ABSTRACT
Early Egyptian drawings show some of the crafts equipped to carry a square sail, spread from a short yard made from a single spar hoisted on a bipod mast. A sail near the bows tends to keep the head of the ship before the wind, but, in any attempt to sail across the wind, the forward position would pull the head away to leeward, and this could be counteracted only by keeping the helm hard down to leeward, with no margin for emergencies. The prophet Isaiah, writing about 740 BC, speaks of Egypt ‘that sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of bulrushes upon the waters’. Some authorities consider that Egyptian reed boats were sometimes rendered seaworthy by being given a waterproofing of pitch. It is impossible to say when the first wooden ships were built in Egypt; it may have been in predynastic times, but there were certainly wooden boats in Dynasty.
