In the book, Follow the Whale, Ivan Sanderson is making the point, among others, that the Phoenecians taught Mediterranean peoples how to hunt whales and that it was the hunting of whales as far back as 10,000 BC that provided much of the impetus for sea exploration and discovery. (My guess is that this related, in the light of more recent discoveries, to the Maritime Archaic culture.) It appears from the text that I will reproduce below that Ivan Sanderson and his illustrator are a little “out of sync” because the text on the page with the illustration above says, (giving a hypothetical, narrative setting):
“The vessel too is painted blue…. Its face, for it has a face, with a SHARP, KEEN NOSE and two great LOZENGE eyes painted on either side of the prow….” In the illustration the prow is not sharp and keen, as Ivan’s text says. However, the “model” from Burrows’ Cave does have a lozenge or diamond-shaped eye.
The question thus arises: Where did Ivan Sanderson in 1957 get the information about lozenge-shaped ship’s “eyes” when almost every photo or illustration I’ve seen shows less stylized, more natural, eyes, or, was the person who carved the Burrows’ Cave ship privy to an alternate, equally correct, representation of an eye in the shape of a lozenge?
