In 1689 William III had at last succeeded in forming the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV, who now had enemies all round him except in little Switzerland. But France was easily the strongest of all the Great Powers, and she was under a single command; while Spain and Austria were lukewarm and weak against her, the many little German countries could not act well together, and Great Britain had many Jacobites at home besides still more in Ireland. Thus the Dutch and British friends of King William were the only ones to be depended on through thick and thin.

Moreover, the Navy had grown dangerously weak under the last two Stuart kings; and some of its men were Jacobites who knew the French king wished to put the Stuarts on the British throne again. So, when the great French admiral, Tourville, defeated the Dutch and British fleets off Beachy Head in 1690, the British fought far more feebly than the Dutch, who did as well as the best of them had done when led by the immortal van Tromp. Luckily for the British, Louis XIV did not want to make them hate him more than he could help, because he hoped to use them for his own ends when he had brought them under James again. Better still, William beat James in Ireland about the same time. Best of all, the Royal Navy began to renew its strength; while it made up its mind to stop foreign invasions of every kind. Even Jacobite officers swore they would stop the French fleet, even if James himself was on board of it. Then the tide of fortune turned for good and all.

In the spring of 1692 Louis and James, with a French and a Jacobite-Irish army, were at La Hogue, in the north-west corner of the Normandy peninsula, ready for the invasion of England. They had to wait for Tourville to clear the Dutch and British fleets away. But they thought these fleets had not joined company and that the British fleet would be so full of Jacobites as to be easily defeated again. At the first streak of dawn on the 19th of May Admiral Russell was off Harfleur, at the north-east corner of the Normandy peninsula. His own British ships of the line (that is, the ships of the biggest and strongest kind) numbered sixty-three; while his Dutch allies had thirty-six. Against these ninety-nine Tourville had only forty-four. Yet, having been ordered to attack, and not getting the counter-order till after the battle was over, he made for the overwhelming Dutch and British with a skill and gallantry beyond all praise.



The fury of the fight centred round the Soleil Royal, Tourville's flagship, which at last had to be turned out of the line. Then, as at Jutland in the Great War, mist veiled the fleets, so that friend and foe were mixed together. But the battle went on here and there between different parts of the fleets; while a hot action was fought after dark by Admiral Carter, who, though a Jacobite, was determined that no foreign army should ever set foot in England. Mortally wounded, he called to his flag captain, "Fight the ship as long as she swims," and then fell dead. All through the foggy 20th the battle was continued whenever the French and Allies could see each other. Next morning the Soleil Royal became so disabled that she drifted ashore near Cherbourg. But Tourville had meanwhile shifted his flag to another ship and fought his way into La Hogue with twelve of his best men-of-war. Some of the other French ships escaped by reaching St. Malo through the dangerous channel between La Hogue and the island of Alderney. Five others escaped to the eastward, and four went so far that they rounded Scotland before getting home.

On the 23rd and 24th Admiral Rooke, the future hero of Gibraltar, sailed up the bay of La Hogue with his lighter vessels; then took to his boats and burnt Tourville's men-of-war, supply ships, and even rowboats, in full view of King Louis and King James and of their whole army of invasion. No other navy has seen so many strange sights, afloat and ashore, as have been seen by the British. Yet even the British never saw a stranger sight than when the French cavalry charged into the shallow water where the Dutch and British sailors were finishing their work. A soldier-and-sailor rough-and-tumble followed, sabres and cutlasses slashing like mad, and some of the horsemen being dragged off their saddles by well-handled boat-hooks.

La Hogue was not a glorious victory, like Trafalgar, because the odds were nine to four in favour of the Dutch and British. But it was one of the great decisive battles of the world, because, from that time on, the British Isles, though often threatened, were never again in really serious danger of invasion.



CHAPTER XIV

THE SECOND WAR AGAINST LOUIS XIV

(1702-1713)

King Charles II of Spain, having no children, made a will leaving his throne to Philip V, a grandson of Louis XIV, whose wife was sister to Charles. Louis declared that "the Pyrenees had ceased to exist"; by which boast he meant that he would govern the Spanish Empire through his grandson, turn the Mediterranean into "a French lake," and work his will against British sea-power, both mercantile and naval.

The war that followed was mostly fought on land; and the great British hero of it was the famous Duke of Marlborough, who was a soldier, not a sailor. But the facts that England, as usual, could not be invaded, and that her armies, also as usual, fought victoriously on the continent of Europe, prove how well British sea-power worked: closing the sea to enemies, opening it for friends, moving armies to the best bases on the coast, and keeping them supplied with all they needed at the front—men, munitions, clothing, food, and everything else.

The great naval feat of this war was the daring attack Rooke made on Gibraltar in 1704 with the help of some very gallant Dutch. Landing all the Marines ("Soldier and Sailor too") on the narrow neck of ground joining the famous Rock of Gibraltar to the mainland of Spain, and ranging all his broadsides against the batteries on the seaward front, Rooke soon beat the Spaniards from their guns and forced them to surrender a place which, if properly defended, should have kept out a fleet ten times as strong. No sooner had Gibraltar fallen than a French fleet came to win it back. But, after a fierce battle off Malaga, with over fifty ships a side, the French gave up the idea; and from that day to this Gibraltar has been British.

British sea-power won many advantages by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. France and Spain agreed that one king should never rule both countries. The British kept Gibraltar and Minorca, which together made two splendid bases for their fleet in the Mediterranean; while France gave up all her claims to Newfoundland and the Territory of Hudson Bay, besides ceding Acadia (Nova Scotia), to the British Crown.



CHAPTER XV

WAR AGAINST FRANCE AND SPAIN

(1739-1748)

Though the same king did not reign over both countries the same family did. So the French and Spanish Bourbons made a Family Compact against British sea-power. Spain promised to take away from the British all the trading rights she had been forced to grant them in America, while France promised to help Spain to win Gibraltar back again.

When the secret began to leak out the feeling against the Bourbons ran high; and when a merchant skipper called Jenkins paraded London, showing the ear he said the Spaniards had cut off him in South America, the people clamoured for immediate war. Admiral Vernon became immensely popular when he took Porto Bello in the Spanish Main. But he was beaten before Cartagena. He was a good admiral; but the Navy had been shamefully neglected by the government during the long peace; and no neglected navy can send out good fleets in a hurry.

Still, the Navy and mercantile marine were good enough to enable British sea-power to turn the scale against Prince Charlie in Scotland and against the French in Canada. The French tried to help the last of the Stuarts by sending supply ships and men-of-war to Scotland. But the British fleet kept off the men-of-war, seized the supply ships, and advanced along the coast to support the army that was running the Jacobites down. Prince Charlie's Jacobites had to carry everything by land. The British army had most of its stores carried fen times better by sea. Therefore, when the two armies met for their last fight at Culloden, the Jacobites were worn out, while the British army was quite fresh. In Canada it was the same story when the French fortress of Louisbourg was entirely cut off from the sea by a British fleet and forced to surrender or starve. In both cases the fleets and armies worked together like the different parts of one body. At Louisbourg the British land force was entirely made up of American colonists, mostly from enlightened Massachusetts.

A fleet sent against the French in India failed to beat that excellent French admiral, La Bourdonnais. But Anson's famous four years voyage round the world (1740-44) was a wonderful success. The Navy having been so much neglected by the government for so many years before the war, Anson had to put up with some bad ships and worse men. Even poor old pensioners were sent on board at the last minute to make up the number required. Of course they soon died off like flies. But his famous flagship, the Centurion, got through, beat everything that stood up to her, and took vast quantities of Spanish gold and silver. Yet this is by no means the most wonderful fact about the Centurion. The most wonderful thing of all is, that, though she was only a one-thousand-tonner (smaller than many a destroyer of the present day) she had no fewer than eight officers who rose to high and well-won rank in after years, and three—Anson, Saunders, and Keppel—who all became First Lords of the Admiralty, and thus heads of the whole Navy.



Three years after his return Anson won a victory over the French off Cape Finisterre, while Hawke won another near the same place a few months later. In both the French fought very well indeed; but, with less skill in handling fleets and smaller numbers than the British, they had no chance. One of Hawke's best captains was Saunders. Thus twelve years before Pitt's conquest of Canada the three great admirals most concerned with it had already been brought together.

The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the war in 1748, settled nothing and satisfied nobody. It was, in fact, only a truce to let the tired opponents get their breath and prepare for the world-wide struggle which was to settle the question of oversea empire.

