The First Days of Man

When the first stone house had been built, the little tribe built others, until there was room for all to sleep protected from the rain. Not knowing what wild animals, or even men, might live in the woods further back from the shore, they also built a stone wall across the neck of the plateau, so that on one side their camp was protected by the cliffs leading down to the ocean, and on the other, by this wall of stone. They brought great piles of firewood into the camp for cooking the fish they caught, and the waterfowl they shot with bows and arrows, along the shores of the little bay at the foot of the cliffs. Every day the men went out hunting and fishing in the canoe, sometimes on the ocean, when it was smooth, and at others, on the bay, or up the river which ran into it. They could not go up this river very far, because of the rocks in it, which made rapids, over which the boat could not pass. But they often went beyond the rapids on foot, and brought back wild hogs, and many small furry animals they had never seen before, and sometimes bears and horned deer.

Having no marsh grass from which to weave cloth, the tribe began once more to use skins and furs for clothing, and to eat more meat, and less fish, than they had eaten in their old home. The country of the sea people had been flat and marshy, while that of the valley tribes was hilly and far from the sea, but in the new home of Tul-Ab and his tribe, they found both the hills and the sea, close together, and so they grew to be like both the sea folk, and the people of the valley and the hills from which they had first come.

Already, in building things of stone, they had done something that men had never done before. Instead of living in caves, or brush huts, they had built houses of stone, and a stone fort. This was a new thing, and from it they began to learn to be carpenters. As the tribe got larger, and more houses were built, they found they could make the roof logs fit closer together by chipping off the two sides of them, and so they made the first hewn timbers. It was not long, before they found they could split the logs with stone wedges, and in this way make rough planks, or boards. These boards they fastened to cross pieces with wooden pegs, to make doors for their houses to keep out the wind and snow and rain.

The women they had brought with them had children, and these children grew up and had more children, and before very long there were many hundred people in the tribe, and their stone huts dotted the cliffs as far as the eye could see. When they found there was not room enough behind the first wall for the growing village, they built another and longer wall, further back from the sea, for they were always afraid of being attacked, on account of the way their former village had been destroyed. Only the very oldest men remembered this now, but they told the story to the younger men, around the fires at night, and when these grew old, they told it to their children and grandchildren, so that it became a legend in the tribe that they had come from another country, where enemies lived who might attack them. A watchman stood day and night on the cliffs, looking out over the sea, ready to light signal fires, in case he saw boats coming toward them from across the water.

The island people found plenty of flint, out of which to make weapons and tools for working wood, and they were very skilful fishermen, and also great hunters with the bow and arrow. As they made hunting trips far back into the country, they found many different kinds of wood for making bows and small canoes, but no reeds were to be found, so they forgot the art of making basket work. Neither did they find any clay, for a long time, and when the few bowls and jars they had brought with them were broken, they made drinking cups of the horns of animals, or of wood. They still used smoked meat and fish, but they knew nothing about planting and growing grains to make bread.

These people were great workers in wood and stone. They worshipped the Sun, and built a temple to him of huge upright stones, set in a wide circle, with a flat altar stone in the middle, on which they placed their offerings of meat and fish. These offerings they burnt with fire, because the priests of the temple told them it pleased the Sun to smell the smoke of the burning flesh as it rose up in the sky. Twice in the year they had great feasts. One was when the days began to get longer, in the spring, and fruits and flowers began to grow. This time is in March, and we call it the vernal equinox, because then the days and nights are of equal length, and equinox means equal nights. From then on, until June, the days grow longer and the nights grow shorter. From June till September, the nights grow longer and the days shorter, until once more they are the same length, and this is called the autumnal equinox. Then the island tribe held another festival, the feast of the harvest. After that the nights began to grow still longer, and the days shorter, because the sun was going away from them more and more, all through the cold winter. Even to-day we remember these two festivals, by offerings of flowers in the spring, at Easter time, and by the harvest feasts which country people still hold in some places at the end of the summer, when the harvests are gathered in.

