Excerpts from Homer, The Odyssey (Robert Fagles translation, 1996) lines 457-475

End of Book 3 Getting 20-man crewed boat underway, after Athena had advised
Odysseuss son Telemachus on its proper construction, as it was to be used in sailing to
Pylos to visit Nestor and to hear news of his long missing father:

Telemachus climbed aboard.

Athena led the way, assuming the pilots seat
Reserved astern, and he sat close beside her.
Cables cast off, the crew swung to the oarlocks.
Bright-eyed Athena sent them a stiff following wind
Rippling out from the west, ruffling over the wine-dark sea
As Telemachus shouted out commands to all his shipmates:
All lay hands to tackle! They sprang to the orders,
hoisting the pinewood mast, they stepped it trim
in its block amidships, lashed it fast with stays
and with braided rawhide halyards hauled the white sail high.
Suddenly wind hit full and the canvas bellied out
and a dark blue wave, foaming up at the bow,
Sang out loud and strong as the ship made way,
Skimming the whitecaps, cutting toward her goal.
All running gear secure in the swift black craft,
They set up bowls and brimmed them high with wine

Middle of Book 5 Odysseus about to leave Calypso to head out to sea for home, builds
a raft from the trees on Calypsos island, using tools she provided:

He set to cutting trunks the work was done in no time.

Twenty in all he felled, he trimmed them clean with his ax
And split them deftly, trued them straight to the line.
Meanwhile the radiant goddess brought him drills
He bored through all his planks and wedged them snugly,
Knocking them home together, locked with pegs and joints.
Broad in the beam and bottom flat as a merchantman
When a master shipwright turns out her hull,
So broad the craft Odysseus made himself.
Working away at speed
He put up half-decks pinned to close-set ribs
And a sweep of gunwales rounded off the sides.
He fashioned the mast next and sank its yard in deep
And added a steering-oar to hold her right on course,
Then he fenced her stem to stern with twigs and wicker,
Bulwark against the sea-surge, floored with heaps of brush.
And lustrous Calypso came again, now with bolts of cloth
To make the sail, and he finished that off too, expertly.
Braces, sheets and brails he rigged all fast on board,
Then eased her down with levers into the sunlit sea.
(Lines 267 285)
Odysseus as celestial navigator:

The wind lifting his spirits high, royal Odysseus

Spread sail gripping the tiller, seated astern
And now the master mariner steered his craft,
Sleep never closing his eyes, forever scanning
The stars, the Pleiades and the Plowman late to set
And the Great Bera that mankind alsi calls the Wagon;
She wheels on her axis always fixed, watching the Hunter,
And she alone is denied a plung in the Oceans baths.
Hers were the stars the lustrous goddess told him
To keep hard to port as he cut across the sea.
And seventeen days he sailed , making headway well;
On the eighteenth, shadowy mountains slowly loomed
The Phaecians island reaching toward him now,
Over the misty breakers, rising like a shield.
(Lines 295-308)