than one might at first imagine. I venture to suggest that if by any wonderful means you could transfer the men of a modern crack 19-metre racing cutter to the more clumsy type of Charles II’s _Mary_, she would be handled very little differently from the manner in which those Caroline seamen were wont to sail her. Similarly, a crew taken from one of the old clippers of about 1870, and transferred--if it were possible--to one of the Elizabethan galleons, would very soon be able to manage her in just the same manner as Drake and his colleagues. It is largely a matter of sea-bias, of instinct, of a sympathy and adaptability for the work. And in such vastly different craft as the Greek and Roman galley, the Spanish carack, the Viking ship of the north, the bean-shaped craft of medieval England, and so on down to the ships of the present day, you find--quite regardless of country or century--men doing the same things under such vastly different conditions.