The island people built their houses and temples of stone. With wood they at first made only roofs and doors, but it was not long before they began to use it for building other things, such as boats. They found no big trees of soft wood on the rocky hillsides, out of which they could make large canoes. So they hewed planks out of the smaller trees, and built the first wooden ships made by man. They could not be called ships, at first, for they were only small boats, but as time went on they built them larger and larger until they would carry forty or fifty men.

Modor was the first man to build one of these boats and he was a skilful carpenter. He hewed a long heavy keel for his boat out of a tree trunk, and at each end he set up a stout post, one for the stem, the other for the stern. Wooden braces, or knees, as they are called, fastened by pegs, held the posts to the keel. Modor's tools were heavy stone axes, wedges of stone to split planks with, saws, made of jagged, toothed pieces of flint, with wooden handles bound to them, sharp flint knives for making wooden pegs, and drills, for boring holes for the pegs. With such rough tools it was not easy for Modor and his companions to build a boat, but they were strong and patient, and worked very hard.

After the stem and stern posts had been fastened in place, ribs were pegged to the keel to form the frame of the boat. These curved ribs they made in two ways. One was to hew them from the crooked limbs of trees. The other was to take straight pieces of wood and soak them for many days in water, until the wood became soft and pliable, and then bend them to shape, and tie them that way with leather cords while they dried.

When the ribs had been fastened to the keel with wooden pegs, long strips of wood were bent around the tops of the ribs, from the stem post to the stern post, and fastened to each rib with a peg. This made the framework of the boat, and now it had to be covered with planks.

Modor and his helpers took the split boards they had made and bent them over the framework, with a peg at each rib to hold them, and in this way covered the whole framework of the boat. Of course a boat built in this rough way would not be water-tight; there were many joints and seams between the rough planking through which water would leak. But Modor had found, oozing from the pine trees, a black, sticky sort of gum or pitch, and this, with soft fibres from the bark of trees, he used to calk his boat and make it tight. The way he did this was to heat the pitch in a large shell, dip the fibres in it, and then drive them into the cracks with a stone wedge. In this way, after many trials, Modor at last got his boat so that it would not leak.

He built a deck of wood over the forward part of the boat, and across the middle part he put five board seats. These seats were for the paddlers to sit on, but the paddles were so long, in order to reach the water, that they were like oars, and it was hard to handle them against the ocean waves. So Modor drove pegs into the edges or gunwales of the boat to hold the oars in place, and men thus began to row boats, instead of paddling them, as they had their canoes and rafts.

As we have seen, the tribe had almost forgotten how to weave, because they no longer had the tough marsh grasses to make cord from. But Modor twisted the fibres from the bark of certain trees into strong cords, and took them to some of the old women, who knew how to weave, and they wove him a sail from them. Then he put a mast in the middle of his boat, with a pole or yard across it, and hung the sail from this yard, with strong cords tied to its lower corners to hold it down.

In this boat Modor and his companions made many voyages along the coast, fishing, and hunting. On one of these trips he found a marsh covered with reeds and rushes, but he did not gather them, for the tribe had no use for them now. On another voyage Modor's boat was carried by the wind across the water to a low shore. It was the same shore from which Tul-Ab and his companions had fled hundreds of years before. When Modor's boat came in sight of the beach, he saw many men running along the sand, waving their spears and shouting. Several canoes crowded with fighting men came out from the shore. Then Modor lowered the sail of his boat, and the rowers bent to their oars, and soon left the canoes and the shore far behind.

When Modor got back to the village he told the old men what he had seen, and that night around the camp fires they told again the story of Tul-Ab, and sang a song about him, and his coming to the island.

The next day the chief of the tribe, whose name was Gudr, told the watchers on the cliffs to be very careful, and to keep their eyes always on the sea, for he feared that the people from across the water might come to attack them. But for a long time none came.