The British in America were very angry with the Mother Country for giving back Louisbourg. But they were much too narrow in their views; for their own fate in America depended entirely on the strength of the Royal Navy, which itself depended on having a safe base in the Mother Country. Now, France had conquered those parts of the once Spanish but then Austrian Netherlands which included the present coast of Belgium; and Britain could no more allow the French to threaten her naval base from the coast of Belgium then than she could allow the Spaniards before or the Germans in our own time. Therefore both she and her colonists won many points in the game, when playing for safety, by giving up Louisbourg, from which there could be no real danger, and so getting France out of Belgium, from which the whole Empire might some day have been struck a mortal blow.

CHAPTER XVI

PITT'S IMPERIAL WAR

(1756-1763)

The British part of the Seven Years War was rightly known as The Maritime War, because Pitt, the greatest of British empire-builders, based it entirely on British sea-power, both mercantile and naval. Pitt had a four-fold plan. First, it is needless to say that he made the Navy strong enough to keep the seaways open to friends and closed to enemies; for once the seaways are cut the Empire will bleed to death just as surely as a man will if you cut his veins and arteries. This being always and everywhere the Navy's plainest duty it need not have been mentioned here unless each other part of Pitt's fourfold plan had not only depended on it but helped to make it work. The second part of his plan was this: not to send British armies into the middle of Europe, but to help Frederick the Great and other allies to pay their own armies—a thing made possible by the wealth brought into Britain by oversea trade. The third part was to attack the enemy wherever British fleets and armies, acting together in "joint expeditions," could strike the best blows from the sea. The fourth was to send joint expeditions to conquer the French dominions overseas.

But lesser men than Pitt were at the head of the Government when the fighting began; and it took some time to bring the ship of state on to her proper course even after his mighty hand began to steer.

In 1754 "the shot heard round the world" was fired by the French at Washington's American militiamen, who were building a fort on the spot where Pittsburg stands today. The Americans were determined to stop the French from "joining hands behind their backs" and thus closing every road to the West all the way from Canada to New Orleans. So they sent young George Washington to build a fort at the best junction of the western trails. But he was defeated and had to surrender. Then Braddock was sent out from England in 1755. But the French defeated him too. Then France sent out to Canada as great a master of the art of war on land as Drake had been by sea. This was the gallant and noble Montcalm, who, after taking Oswego in 1756 and Fort William Henry in 1757, utterly defeated a badly led British army, four times the size of his own, at Ticonderoga in 1758.

Meanwhile war had been declared in Europe on the 18th of May, 1756. On one side stood France, Austria, Saxony, Russia, and Sweden; on the other, Great Britain, Prussia, and a few smaller German states, among them Hanover and Hesse. Things went as badly here as overseas; for the meaner kind of party politicians had been long in power, and the Fleet and Army had both been neglected. There was almost a panic in England while the French were preparing a joint expedition against Minorca in the Mediterranean lest this might be turned against England herself. Minorca was taken, a British fleet having failed to help it. Hawke and Saunders were then sent to the Mediterranean as a "cargo of courage." But the fortunes of war could not be changed at once; and they became even worse next year (1757). The Austrians drove Frederick the Great out of Bohemia. The French took Hanover. And, though Frederick ended the year with two victories, Pitt's own first joint expedition failed to take Rochefort on the west coast of France. Clive's great victory at Plassey, which laid the foundation of our Indian Empire, was the only silver lining to the British clouds of war.

But in 1758 Pitt was at last managing the war in his own perfect way; and everything began to change for the better.

The enemy had already felt the force of British sea-power in three different ways. They had felt it by losing hundreds of merchant vessels on the outbreak of war. They had felt it in Hanover, where they were ready to grant the Hanoverians any terms if the surrender would only be made before a British fleet should appear on their flank. And they had felt it during the Rochefort expedition, because, though that was a wretched failure, they could not tell beforehand when or where the blow would fall, or whether the fleet and army might not be only feinting against Rochefort and then going on somewhere else.

There is no end to the advantages a joint fleet and army possesses over an army alone, even when the army alone has many more men. It is ten times easier to supply armies with what they need in the way of men, guns, munitions, food, clothes, and other stores, when these supplies can be carried by sea. It is ten times easier to keep your movements secret at sea, where nobody lives and where the weaker sea-power can never have the best of lookouts, than it is on land, where thousands of eyes are watching you and thousands of tongues are talking. So, if your army fights near a coast against an enemy who commands the sea, you can never tell when or where he may suddenly attack your line of supply by landing an army to cut it. The French generals, though they had the best army in the world, were always looking over their shoulders to see if some British joint expedition was not hovering round the flank exposed to the coast. The French Navy, though very gallant, could only help French shipping here and there, by fits and starts, and at the greatest risk. So, while the British forces used the highways of the sea the whole time, the French forces could only use them now and then by great good luck. Thus British sea-power hampered, spoilt, or ruined all the powers of the land.

The French wanted to save Louisbourg, the fall of which they knew would be the first step to the British conquest of Canada. But they could not send a fleet through the English Channel right under the eyes of the British naval headquarters, from which they were themselves expecting an attack. So they tried one from the Mediterranean. But Osborne and Saunders shut the door in their faces at Gibraltar and broke up their Toulon fleet as well. Then the French tried the Bay of Biscay. But Hawke swooped down on the big convoy of supply vessels sheltering at Aix and forced both them and their escorting men-of-war to run aground in order to save themselves from being burnt. Meanwhile large numbers of French farmers and fishermen had to be kept under arms to guard the shores along the Channel. This, of course, was bad for the harvest of both sea and land, on which the feeding of the men at the front so greatly depended. But there was no help for it, as the British fleet was watching its chance to pounce down on the first point left unguarded, and the French fleet was not strong enough to fight it out at sea. St. Malo and Cherbourg were successfully attacked. The only failure was at St. Cast, where a silly old general made mistakes of which a clever French one quickly took advantage.

Thus harassed, blockaded, and weakened on every coast, France could do nothing to save Louisbourg, the first link in the long, thin chain of French posts in America, where the fortunes of war were bound to follow the side that had the greater sea-power. No army could fight in America if cut off from Europe; because the powder and shot, muskets and bayonets, cannons and cannon-balls, swords and pistols, all came out from France and England. More than this, the backbone of both armies were the French and British regulars, who also came from France and England. Most of all, fleets were quite as important at Quebec and Montreal as at Louisbourg, for ocean navigation went all those hundreds of miles inland. Beyond these three great points, again, sea-power, of a wholly inland kind, was all-important; for the French lived along another line of waterways—from Montreal, across the Great Lakes, and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. You might as well expect an army to march without legs as to carry on a war in America without fleets of sea-going ships and flotillas of inland small craft, even down to the birchbark canoe.

Pitt's plan for 1758 was to attack Canada on both flanks and work into place for attacking her centre the following year. Louisbourg on the coast of Cape Breton guarded her sea flank. Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburg) at the forks of the Ohio guarded her land flank and her door to the Golden West. Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain guarded her gateway into the St. Lawrence from the south. Here the British attack, though made with vastly superior numbers, was beaten back by the heroic and skilful Montcalm. But Fort Duquesne, where Washington and Braddock had been defeated, was taken by Forbes and re-named Pittshurg in honour of the mighty Minister of War. Louisbourg likewise fell. So Canada was beaten on both wings, though saved, for the moment, in the centre.

Louisbourg never had the slightest chance; for Boscawen's great fleet cut it off from the sea so completely that no help the French could spare could have forced its way in, even if it had been able to dodge past the British off the coast of France. The British army, being well supplied from the sea, not only cut Louisbourg off by land as well as the fleet had cut it off by sea but was able to press the siege home with such vigour that the French had to surrender after a brave defence of no more than eight weeks. The hero of the British army at Louisbourg was a young general of whom we shall soon hear more—Wolfe.

If we ever want to choose an Empire Year, then the one to choose, beyond all shadow of a doubt, is 1759; and the hero of it, also beyond all shadow of a doubt, is Pitt. Hardwicke, Pitt's chief civilian adviser, was a truly magnificent statesman for war. Anson was a great man at the head of the Navy. Ligonier was equally good at the head of the Army, with a commission as "Commander-in-Chief of all His Majesty's Forces in Great Britain and America," which showed how much Pitt thought of the Canadian campaigns. The silent Saunders was one of the best admirals that even England ever had. And when people drank to "the eye of a Hawke, and the heart of a Wolfe!" they showed they knew of other first-rate leaders too. But by far the greatest head and heart, by far the most inspiring soul, of this whole vast Empire War was Pitt. In many and many a war, down to our own day, the warriors who have led the fleets and armies have been greater and nobler than the statesmen who managed the government. But Pitt was greater, though even he could not be nobler, than any of the warriors who served the Empire under him; for he knew, better than any one else, how to make fleets and armies work together as a single United Service, and how to make the people who were not warriors work with the warriors for the welfare of the whole United Empire. Of course he had a wonderful head and a wonderful heart. But his crowning glory as an Empire-maker is that he could rise above all the petty strife of party politicians and give himself wholly to the Empire in the same spirit of self-sacrifice as warriors show upon the field of battle.

