Prince William and a few more into it; and these pushed off, and might have escaped, had not the prince insisted on returning to the rescue of his half-sister. As the boat neared the wreck, so many people leapt into her that she capsized, and all in her were lost. Two persons clung to the mast of the White Ship. One, cramped by the chill of the night, fell off and was drowned; and the only man who survived, to be saved next morning by fishermen from the shore, was Berauld, a butcher of Rouen.[1]
Nicolas[2] considers that the numbers said to have embarked in the White Ship on this occasion must have been exaggerated, "for it is exceedingly doubtful if any vessel of the period was capable of holding so many people." It seems unnecessary to raise such an objection. We have little definite information concerning the dimensions of the largest ships of the time, but if Olaf Tryggvesson, at the end of the tenth century, built, as the Norse chroniclers tell us, a vessel 117 feet long, there is surely no reason why Prince William, in the first quarter of the twelfth century, should not have built a ship of equal length; and such an one could have carried three hundred people without much difficulty.
We are, most of us, liable to be influenced in our estimate of the ships of remote periods by the rude and obviously inaccurate representations that have been handed down to us, especially on coins and sculptures. In those days there were no people who, after following the sea and learning what ships were like, did as artistically inclined naval officers of the nineteenth century have done over and over again. The painter, the medallist, and the sculptor were landsmen; and we are no wiser in trusting their versions of what ships were like, than we should be in trusting a modern North Sea fisherman's version of what some totally unfamiliar instrument, such as a pulsometer, or a polariscope, is like.[3]
- ↑ Sim. of Durham, 242; Bromton, 1012; Will. of Malmes. ii. 653; Ord. Vit. 867, etc.
- ↑ I. 101.
- ↑ M. Jal, writing on this subject, calls attention to the small bas-reliefs of ships cast on the gas-standards for the Paris boulevards by M. A. Muel in 1837 (see cut, next page), and to the extraordinary representations of galleys to be found in various modern paintings and sculptures of the arms of Paris: and he imagines an archæologist of some future age commenting as follows upon relics discovered in the ruins of the French capital: "The vessels which we find represented on the bases of candelabras, on the beaks of rostral columns, on shields, and on the pedestals of certain statues emblematic of towns, faithfully figure the French vessels of the early years of the nineteenth century. This is beyond all doubt. A plan of Paris for 1839 shows us the Ministry of Marine close to the place which was thus ornamented with so many ships, probably on
