Phoenician ships seem to have been placed under the protection of the Cabeiri, and to have had images of them at their stem or stern or both.[918] These images were not exactly “figure-heads,” as they are sometimes called.  They were small, apparently, and inconspicuous, being little dwarf figures, regarded as amulets that would preserve the vessel in safety.  We do not see them on any representations of Phoenician ships, and it is possible that they may have been no larger than the bronze or glazed earthenware images of Phthah that are so common in Egypt.  The Phoenicians called them pittuchim, “sculptures,"[919] whence the Greek {pataikoi} and the French fetiche.

The navigation of the Phoenicians, in early times, was no doubt cautious and timid.  So far from venturing out of sight of land, they usually hugged the coast, ready at any moment, if the sea or sky threatened, to change their course and steer directly for the shore.  On a shelving coast they were not at all afraid to run their ships aground, since, like the Greek vessels, they could be easily pulled up out of reach of the waves, and again pulled down and launched, when the storm was over and the sea calm once more.  At first they sailed, we may be sure, only in the daytime, casting anchor at nightfall, or else dragging their ships up upon the beach, and so awaiting the dawn.  But after a time they grew more bold.  The sea became familiar to them, the positions of coasts and islands relatively one to another better known, the character of the seasons, the signs of unsettled or settled weather, the conduct to pursue in an emergency, better apprehended.  They soon began to shape the course of their vessels from headland to headland, instead of always creeping along the shore, and it was not perhaps very long before they would venture out of sight of land, if their knowledge of the weather satisfied them that the wind might be trusted to continue steady, and if they were well assured of the direction of the land that they wished to make.  They took courage, moreover, to sail in the night, no less than in the daytime, when the weather was clear, guiding themselves by the stars, and particularly by the Polar star,[920] which they discovered to be the star most nearly marking the true north.  A passage of Strabo[921] seems to show that—­in the later times at any rate—­they had a method of calculating the rate of a ship’s sailing, though what the method was is wholly unknown to us.  It is probable that they early constructed charts and maps, which however they would keep secret through jealousy of their commercial rivals.