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The older a source is, the more often it remembers ships. Plato gives Atlantis harbors full of them, Homer counts the Greek fleet before Troy, the Oera Linda Book follows a sea king with a fleet of 127 vessels, and the Bible sends the ships of Tarshish across the sea every three years. For me these passages matter because they show a world that travelled by sea much earlier and much further than we usually assume. These are the pages where ships appear.
The harbors of Atlantis
On Critias, the story of Atlantis the island has an extensive network of harbors and docks for a vast fleet. A canal runs from the central island to the sea so ships can reach the city, and the harbors are filled with ships from all over the world. The Atlanteans have a powerful navy that lets them project their power far beyond their island.
On Onffroy de Thoron (1869): Solomon’s Voyages to the Amazon the French explorer builds his whole argument on that navy:
According to Plato, the naval forces of the Atlanteans numbered several thousand ships; even allowing for exaggeration, we have in the accounts just cited the proofs that the Ocean was navigated by peoples whose antiquity goes back beyond the cataclysm of Atlantis,
Onffroy de Thoron, 1869
When the end came, the same ships carried the survivors away. On Tibet: the wise teachers of Atlantis took their follower by ship the teachers leave by ship and then overland, and a few reach as far as Tibet.
The Catalogue of Ships
On The Catalogue of Ships I follow the second book of the Iliad, where Zeus sends a lying dream to Agamemnon at the ships of the Achaeans and the whole army pours from the ships and tents to the assembly. Then Homer lists every contingent and the number of its ships. The rest of the epic is on The Iliad. To me it reads like a register of sea peoples, and I compare it with what Plato says about the same Aegean world.
Jon, the sea king from Alderga
The Frisian Oera Linda Book has its own fleet. On Jon, sea-king from Alderga the history of Jon begins like this:
Jon—that is, “Given”—was a sea-king, born at Alderga, who sailed from the Flymeer with a fleet of 127 ships fitted out for a long voyage, and laden with amber, tin, copper, cloth, linen, felt, otter-skins, beaver and rabbit skins.
The Oera Linda Book
I place the events of that book around 6,115 BCE on The Oera Linda Book Reviewed. A northern trading fleet that early is one of the reasons I take the book seriously as a memory of seafaring peoples.
The ships of Tarshish
On The Island Tarshish I collect the verses on Tarshish. Solomon’s fleet sails with the fleet of Hiram of Tyre, and once every three years the ships of Tarshish come back with gold, silver, ivory, apes and peacocks. “Ships of Tarshish” means large ocean-going ships built for long voyages. The same page has the verse that put Jonah on board:
But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Yahweh. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of Yahweh.
Jonah 1:3
What happens next I follow on Jonah. Onffroy de Thoron sends those same ships of Solomon and Hiram across the Atlantic and up the Amazon to Ophir.
Phaeacians and Phoenicians
On Scheria no one builds ships or navigates like the Phaeacians. Their ships need no helmsmen and travel as fast as thought, and they carry Odysseus home to Ithaca. On The Phaeacians and Phoenicians I set those magical sailors, descendants of Poseidon, beside the historical Phoenicians, expert shipbuilders and traders who may have reached as far as the British Isles. On The Phoenician history Sanchuniathon credits one of the first men with inventing the hook, line and raft and being the first of all men to sail.
Ships that fly
Some of my sources go further. On The vailx, from A Dweller on Two Planets, the vailx is an airship far faster than any steamship, steered with keys for propulsion, levitation, altitude and speed. On Caiphul the capital of Poseidon earned the title “Sovereign of the Seas” in the days when ships were still the carriers, before aerial vessels took over. The oldest ship story of all, Noah’s, has its own page, The Ark. On Mandan Indians Donnelly reads the Dakota legend of huge skiffs in which their ancestors floated for weeks as a memory of ships and long sea voyages.
Related pages
- Critias, the story of Atlantis
- The Catalogue of Ships
- Jon, sea-king from Alderga
- The Island Tarshish
- Onffroy de Thoron (1869): Solomon’s Voyages to the Amazon
- Scheria
- The Phaeacians and Phoenicians
- Tibet: the wise teachers of Atlantis took their follower by ship
- The vailx
For every page I tagged with Ships, see the Ships tag archive.