In choosing commanders by land and sea Pitt always took the best, no matter who or what their friends or parties were; and no commander left Pitt's inspiring presence without feeling the fitter for the work in hand. In planning the conquest of Canada, Pitt and Ligonier agreed that Amherst and Wolfe were the men for the army, while Pitt and Anson agreed that Saunders and Holmes were the men for the fleet. This was all settled at the beginning of Empire Year—1759.

But this was only a part, though the most important part, of Pitt's Imperial plan. No point of vantage, the whole world round, escaped his eagle eye. The French and Dutch were beaten in India; though both fought well, and though the French fleet fought a drawn battle with the British off Ceylon. On the continent of Europe our allies were helped by a British army at the decisive victory of Minden, which drove the French away from Hanover. And in the West Indies the island of Guadaloupe was taken by a joint expedition of the usual kind; but only after the French had made a splendid resistance of over three months.

Stung to the quick by these sudden blows from the sea France planned a great invasion of the British Isles. She did not hide it, hoping thereby to make the British keep their fleets at home in self-defence. But though, as always happens, there were people weak enough to want to keep the Navy close beside the coast and stupidly divided up, so that plenty of timid folk could see the ships in front of them, just where the enemy with one well handled fleet could beat them bit by bit, Pitt paid no attention at all to any silly nonsense of the kind. He and Anson knew, of course, that, when you have the stronger fleet, the only right way is to defend yourself by attacking the enemy before he can attack you. So, instead of wasting force at home, Pitt sent joint expeditions all over the seaboard world, wherever they were needed to guard or make the Empire overseas; while he sent fleets to beat or blockade the French fleets off their own, not off the British, coasts.

The dreaded invasion never came off; and the only two French fleets that did get out were destroyed: the one from the Mediterranean off Lagos in the south of Portugal, and the one from the west coast of France in Quiberon Bay.

Boscawen's fleet was refitting and taking in stores at Gibraltar when one of his look-out frigates signalled up to the Governor's house, where Boscawen was dining, that the French were slipping through the Strait by hugging the African shore under cover of the dark. The British flagship had her sails unbent (that is, unfastened altogether). Every vessel had her decks and hold lumbered up with stores. Half the crews were ashore; and if a spy had taken a look round he would have thought the enemy could never have been overhauled. But the Navy is never caught napping. In the twinkling of an eye Gibraltar was full of British blue-jackets racing down to their ships, leaping on board, and turning their skilful hands to the first job waiting to be done. Within two hours Boscawen was off hotfoot after the French, hoisting in boats, stowing the last of the lumbering stores, and clearing decks for action. Overhauling La Clue near Lagos, off the coast of Portugal, he ranged up alongside, flagship to flagship. But the French, fighting with equal skill and courage, beat him off. Falling astern he came abreast of the gallant Centaure, which had already fought four British men-of-war. Being now a mere battered hulk she surrendered. Then Boscawen, his damage repaired, pushed ahead again. La Clue, whose fleet was the smaller, seeing no chance of either victory or escape, chose shipwreck rather than surrender, and ran his flagship straight on the rocks, with every stitch of canvas drawing full and his flag kept flying.



Quiberon and Quebec go together, like "the eye of a Hawke and the heart of a Wolfe"; for Hawke's victory at Quiberon made it certain that Wolfe's victory at Quebec could not be undone. The French were trying to unite their west-coast fleets at Morbihan for an invasion of England or at least a fight to give some of their own shipping a breathing spell free from blockade. Their admiral, Conflans, was trying to work his way in under very great difficulties. He was short of trained men, short of proper stores, and had fewer ships than Hawke. Hawke's cruisers had driven some of Conflans' storeships into a harbour a hundred miles away from Brest, where Conflans was trying hard to get ready for the invasion of England. The result was that these stores had to be landed and carted across country, which not only took ten times longer than it would have taken to send them round by sea but also gave ten times as much trouble. At last Conflans managed to move out. But he had about as much chance of escape as a fly in a spider's web; for Hawke had cruisers watching everywhere and a battle fleet ready to pounce down anywhere. Conflans had been ordered to save his fleet by all possible means till he had joined the French fleet and army of invasion. So he is not to be blamed for what he tried to do at Quiberon.

On the 20th of November he was sailing toward Quiberon Bay when he saw the vanguard of Hawke's fleet coming up before a rising gale. With fewer ships, and with crews that had been blockaded so long that they were no match for the sea-living British, he knew he had no chance in a stand-up tight in the open, and more especially in the middle of a storm. So he made for Quiberon, where he thought he would be safe; because the whole of that intricate Bay is full of rocks, shoals, shallows, and all kinds of other dangers.

But Hawke came down on the wings of the wind, straight toward the terrific dangers of the Bay, and flying before a gale which in itself seemed to promise certain shipwreck; for it blew on-shore. Conflans ran for his life, got into the Bay, and had begun to form his line of battle when some distant shots told him that his rear was being overhauled. Then his last ships came racing in. But the leading British, like hounds in full cry, were closing on them so fast that before they could join his line they were caught in the fury of the fight. Within a few desperate minutes two French ships were so badly battered that they had to surrender, while three more were sent to the bottom. Then the gale shifted and blew Conflans' own line out of order. He at once tried to move into a better place. But this only made matters worse. So he anchored in utter confusion, with wrecking rocks on one side and Hawke's swooping fleet on the other. Once more, however, he tried a change—this time the bold one of charging out to sea. But Hawke was too quick for him, though the well-named Intrepide rushed in between the two racing flagships, the Royal George and Soleil Royal. This was the end. The gale rose to its height. Darkness closed in. And then, amid the roaring of the battle and the sea, the victorious British anchored beside all that was left of the French.

There were no such sea fights on the coasts of Canada, where the British were in overwhelming naval strength. But never was there a joint expedition which owed more to its fleet than the one that took Quebec this same year (1759). The fact that the battles were fought on the land, and that Wolfe and Montcalm both fell in the one which decided the fate of Quebec, has made us forget that sea-power had more to do with this and the other American campaigns than all the other forces put together. The army did magnificently; and without Wolfe's and the other armies the conquest could never have been made. But the point is this, that, while each little army was only a finger of the hand that drew the British sword in Canada, the fleet which brought the armies there and kept them going was part and parcel of the whole vast body of British sea-power united round the world.

Pitt planned to give French Canada the knockout blow in Empire Year. So, holding the extreme east and west at Louisbourg and Fort Duquesne, he sent a small force to cut the line of the Lakes at Niagara, a much larger one to cut into the line of the St. Lawrence from Lake Champlain, and the largest and strongest of all up the St. Lawrence to take Quebec, which, then as now, was the key of Canada. Niagara was taken; and the line of Lake Champlain was secured by Amherst, who, however, never got through to the St. Lawrence that year. But the great question was, who is to have the key? So we shall follow Saunders and Wolfe to Quebec.

Wolfe's little army of nine thousand men was really a landing party from Saunders' big fleet, which included nearly fifty men-of-war (almost a quarter of the whole Royal Navy) and well over two hundred transports and supply ships. The bluejackets on board the men-of-war and the merchant seamen on board the other ships each greatly outnumbered the men in Wolfe's army. In fact, the whole expedition was made up of three-quarters sea-power and only one-quarter land.

Admiral Durell, who had been left at Halifax over the winter, was too slow in getting the advance guard under way in time to cut off the twenty-three little vessels sent out from France to Montcalm in the spring. But this reinforcement was too small to make any real difference in the doom of Quebec when once British sea-power had sealed the St. Lawrence. Saunders took Wolfe's army and the main body of his own fleet up the great river in June: a hundred and forty-one vessels, all told, from the flagship Neptune of ninety guns down to the smallest craft that carried supplies. It was a brave sight off the mouth of the Saguenay, where the deep-water estuary ends, to see the whole fleet, together at sunset, with its thousand white sails, in a crescent twenty miles long, a-gleam on the blue St. Lawrence.