Other men in the tribe also built boats like the one made by Modor, larger ones, and they carved the heads of animals, or birds, or fish, out of wood, and fastened them at the bows of their boats, and this was the first use of figureheads, which you can see on some sailing ships even now. They painted the boats with red, and yellow and blue earths, mixed with fish oil, and stained the sails different colours with the juices of berries and plants.

One day, while digging along the bottom of the cliffs for red earth with which to make paint for his boat, Modor came across a lump of something that he at first thought was stone. It was yellow in colour, and very heavy. He laid it on a rock, and beat it with the head of his axe, expecting it would break. But instead of breaking, it flattened out, and began to shine, where the axe head struck it, like the rays of the sun. Modor was very much pleased with his find, because it was so pretty, and he beat it out into a thin strip, and rubbed it bright with a stone, and bent it like a bracelet about his upper arm. His companions, when they saw it, liked its pretty, bright colour, but beyond that, they paid no attention to it. They did not know that Modor was the first man in the world to discover a metal. The bracelet he had bent around his arm was made of pure gold.

CHAPTER XIX

THE FIRST SEA FIGHT

The Stone Age on earth lasted for a very long time; much longer than you would think, as you read this story. From the time when Ra made his first stone-pointed spear many, many thousands of years had passed, and still men knew nothing of the use of metals. In some parts of the earth, as the tribes migrated, and spread to new countries, stone weapons and tools were used for thousands of years longer; in fact, they are still used, even to-day, by certain savage tribes. But in other parts of the earth, men discovered metals, and how to use them, and soon the age of bronze began.

In Nature's great storehouse metals are found in two different ways. Some of them, such as gold, tin, and copper, occur free, that is, they are found in the rocks in solid veins. When these rocks are broken up by the action of the weather, or by swift-flowing streams, the bits of metal, being very heavy, fall to the bottom, and are found in lumps, or nuggets in the sand and earth along the shores.

Other metals, such as iron, are usually found in nature in the shape of ores, and can only be gotten out of these ores by smelting, that is, by heating the ores in a hot fire.

Early man, of course, found the free metals first, and it was a very long time before he learned how to smelt ores, and make iron, and steel. The ancient Egyptians carved their wonderful statues, their huge obelisks, with tools of copper, hardening the soft metal in some way, so that it would cut the toughest stone. The secret of hardening and tempering copper in this way has been lost, and the most skilful metal workers to-day do not know how to do it.

When Man first discovered gold, the only use he made of it was for ornaments, just as Modor twisted the golden bracelet about his arm. Tin, too, although harder than gold, was of little use to him. Even copper, the hardest of the three, was too soft in its natural state to be used for anything but knives, or swords, and even these were not so good as those made of very hard stone. But when it was found that copper and tin, melted together, would form what is known as bronze, hard, tough and strong, a new era or age began, known as the Age of Bronze.

It was long after Modor found the lump of gold, however, that the use of bronze began.

The island men kept watch from their village on the cliffs for many years, expecting each day to see a fleet of canoes come across the water from the far-off mainland, but as time passed they forgot about their enemies, and went on fishing and hunting and building boats in peace.

Then, one day, when the sea was quiet and smooth, a watcher on the cliffs saw a boat far off on the horizon, and as it came closer, others appeared behind it until there were forty or more in sight. He gave the alarm, and soon the smoke went up from the signal fires, calling all the fishing and hunting parties home as quickly as possible.