The French-Canadian pilots who had been taken prisoners swore that no fleet could ever get through the Traverse, a tricky bit of water thirty miles below Quebec. But, in the course of the summer, the British sailing masters, who had never been there before, themselves took two hundred and seventy-seven vessels right through it with greater ease in squadrons than any French-Canadian could when piloting a single ship. The famous Captain Cook, of whom we shall soon hear more, had gone up a month ahead with Durell, and, in only three days, had sounded, surveyed, and buoyed the Traverse to perfection.

When once the fleet had reached Quebec Montcalm was completely cut off from the outside world, except for the road and river up to Montreal. His French-Canadian militia more than equalled Wolfe's army in mere numbers. But his French regulars from France, the backbone of the whole defence, were not half so many. Vaudreuil, the French-Canadian Governor, was a fool. Bigot, the French Intendant, was a knave. They both hated the great and honest Montcalm and did all they could to spite him. The natural strength of Quebec, "the Gibraltar of America," was, with his own French regulars, the only defence on which he could always rely.

The bombardment of Quebec from across the narrows of the St. Lawrence ("Kebec" is the Indian for "narrows") went on without much result throughout July; and Wolfe's attempt to storm the Heights of Montmorency, five miles below Quebec, ended in defeat. During August a squadron under Holmes, third-in-command of the fleet, kept pushing up the St. Lawrence above Quebec, and thus alarming the French for the safety of their road and river lines of communication with Montreal, the only lines left. They sent troops up to watch the ships, and very wearing work it was; for while the ships carried Wolfe's landing parties up and down with the tide, the unfortunate Frenchmen had to scramble across country in a vain effort to be first at any threatened point.

From the 3rd of September to the famous 13th Wolfe worked out his own splendid plan with the help of the fleet. Three-fourths of the French were entrenched along the six miles of North Shore below Quebec, to please Vaudreuil, who, as Governor, had power to order Montcalm. The rest were in or above Quebec; and mostly between Cap Rouge, which was seven miles, and Pointe-aux-Trembles, which was twenty-two miles, above. Wolfe's plan was to make as big a show of force as possible, up to the very last minute, against the entrenchments below Quebec and also against the fifteen miles of North Shore between Cap Rouge and Pointe-aux-Trembles, while he would really land at what we now call Wolfe's Cove, which is little more than one mile above Quebec. If he could then hold the land line west to Montreal, while Holmes held the river line, Montcalm would be absolutely cut off in every direction and be forced to fight or starve. Montcalm's secret orders from the King being to keep any other foothold he possibly could if Quebec was taken, he had to leave stores of provisions at different points toward the West and South, as he intended to retire from point to point and make his last stand down by New Orleans.

Quebec was, however, to be held if possible; and everything that skill and courage could do was done by Montcalm to hold it. He even foresaw Wolfe's final plan and sent one of his best French battalions to guard the Plains of Abraham. But Vaudreuil withdrew it four days before the battle there. Again, on the very eve of battle, Montcalm ordered the same battalion to ramp for the night in defence of Wolfe's Cove. But Vaudreuil again counter-ordered, this time before the men had marched off, thus leaving that post in charge of one of his own friends, a contemptible officer called Vergor.

Wolfe knew all about Vergor and what went on in the French camp, where Vaudreuil could never keep a secret. So he and Saunders and Holmes set the plan going for the final blow. The unfortunate Frenchmen above Cap Rouge were now so worn out by trying to keep up with the ships that Wolfe knew they would take hours to get down to Quebec if decoyed overnight anywhere up near Pointe-aux-Trembles, more than twenty miles away. He also knew that the show of force to be made by Saunders the day before the battle would keep the French in their trenches along the six miles below Quebec. Besides this he knew that the fire of his batteries opposite Quebec would drown the noise of taking Vergor's post more than a mile above. Finally, the fleet kept him perfectly safe from counter-attack, hid his movements, and took his army to any given spot far better and faster than the French could go there by land.

With all this in his favour he then carried out his plan to perfection, holding the French close below and far above Quebec by threatening attacks from the ships, secretly bringing his best men together in boats off Cap Rouge after dark, dropping them down to Wolfe's Cove just before dawn, rushing Vergor's post with the greatest ease, and forming up across the Plains of Abraham, just west of Quebec, an hour before Montcalm could possibly attack him. Cut off by water and land Montcalm now had to starve or fight Wolfe's well-trained regulars with about equal numbers of men, half of whom were militia quite untrained for flat and open battlefields. Wolfe's perfect volleys then sealed the fate of Quebec; while British sea-power sealed the fate of Canada.

The rest of the war was simply reaping the victories Pitt had sown; though he left the Government in 1761, and Spain joined our enemies the following year. The jealous new king, George III, and his jealous new courtiers, with some of the jealous old politicians, made up a party that forced Pitt out of the Government. They then signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1763 without properly securing the fruit of all his victories.

But Canada had been won outright. The foundations of the Indian Empire had been well and truly laid. And the famous Captain Cook, who surveyed the Traverse for Saunders and made the first charts of British Canada, soon afterwards became one of the founders of that British Australasia whose Australian-New Zealand-Army-Corps became so justly famous as the fighting "Anzacs" throughout our recent war against the Germans.



ON THE LOSS OF THE ROYAL GEORGE

Written when the news arrived (September, 1782).

The Royal George, Hawke's flagship at the Battle of Quiberon Bay, the battle which confirmed the conquest of Canada, was a first-rate man-of-war of 100 guns. On the 29th of August, 1782, while at anchor off Spithead, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, her guns broke loose with the rolling and she went down with all hands.

Toll for the brave— The brave that are no more: All sunk beneath the wave, Fast by their native shore. Eight hundred of the brave, Whose courage well was tried, Had made the vessel heel And laid her on her side; A land-breeze shook the shrouds, And she was overset; Down went the Royal George, With all her crew complete.

Toll for the brave— Brave Kempenfelt is gone, His last sea-fight is fought, His work of glory done. It was not in the battle, No tempest gave the shock, She sprang no fatal leak, She ran upon no rock; His sword was in the sheath, His fingers held the pen, When Kempenfelt went down With twice four hundred men.

Weigh the vessel up, Once dreaded by our foes, And mingle with your cup The tears that England owes; Her timbers yet are sound, And she may float again, Full charg'd with England's thunder, And plough the distant main; But Kempenfelt is gone, His victories are o'er; And he and his eight hundred Must plough the wave no more. —Cowper.



CHAPTER XVII

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

(1775-1783)

The rights and wrongs of this Revolution are not our business here. But British sea-power is. So we should like to tell the whole story of the Navy in that unhappy time; because most books say little about it and do not say that little well. But, as we have no time for more than the merest glance, all we can do is to ask those who want to learn the truth in full to read The Influence of Sea-Power on History, by that expert American, Admiral Mahan.

The Revolution was not a fight between British and Americans, as we and they are apt to think it now, but a British civil war that divided people in Britain as well as in America. In both countries there were two parties, the Government and Opposition, each against the other; the only difference, though a very great one, being that while the Opposition in America took up arms the Opposition in Britain did not. Both countries were then parts of the same British Empire; and so this war was really the link between the other two great civil wars that have divided the English-speaking peoples. Thus there were three civil wars in three successive centuries: the British Civil War in the seventeenth, between Roundhead and Cavalier in England; the British-American Civil War in the eighteenth, between the King's Party Government and the Opposition on both sides of the Atlantic; and the American Civil War in the nineteenth, between the North and South of the United States.

The American Opposition had no chance of winning their Independence, however much they might proclaim it, so long as the Royal Navy held the sea against them. Washington knew this perfectly well; and his written words are there to prove it. The Revolutionists fought well on land. They invaded Canada and took the whole country except the walls of Quebec. They also fought well at sea; and Paul Jones, a Scotsman born, raided the coasts of Great Britain till nurses hushed children by the mere sound of his name.

But no fleet and army based on the New World could possibly keep up a war without help from the Old; because, as we have seen all through Pitt's Imperial War, the Old World was the only place in which enough men, ships, arms, and warlike stores could be found. Stop enough supplies from crossing the Atlantic, and the side whose supplies were stopped would certainly lose. And more than that: whichever side commanded the sea would soon command the land as well. Quebec held out under Carleton till relieved by a fleet in the spring. But, even if Quebec had fallen, the American invaders would have been driven out again by the mere arrival of the fleet. For whichever side lost the use of the St. Lawrence lost the only means of moving, feeding, arming, and reinforcing an army in Canada well enough to stand the strain.

The turn of the tide of fortune came, and only could come, when all the foreign navies in the world took sides against the King's party in this British civil war. France, Spain, and Holland were thirsting for revenge. So when they saw a vile creature like Lord George Germain bungling through a war Pitt never would have made; when they saw British generals half-hearted because belonging to the party that opposed the King's; when they saw how steadfastly Washington fought; and, most of all, when they saw how much the Royal Navy was weakened by the Opposition in Parliament, who stopped a great deal of money from being voted for the Army and Navy lest the King should be too strong against the Americans; when foreigners whose own navies had been beaten by the British saw such a chance, they came in with navies which they had meanwhile been strengthening on purpose to get their revenge.

France, Spain, and Holland all fought on the side of the Revolution, their big navies joining the little one formed by Paul Jones; while Russia, Sweden, Denmark (which then included Norway), Prussia, and the Hansa Towns, all formed the Armed Neutrality of the North against the weakened British Navy. The King's Party Government thus had nine navies against it—four in arms and five in armed neutrality; and this checked the British command of the Atlantic just long enough to make Independence safe for the American Revolutionists.

It did, not, however, stop the Navy from saving the rest of the Empire; for Pitt and the Opposition in the Mother Country, who would not strengthen the Navy against the Americans, were eager to strengthen it against foreign attack. In 1782 Rodney beat the French in the Atlantic, and Hughes beat them in the Indian Ocean; while Gibraltar was held triumphantly against all that France and Spain could do by land and sea together.



CHAPTER XVIII

NELSON

(1798-1805)

Nelson and Napoleon never met; and Wellington the soldier beat Napoleon ten years after Nelson was killed at Trafalgar. Yet it was Nelson's victories that made Napoleon's null and void, thus stopping the third attempt in modern times to win the overlordship of the world. As Drake stopped Philip of Spain by defeating the Armada, as Russell stopped Louis XIV by the battle of La Hogue, as Jellicoe in our own day stopped the Kaiser off the Jutland Bank, so Nelson stopped Napoleon by making British sea-power quite supreme. Century by century the four mightiest warlords of the land have carried all before them until their towering empires reached the sea. But there, where they were strangers, they all met the same Royal Navy, manned by sailors of the only race whose home has always been the sea, and, meeting it, they fell.



Able men all, and mighty warlords, the might of three was much more in their armies than in themselves. Cruel Philip was not a warrior of any kind. Ambitious Louis and the vainglorious Kaiser were only second-rate soldiers, who would never have won their own way to the highest command. But Napoleon was utterly different. He was as great a master of the art of war on land as Nelson was by sea; and that is one reason why Nelson, who caused his downfall, stands supreme. But there are other reasons too. Nelson, like Drake, fought three campaigns with marvellous skill; but he also fought more seamanlike foes. Like Russell, he completely destroyed the enemy fleet; but he never had Russell's advantage in numbers. We might go on with other reasons yet; but we shall only give two more: first, that magic touch of his warm heart which made his captains "like a band of brothers," which made the bluejackets who carried his coffin treasure up torn bits of the pall as most precious relics, and which made the Empire mourn him as a friend; secondly, the very different kind of "Nelson touch" he gave his fleet when handling it for battle, that last touch of perfection in forming it up, leading it on, striking hardest at the weakest spot, and then driving home the attack to the complete destruction of the enemy.

Nelson was not the first, but the fifth, great admiral to command fleets in the last French War (1793-1815). Howe, Hood, St. Vincent, Duncan, Nelson: that is the order in which the victors came. Howe, Hood, St. Vincent, and Duncan were all men who had fought in Pitt's Imperial War; and each was old enough to have been Nelson's father. Howe was the hero of the relief of Gibraltar in 1782, at the time that all the foreign navies in the world were winning American Independence by taking sides in a British civil war. Howe was also the hero of "the Glorious First of June" in 1794, when he defeated the French off the north-west coast of France.

But it was under Hood, not Howe, that Nelson learnt the way fleets should be used; and it was under St. Vincent that he first sprang into fame.



St. Vincent, with fifteen ships of the line (that is, big battleships) was sailing south to stop a Spanish fleet from coming north to join the French, when, on the 14th of February, 1797, the look-out reported "enemy in sight." St. Vincent was walking up and down the quarter-deck with his flag-captain, Hallowell, as the reports came in. "Ten ships of the line in sight." Then "fifteen," the same number that he had himself. Then "twenty" . . . "twenty-five" . . . and at last "twenty-seven." When this total of twenty-seven was reported, the officer reporting said, in a questioning way, "Pretty long odds, Sir?" But, quick as a flash, St. Vincent answered, "Enough of that, Sir! the die is cast; and if they are fifty I will go through them!" And he did. This victory, which broke up the plans the French and Spaniards had made against Britain, was thought so important that Jervis, as he then was called, was made Lord St. Vincent, taking his title from the place near which he won the battle, Cape St. Vincent, the south-west corner of Europe.

In October Admiral Duncan was made Lord Camperdown for destroying the Dutch fleet which was trying to help the French into Ireland. He caught it off Camperduin (on the coast of North Holland) and smashed it to pieces after a furious battle, in which the Dutch, with a smaller fleet, showed that they too were of the Viking breed. This victory stopped the danger from the north, just as St. Vincent's stopped it from the south. Both were fought in the only proper way to defend the British Empire on the sea when the enemy comes out, that is, by going to meet him in his own waters, instead of waiting to let him choose his own point of attack against the British coast.

Next year, 1798, Nelson was also made a peer for a glorious victory won on his own account. He had learnt from Lord Hood the first principle of all defence—that the real aim is not so much to stand on guard or even to win a victory as to destroy the enemy's means of destroying you. This chimed in with his own straight-forward genius; and he never forgot his old chief: "the best officer that England has to boast of." Hood had the misfortune never to have been in supreme command during a great battle. But, in Nelson's opinion, he stood above all other commanders-in-chief of his own time; and, as we look back on him now, we see that Nelson alone surpassed him.

Napoleon, like the Germans of today, hoped to make land-power beat sea-power in the East by stirring up rebellion against the British rule in India and making Egypt his bridge between Europe and Asia. With daring skill he crossed the Mediterranean and conquered Egypt. But his victory proved worse than useless; for Nelson followed the French fleet and utterly defeated it in the Bay of Aboukir at the mouth of the Nile on the 1st of August, 1798. The battle was fought with the utmost firmness on both sides, each knowing that the fate of Egypt, of the East, and of Napoleon's army as well as of his fleet, hung trembling in the scales. The odds were twelve British battleships to thirteen French. The French sailors, as usual, were not such skilled hands as the British, partly because France had always been rather a country of landsmen than seamen, but chiefly because the French fleets were, as a rule, so closely blockaded that they could not use the open sea for training nearly so much as their British rivals did. Still, the French fleet, though at anchor (and so unable to change its position quickly to suit the changes of the fight) looked as if it could defy even Nelson himself. For it was drawn up across the bay with no spot left unguarded between it and the land at either end of the line; and it was so close in shore that its admirals never thought anybody would try to work his way inside.

But that is just what Nelson did. He sent some of his ships between the van of the French and the Aboukir shoal, where there was just room to scrape through with hardly an inch to spare; and so skilful was the British seamanship that this marvellous manoeuvre took the French completely by surprise. Then, having his own fleet under way, while the French was standing still, he doubled on their van (that is, he attacked it from both sides), held their centre, and left their rear alone. By this skilful move he crushed the van and then had the centre at his mercy. The French gunners stuck to their work with splendid courage, driving the Bellerophon off as a mere battered hulk and keeping most of the rest at bay for some time. But the French flagship, Orient, which the Bellerophon had boldly attacked, was now attacked by the Swiftsure and Alexander; and the French admiral, Brueys, already wounded twice, was mortally hit by a cannon ball. He refused to be carried below, saying that "a French admiral should die on deck in a fight like this." His example encouraged the crew to redouble their efforts. But, just after he died, fire broke out on board the Orient and quickly spread fore and aft, up the rigging, and right in toward the magazine. The desperate battle was now at its fiercest, raging all round this furious fire, which lit the blackness of that warm Egyptian night with devils' tongues of flame. The cannonade went on. But even the thunder of two thousand guns could not drown the roar of that seething fire, now eating into the very vitals of the ship, nearer and nearer to the magazine. Every near-by ship that could move now hauled clear as far as possible; while the rest closed portholes and hatchways, took their powder below, sent all hands to fire stations, and breathlessly waited for the end. Suddenly, as if the sea had opened to let Hell's lightning loose, the Orient burst like a gigantic shell and crashed like Doomsday thunder. The nearest ships reeled under the terrific shock, which racked their hulls from stem to stern and set some leaking badly. Masts, boats, and twisted rigging flew blazing through the air, fell hissing on the watered decks, and set two British vessels and one French on fire. But the crews worked their very hardest, and they saved all three.