The attacking fleet was made up of many large log canoes, driven by both paddles and sails. The hill men whom Ban had led to conquer the tribe by the sea knew little or nothing about making boats when they came, but the prisoners they had taken, women, and a few men, they made their slaves, and from these they learned how to make canoes of wicker and skins, and also how to burn them out of logs. As time went on Ban's tribe became great fishermen, just as the sea people had been before them, and travellers came down from the valley, bringing grain, and fine pottery, and many other new things that the sea people had known nothing about. This made the tribe of Ban very powerful and strong; from the slaves they had learned to make fish hooks, and nets, and grass cloth and boats, and from the hill people, and the dwellers in the valley, they learned how to make bread, and wine, and to plant things for food, and make clothing of leather and skins instead of grass cloth, and much besides. Soon all the country between the valley and the sea was covered with people, and now the new tribes that wandered away from the valley went inland, settling new country, for there was no longer any room for them, in the direction of the sea.

When the tribe of Ban, and the other tribes that now lived along the seacoast, wanted to find new places where there was plenty of game, there was nowhere for them to go. The sea stopped them. But they knew, when they saw the boat of Modor sail along their coast, that the old legend about the land of the flying birds was true, and that somewhere across the Great Water was a new country, where there might be plenty of game, and room for them to live. So a thousand of them, in fifty great canoes, twenty men to a canoe, set sail on a voyage of discovery. It was their boats that the watchers on the cliffs saw coming toward them.

When the smoke signals went up, all the boats of the island men came flying home, and gathered in the bay below the cliffs. The entrance to the bay was narrow, and they decided to fight from their ships, and keep the enemy's boats out. Unless these could get into the bay, there was no way in which the men in them could climb up to the village on the high ground above, for the cliffs on the ocean side were much too steep to climb.

The invaders lowered their sails and paddled about the mouth of the bay, trying to make up their minds what to do. They had not expected to find such a rocky shore, for their own coast was flat and sandy. Then suddenly they decided to sail into the bay and attack the ships of the island men inside.

The island men's ships were larger and higher out of the water than the log canoes, but there were not nearly so many of them; less than thirty in all, some large and some small. Their sails were lowered, but rowers manned the oars, while on the decks forward stood fighting men, with spears, slings and heavy rocks, and bows and arrows. Along the shore of the bay, at the foot of the cliffs, more fighting men stood, while above, in the village on the plateau, were the women, the old men and children, all ready to roll great stones down the path which led up the cliff, in case any of the enemy should try to climb up that way.

The canoes of the invaders swept into the bay through its narrow mouth, and at once dashed toward the opposing fleet, their crews cheering and shouting. At the same time the boats of the island men advanced to meet them, led by Modor, who had become the chief of the tribe, now that Gudr was dead. Modor, whose vessel was in the lead, told his men to row as hard as they could, straight at the first canoe. The tall prow of his boat hit the canoe and crushed in its side, so that it sank, and all the crew were thrown into the water. This battle was the very first sea-fight, and Modor was the first man to ram an enemy's ship.

Other ships belonging to the island men came up, and other canoes were rammed. The men in the water tried to climb aboard the ships, but they were struck with axes, or pierced with spears, so that the water of the bay was red with blood. But the island men did not have things all their own way. Some of the canoes attacked the ships in pairs, one on each side, and their crews sprang aboard and fought with the island men on the decks, so that many were killed on both sides.

Some of the sea people ran their canoes ashore, and jumped out on the sand. Here they were met by the defenders on the beach, who fought with them to protect their homes.

The battle raged with fury for two or three hours, but at last, when many of their boats had been sunk, and the crews killed, the sea people gave up the fight and paddled out of the bay.

Modor now gave a great shout and called to his men to follow in pursuit. The ships, with their long oars, were faster than the canoes, in the rough water outside the bay, and rammed and sank many of them. Only twelve out of the fifty that came, managed to escape; their crews paddled away with all their might, and soon they were mere specks in the distance.

Then Modor and his ships came back to the bay, the wounds of his men were washed and bound up, and a great feast was held that night to celebrate the victory.

In the enemy's canoes that had been driven up on the shore they found all sorts of provisions; cakes made of grain meal, and jars of wine, neither of which they had ever seen before. They also found round wicker baskets, for holding fish, and strong cords of twisted grass, and many pottery jars and bowls.