For a few awed minutes every gun was dumb. Then the Franklin, the French ship that had taken fire, began the fight again. But the Defence and Swiftsure brought down her masts, silenced nearly all her guns, and forced her to surrender. By midnight the first seven ships in that gallant French line had all been taken or sunk; every man who could be saved being brought on board the victorious British men-of-war and, of course, well treated there. The eighth Frenchman, the Tonnant, still kept up the fight, hoping to stop the British from getting at the five astern. Her heroic captain, Thouars, had, first, his right arm, then his left, and then his right leg, smashed by cannon balls. But, like Brueys, he would not leave the deck, and calmly gave his orders till he died.

Dawn found the Tonnant still trying to stem the British advance against the French rear, and the French frigate Justice actually making for the disabled British battleship, Bellerophon, which she wished to take. But the light of day soon showed the remaining French that all they could do for their own side now was to save as many ships as possible. So the rear then tried to escape. But one blew up; two ran ashore; and, of all the fleet that was to have made Napoleon's foothold sure, only four escaped, two from the line of battle and two from the frigates on the flank.

Nelson had won a victory which was quite perfect in reaching his great aim—the complete destruction of Napoleon's power in Egypt and the East. Napoleon himself escaped to France, after a campaign in Palestine followed by a retreat to Egypt. But his army was stranded as surely as if it had been a wrecked ship, high and dry. Three years after the Battle of the Nile the remnant of it was rounded up and made to surrender. Moreover, Malta, the central sea base of the whole Mediterranean, had meanwhile (1800) fallen into British hands, where, like Egypt, it remains to this day.

The same year (1801) that saw the French surrender in Egypt saw Nelson win his second victory, this time in the north. Napoleon (victorious, as usual, on land, and foiled, as usual, at sea) had tried to ruin British shipping by shutting it out of every port on the continent of Europe. This was his "Continental System." It hurt the Continent; for British ships carried most of the goods used in trade not only between Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, but also between the different ports on the European continent itself. Napoleon, however, had no choice but to use his own land-power, no matter what the cost might be, against British sea-power. He was encouraged to do this by finding allies in those countries which had formed the anti-British Armed Neutrality of the North twenty years before. Russia, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, Prussia, and the Hansa Towns of Germany, were all glad to hit British sea-power in the hope of getting its trade for themselves. So the new Alliance arranged that, as soon as the Baltic ports were clear of ice, the Russian, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian fleets would join the French and Spanish.

But Nelson was too quick for them. On the 1st of April he led a fleet along the channel opposite Copenhagen, which is the gateway of the Baltic. After dark, his trusty flag-captain, Hardy, took a small rowboat in as close as possible and tried the depths with a pole; for the boat was so close to the Danish fleet that the splash of the sounding lead on the end of a line would surely have been heard. By eleven o'clock Nelson had found out that he could range his own fleet close enough alongside the Danes. So he sat up all night planning his attack. At seven next morning he explained it to his captains, and at nine to the pilots and sailing-masters. Half an hour later the fleet began to move into place. Three big ships grounded in the narrow, shallow, and crooked channel. But the rest went on, closing up the dangerous gaps as best they could. Just, after ten the first gun was fired; but it was another hour and a half before the two fleets were at it, hard all. At one o'clock a Danish victory seemed quite as likely as a British one. Very few Danish gnus had been silenced, while two of the grounded British men-of-war were flying signals of distress, and the third was signalling to say she could do nothing. In the meantime the few British men-of-war that were trying to work into the channel from the other end under Sir Hyde Parker were being headed off by the wind so much that they could hardly do more than threaten their own end of the Danish line. Parker was the Commander-in-chief; though Nelson was making the attack.



It was at this time of doubt and danger that Parker, urged by a nervous staff officer, ordered up signal No. 39, which meant "Discontinue action" (that is, stop the fight if you think you ought to do so). The story commonly told about this famous signal is wrong; as most stories of the kind are pretty sure to be. Signal 39 did not order Nelson to break away, no matter what he thought, but meant that he could leave off if he thought that was the right thing to do. As, however, he thought the chance of winning still held good, he told his signal lieutenant simply to "acknowledge but not repeat No. 39." Then he added, "and keep mine flying," his own being the one for "close action." These two signals then gave Nelson's captains the choice of going on or breaking off, according to which seemed the better. All went on except "the gallant, good Riou," a man who, if he had lived today, would certainly have won the Victoria Cross. Riou was in charge of a few small vessels which were being terribly mauled by the Trekroner batteries without being able to do any good themselves. So he quite rightly hauled off, thus saving his division from useless destruction. Unluckily he was killed before getting out of range; and no hero's death was ever more deeply mourned by all who knew his career. Good commanders need cool heads quite as much as they need brave hearts.

Shortly after Riou had left the scene the Danes began to fire more slowly, while the British kept up as well as ever. But, the Trekroner forts that had hammered Riou now turned their guns on the Monarch and Defiance, making the battle in that part of the line as hot as before; while some Danes so lost their heads as to begin firing again from ships that had surrendered to the British. This was more than Nelson could stand. So he wrote to the Danish Crown Prince: "Lord Nelson has been commanded to spare Denmark when she no longer resists. The line of defence which covers her shores has struck to the British flag. Let firing cease, then, that he may take possession of his prizes, or he will blow them into the air along with the crews who have so nobly defended them. The brave Danes are the brothers, and should never be the enemies, of the English."

Nelson refused the wafer offered him to close up the letter, saying, "this is no time to look hurried"; and, sending to his cabin for a candle, wax, and his biggest seal, he folded and sealed the letter as coolly as if writing in his house at home instead of in a storm of shot and shell. After arranging terms the Danes gave in; and the whole Armed Neutrality of the North came to nothing. For the second time Nelson had beaten Napoleon.

This defeat did not really harm the Northern Powers; for, though they liked their own shipping to do all the oversea trading it could, they were much better off with the British, who could take their goods to market, than with Napoleon, who could not. Besides, the British let them use their own shipping so long as they did not let Napoleon use it; while Napoleon had to stop it altogether, lest the British, with their stronger navy, should turn it to their advantage instead of his. In a word: it was better to use the sea under the British navy than to lose it under Napoleon's army.

Both sides now needed rest. So the Peace of Amiens was signed in March 1802. With this peace ended Napoleon's last pretence that he was trying to save the peoples of the world from their wicked rulers. Some of them did need saving; and many of the French Revolutionists were generous souls, eager to spread their own kind of liberty all over Europe. But British liberty had been growing steadily for a good many hundreds of years, and the British people did not want a foreign sort thrust upon them, though many of them felt very kindly toward the French. So this, with the memory of former wars, had brought the two countries into strife once more. All might then have ended in a happy peace had not Napoleon set out to win the overlordship of the world, like Philip and Louis before him and the German Kaiser since. France, tired of revolutionary troubles and proud of the way her splendid army was being led to victory, let Napoleon's dreams of conquest mislead her for twelve years to come. Hence the new war that began in 1803 and ended on the field of Waterloo.

Napoleon had used the peace to strengthen his navy for a last attempt to bring the British to their knees. Villeneuve, the admiral who had escaped from the Nile, was finally given command of the joint fleets of France and Spain in the south, while Napoleon himself commanded the great army of invasion at Boulogne, within thirty miles of England. "Let us," said Napoleon, "be masters of the Channel for six hours and we shall be the masters of the world." But he knew that the only way to reach London was to outwit Nelson.

Napoleon's naval plans were wonderfully clever, like all his plans. But they were those of a landsman who failed to reckon with all the troubles of bringing the different squadrons of the French and Spanish fleets together in spite of the British blockade. Moreover, they were always changing, and not always for the better. Finally, toward the end of August, 1805, when he saw they were not going to work, he suddenly began a land campaign that ended with his stupendous victory over the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz early in December.

But meanwhile the French and Spanish fleets had remained a danger which Nelson wished to destroy at its very source, by beating Villeneuve's main body wherever he could find it. At last, on the 21st of October, after two years of anxious watching, he caught it off Cape Trafalgar, at the northwest entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar. Directly he saw he could bring on a battle he ran up the signal which the whole world knows, and which we of the Empire will cherish till the end of time: "England expects that every man will do his duty." That he had done his own we know from many an eye-witness, as well as from this entry in his private diary three months before Trafalgar: "I went on shore for the first time since the 16th of June 1803; and, from having my foot out of the Victory, two years wanting ten days." During all this long spell of harassing duty he kept his fleet "tuned up" to the last pitch of perfection in scouting, manoeuvring, and gunnery, so as to be always ready for victorious action at a moment's notice.



Villeneuve had thirty-three battleships, Nelson only twenty-seven. But these twenty-seven all belonged to one navy and were manned by crews who had been drilled for battle on the open sea without a single spell of mere harbour work, like the French and Spaniards. Still, the enemy were brave, and Nelson remarked that "they put a good face on it." But he quickly added, "I'll give them such a dressing as they never had before." It was a lovely day of light west wind and bright sunshine as the British bore down to the attack in two lines-ahead ("follow-my-leader"), the port (or left) one led by Nelson in the immortal Victory, flying the battle signal "Engage the enemy more closely," and the starboard one by Collingwood in the Royal Sovereign. The first shot was fired on the stroke of noon, or at "eight bells," as they say on board. Nelson's plan, as usual, was to strike hardest at the weakest spot, which he knew he could reach because his fleet was so much better trained. He and Collingwood went through the enemy's long line at two spots about half a mile apart, crushing his centre, and separating his front from his rear. The double-shotted British guns raked the enemy vessels with frightful effect as their muzzles passed close by the sterns. The enemy fired back bravely enough; but with much less skill and confidence. The Spaniards were already beginning to feel none too friendly toward Napoleon; while the French had already lost their trust in Spanish help.



Yet the Spaniards were a proud people, not to be beaten without a hard struggle; while the French were bound to do their best in any ease. So the fight was furious and fought at the closest quarters. The gunners could often see every feature of their opponents' faces and were sometimes scorched by the flashes from opposing guns. The Victory was fighting a terrific duel with the French Redoutable, and Nelson was pacing the deck with his flag-captain, Hardy, when, at 1.25, he suddenly sank on his knees and fell over on his side, having been hit by a musket-shot fired from the enemy's mizzentop, only fifteen yards away. "They've done for me at last," said Nelson, as Hardy stooped over him. A Sergeant of Marines and two bluejackets ran forward and carried him below. Though in great agony he pulled out his handkerchief and, with his one hand, carefully covered his face, in the hope that the men between decks would not see who was hit.

While Nelson lay dying below, the fight raged worse than ever round the Victory. The Redoutable's tops were full of snipers, who not only plied their muskets to good effect but also used hand grenades (something like the bombs of the present day). The Victory's deck was almost cleared by the intense fire of these men, and the crew of the Redoutable got ready to board. But on the word "Repel boarders!" so many marines and blue-jackets rushed up from below that the French gave up the attempt. The musketry fire was still very hot from one ship to another; and the French snipers were as bad as ever. But those in the mizzentop from which Nelson was hit were all sniped by his signal midshipman, young Jack Pollard, who, being a dead shot, picked off the Frenchmen one by one as they leaned over to take aim. In this way Pollard must have hit the man who hit Nelson.



An hour after Nelson had fallen the Victory had become so battered, so hampered by a maze of fallen masts and rigging, and so dangerously holed between wind and water, that Hardy was glad of her sheering off a bit, out of the thick of the fight. He then ran below to see Nelson, who at once asked, "Well, Hardy, how goes the battle?" "Very well, my Lord," said Hardy, "we have twelve of the enemy's ships." "I hope," said Nelson, "that none of ours have struck." "There's no fear of that," said Hardy. Another hour passed before Hardy could come back to say, "I am certain that fourteen or fifteen have struck." "That's well," said Nelson, "but I bargained for twenty." Then, rousing himself to give his last order, he said, "Anchor, Hardy, anchor!" for he knew a storm was coming and that Cape Trafalgar was a bad lee shore (that is, a shore toward which the wind is blowing). A few minutes later he died, murmuring with his latest breath, "Thank God, I've done my duty."

Trafalgar was so complete a victory that Napoleon gave up all attempts to conquer the British at sea. But he renewed his "Continental System" and made it ten times worse than before. Having smashed the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz, and the Prussian one at Jena, he wrote the Berlin Decrees, ordering every port on the continent of Europe to be shut against every single British ship. This was blockade from the land. The British answered with a blockade from the sea, giving notice, by their Orders-in-Council, that their Navy would stop the trade of every port which shut out British vessels. Napoleon hoped that if he could bully Europe into obeying his Berlin Decrees he would "conquer the sea by the land." But what really happened was quite the other way round; for Napoleon's land was conquered by the British sea. So much of the trade of the European ports had been carried on by British vessels that to shut these out meant killing the trade in some ports and hurting it in all. Imagine the feelings of a merchant whose country's army had been beaten by Napoleon, and whose own trade was stopped by the Berlin Decrees, when he saw the sea open to all who were under the care of the British Navy and closed to all who were not! Imagine also what he thought of the difference between Napoleon's land-power, which made him a prisoner at home, and British sea-power, which only obliged him to obey certain laws of trade abroad! Then imagine which side he thought the better one for trade, when he saw Napoleon himself being forced to choose between letting British vessels into France with cloth or letting his army go bare!

Slowly, at first, but very surely, and faster as time went on, the shutting of the ports against British vessels roused the peoples of Europe against Napoleon. They were, of course, roused by his other acts of tyranny—by the way he cut up countries into new kingdoms to suit himself first and the people of these countries last or not at all, by his ordering foreigners about like slaves, and by his being a ruthless conqueror wherever he could. But his shutting of the ports added a kind of slow starvation in the needs and arts of life to all his other sins; while the opening of the ports to British fleets and armies, and to the British trade that followed, meant the bread of life and liberty. Thus Trafalgar forced Napoleon either to give in at once or else to go on raising those hosts of enemies which sapped his strength in Spain and Russia and caused his fall at Waterloo.



CHAPTER XIX

"1812"

The fight between Napoleon's land-blockade and Britain's sea-blockade divided not only the people of Europe into friends and foes but also divided the people of the United States into opposing parties, one in favour of Napoleon, the other in favour of the British. The party favouring Napoleon wanted war against the British. The other party wanted peace.

The War Party hated the British, coveted Canada, and wished to break the British blockade. The Peace Party said that Napoleon was a tyrant, while the British were on the side of freedom, and that Napoleon was rougher with American ships which broke the land-blockade than the British were with those which broke the sea-blockade. The War Party answered that, for one ship Napoleon could catch, the British caught twenty. This was true. But it showed that the War Party would rather make money on Napoleon's side than lose it on the side of freedom.

The War Party's last argument was that British deserters should be safe under the American flag when on the high seas. The high seas meant the sea far enough from any country to be a "no-man's-land," where, as all the other peoples of the world agreed, any navy could enforce the laws of war against any one who broke them. The War Party, however, said "no," and went on tempting British seamen to desert, by offering "dollars for shillings," a thing they could well afford, because they were making a great deal of money out of the war, while the British were forced to spend theirs in fighting the tyrant Napoleon.

The War Party won the vote in Congress; and war was declared in 1812, just when Napoleon was marching to stamp out resistance in Russia.

This war sprang a double surprise on the British. First, the Americans failed badly on land against Canada, though they outnumbered the Canadians fifteen to one, and though the Imperial garrison of Canada was only four thousand strong. Secondly, the little American Navy gave the big British Navy a great deal of trouble by daring cruises on the part of small but smart squadrons against the British trade routes, and, as there were no squadron battles, by what counted for very much more than squadron cruises in the eyes of the world, five ship duels won without a break. Ship for ship of the same class the Americans had the larger and smarter vessels of the two, and often the better crews. Twenty years of war had worn out the reserves of British seamen. "Dollars for shillings" had tempted many of the British who survived to desert the hard work against Napoleon for the easier, safer, and better paid work under the Stars and Stripes; while the mere want of any enemy to fight for the command of the sea after Trafalgar had tended to make the British get slack.

But, even after making all allowances in favour of the British and against the Americans, there is no denying that the Yankee ships fought exceedingly well. Their skilful manoeuvres and shattering broadsides deserved to win; and the U.S. SS. Constitution, Hornet, Wasp, and United States richly deserve their place of honour in the story of the sea. The turn of the tide came on the 1st of June, 1813, when the U.S.S. Chesapeake sailed out of Boston to fight H.M.S. Shannon. These two frigates were about equal in size and armament. The Chesapeake carried fifty more men; but her captain, the very gallant Lawrence, was new to her, like his officers and men, and the crew as a whole were not nearly such veterans as the Shannon's, whom Broke had trained to perfection for seven years. The duel lasted only fifteen minutes. Every single British shot struck home; and when Broke led his boarders on to the Chesapeake's deck the fight had been won already.