They ate the bread cakes, and drank the wine, which made them very merry and gay. The old men, who later on were called bards, made a song in honour of Modor's victory, and one of them played the first music that man had ever heard. He had taken the shell of a sea turtle, and stretched some thin strings of gut across it and he picked these strings with his fingers while singing his song. Many hundreds of years later these bards, with their rude harps, wandered all through the country, from village to village, entertaining the people around the fires at night with songs of the mighty deeds of Modor and other great chiefs and leaders of the past. In those days, before people had learned to write, these bards were the ones who kept the history of the past, and even to-day we can find some of their songs and stories in the ancient sagas and legends of almost every people and country. Some of the deeds of these ancient heroes as told by the bards were so wonderful that the people came to look upon them as gods.

One of the young men in Modor's boat made a new discovery, while the battle was going on. When the attacking canoes came alongside, he sprang into one of them, followed by some of his companions, and fought the crew with his axe. A shower of sling stones from another canoe flew about him. To protect his face and head from the stones he snatched up the round wicker top of one of the fish baskets, and held it before him, so that the sling stones bounced off and did him no harm. This was the first shield.

Later on, when the battle was over, he took one of these round wicker tops, and stretched a piece of heavy leather over it. Then he fastened two leather thongs on the inside, so that he could slip his arm through them and so hold the shield before him while still having his hand free to grasp his bow.

Modor, who was a great chief, as well as a skilful carpenter, saw how useful this was at once. He sent a party up the coast to where he had seen the reeds growing, and had them bring back many bundles of them. With these he showed the women how to make frames of basket-work, and cover them with tough hide, so that each man had a shield to defend himself with.

Another thing that came from this battle was the beginning of the use of armour. One of the sea folk had struck Modor a heavy blow across the arm, that would have cut it to the bone, had not the axe fallen upon the thick band of gold Modor wore on his arm. After this, Modor hunted for more of the gold, and when he found it, he made many more wide gold bands, and put them on each arm from the elbow to the shoulder, and this was the first use of metal armour. But it was a very long time before men came to use heavy armour of brass, and iron and steel.

Modor loved adventure, and he made up his mind to gather a fleet of ships, and cross the water to the land of the sea people, and attack them. But he did not live to do this. One day, while hunting in the marsh of the reeds, up the coast, a great beast like a rhinoceros, with long woolly hair, and sharp horns on its snout, charged down on him and his companions. They fought bravely, but Modor and two of his men were killed, and the rest fled to their boat, afraid.

The whole village mourned Modor with songs and cries of grief, and the next day a party went to the marsh and brought back his body. They buried it in a grave on the plateau, with great stones over it to mark the place. With his body they buried the dead chief's spear, and axe, and his gold armlets and shield, for these people believed that the dead would live again, and would need their weapons in the other world.

For hundreds and hundreds of years after this the island people lived in peace. The tribe grew very large, and spread far inland, where they found pleasant meadows, and forests, and banks of clay from which to make pottery. They built many stone villages and temples, and made armlets of gold, as Modor had done, and sewed plates of it to their belts, and ornamented the handles of their spears and knives with it. They also found tin, from which they made ornaments of a shining colour like silver, and copper, from which they made spear heads, and axes, beating them into shape with hammers of stone. With coloured clays, and the juices of plants, they stained their bodies in strange patterns, and coloured the shafts of their arrows and spears.

In the forests of the island were many wild animals, bears, great horned deer, and savage wolves, while along the rivers that flowed through the marshy country were huge beasts like the rhinoceros, and wild boar and snakes. From fighting these enemies they became fierce and brave, and when the bards sang of the men who came to attack them from over the sea, they would beat their weapons on the ground, with a loud noise, and talk of setting out to conquer them, as Modor had planned to do. But it was not until long after, when a chief named Mor came to be head of the tribe that they crossed the Great Water.