The British government, never wanting this war, and doing all they could to avoid it without endangering the side of freedom against Napoleon, had not even now put forth their real naval strength. But in 1814 they blockaded all the ports in the United States that the War Party could shut against them; whereupon, so far as these ports were concerned, American sea trade simply fell dead. They also burnt the American Government buildings at Washington as a reprisal for the Canadian Government buildings the Americans had burnt at Newark and Toronto.

Those two splendid Americans, Commodores Perry and Macdonough, than whom the British never met a better or more generous foe, won the command of Lakes Erie and Champlain, thus partly offsetting British victories elsewhere. The American peace delegates were, however, still more favoured by the state of Europe at the end of 1814, when they were arranging the Treaty of Ghent with the British; for, while they had no outside trouble to prevent them from driving a hard bargain, the British had half the other troubles of the world on their shoulders as well.

The end of it all was that things were left as before. The Treaty said nothing about the claims and causes for which the United States had made the war.



HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM THE SEA

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away; Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay; Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay; In the dimmest North-east distance dawn'd Gibraltar grand and gray; "Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?"—say, Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray, While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa. —Robert Browning.



This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself. Now these her princes are come home again, Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true. —Shakespeare. King John, Act V, Scene VII.



YE MARINERS OF ENGLAND

Ye Mariners of England That guard our native seas! Whose flag has braved a thousand years The battle and the breeze! Your glorious standard launch again To match another foe; And sweep through the deep, While the stormy winds do blow! While the battle rages loud and long, And the stormy winds do blow.

The spirit of your fathers Shall start from every wave; For the deck it was their field of fame, And Ocean was their grave: Where Blake and mighty Nelson fell Your manly hearts shall glow, As ye sweep through the deep, While the stormy winds do blow! While the battle rages loud and long, And the stormy winds do blow.

Britannia needs no bulwarks, No towers along the steep; Her march is o'er the mountain-waves, Her home is on the deep. With thunders from her native oak She quells the floods below, As they roar on the shore, When the stormy winds do blow! When the battle rages loud and long, And the stormy winds do blow.

The meteor flag of England Shall yet terrific burn; Till danger's troubled night depart And the star of peace return. Then, then, ye ocean warriors! Our song and feast shall flow To the fame of your name, When the storm has ceased to blow! When the fiery fight is heard no more, And the storm has ceased to blow. —Thomas Campbell.



SEA-FEVER

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking, And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over. —John Masefield.



O, FALMOUTH IS A FINE TOWN

O, Falmouth is a fine town with ships in the bay, And I wish from my heart it's there I was to-day; I wish from my heart I was far away from here, Sitting in my parlour and talking to my dear.

For it's home, dearie, home—it's home I want to be, Our topsails are hoisted, and we'll away to sea; O, the oak and the ash and the bonnie birken tree, They're all growing green in the old countrie.

In Baltimore a-walking with a lady I did meet With her babe on her arm, as she came down the street; And I thought how I sailed, and the cradle standing ready For the pretty little babe that has never seen its daddy.

And it's home, dearie, home, &c.

O, if it be a lass, she shall wear a golden ring; And if it be a lad, he shall fight for his king: With his dirk and his hat and his little jacket blue He shall walk the quarter-deck as his daddie used to do.

And it's home, dearie, home, &c.

O, there's a wind a-blowing, a-blowing from the west, And that of all the winds is the one I like the best, For it blows at our backs, and it shakes our pennon free, And it soon will blow us home to the old countrie.

For it's home, dearie, home—it's home I want to be, Our topsails are hoisted, and we'll away to sea; O, the oak and the ash and the bonnie birken tree, They're all growing green in the old countrie. —Old Song.



"FAREWELL AND ADIEU"

This famous song was sung in the Navy all through the Sailing Age; and it is not yet forgotten after a century of Steam and Steel. Gibraltar, Cadiz, and many other places on the coast of Spain, were great ports of call for the Navy as well as great ports of trade for the Mercantile Marine. So, what with music, dance, and song in these homes of the South, there was no end to the flirtations between the Spanish ladies and the British tars in the piping times of peace.

Farewell, and adieu to you, gay Spanish ladies, Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain! For we've received orders for to sail for old England, But we hope in a short time to see you again.

We'll rant and we'll roar like true British heroes, We'll rant and we'll roar across the salt seas, Until we strike soundings in the channel of old England; From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues.

Then we hove our ship to, with the wind at sou'-west, boys, We hove our ship to, for to strike soundings clear; We got soundings in ninety-five fathom, and boldly Up the channel of old England our course we did steer.

The first we made it was called the Deadman, Next, Ramshead off Plymouth, Start, Portland, and Wight; We passed by Beechy, by Fairleigh, and Dungeness, And hove our ship to, off the South Foreland light.

Then a signal was made for the grand fleet to anchor, All in the downs, that night for to sleep; Then stand by your stoppers, let go your shank-painters, Haul all your clew-garnets, stick out tacks and sheets. —Old Song.



BOOK III

THE AGE OF STEAM AND STEEL

PART I

A CENTURY OF CHANGE

(1814-1914)

CHAPTER XX

A CENTURY OF BRITISH-FRENCH-AMERICAN PEACE

(1815-1914)

Germany made 1914 a year of blood; but let us remember it as also being the hundredth year of peace between the British, Americans, and French, those three great peoples who will, we hope, go on as friends henceforward, leading the world ever closer to the glorious goal of true democracy: that happier time when every boy and girl shall have at least the chance to learn the sacred trust of all self-government, and when most men and women shall have learnt this lesson well enough to use their votes for what is really best.



CHAPTER XXI

A CENTURY OF MINOR BRITISH WARS

(1815-1914)

During the hundred and nine years between Trafalgar and the Great War against the Germans the Royal Navy had no more fights for life or death. But it never ceased to protect the Empire it had done so much to make. It took part in many wars; it prevented many others; it helped to spread law and justice in the world; and, at the end of all this, it was as ready as ever to meet the foe.

Sometimes it acted alone; but much oftener with the Army in joint expeditions, as it had for centuries. And here let us remind ourselves again that the Navy by itself could no more have made the Empire than the Army could alone. The United Service of both was needed for such work in the past, just as the United Service of these and of the Royal Air Force will be needed to defend the Empire in the future. Nor is this all we must remember; for the fighting Services draw their own strength from the strength of the whole people. So, whenever we talk of how this great empire of the free was won and is to be defended, let us never forget that it needed and it needs the patriotic service of every man and woman, boy and girl, whether in the fighting Services by sea and land and air or among those remaining quietly at home. One for all, and all for one.

The Navy's first work after the peace of 1815 was to destroy the stronghold of the Dey of Algiers, who was a tyrant, enslaver, and pirate in one. This released thousands of Christian slaves and broke up Algerian slavery for ever. A few years later (1827) the French and British fleets, now happily allied, sank the Turkish fleet at Navarino, because the Sultan was threatening to kill off the Greeks. Then the Navy sent the Pasha of Egypt fleeing out of Beirut and Acre in Syria, closed in on Alexandria, and forced him to stop bullying the people of the whole Near East.

By this time (1840) steam had begun to be used in British men-of-war. But the first steamer in the world that ever fired a shot in action, and the first to cross any ocean under steam the whole way, was built at Quebec in 1831. This was the famous Royal William, which steamed from Pictou (in Nova Scotia) to London in 1833, and which, on the 5th of May, 1836, in the Bay of San Sebastian, fired the first shot ever fired in battle from a warship under steam. She had been sold to the Spanish Government for use against the Carlists, who were the same sort of curse to Spain that the Stuarts were to Britain, and was then leading the British Auxiliary Steam Squadron under Commodore Henry. (The American Savannah is often said to have crossed the Atlantic under steam in 1819. But her log (ship's diary) proves that she steamed only eighty hours during her voyage of a month.)



In 1854 French and British were again allied, this time against Russia, which wanted to cut Europe off from Asia by taking Constantinople. The Allies took Sebastopol in the Crimea because it was the Russian naval base in the Black Sea. The Czar never thought that "bleeding his big toe" could beat him. But it did. He had to supply his army by land, while the Allies supplied theirs by sea; and though theirs fought thousands of miles from their bases at home, while his fought in Russia itself, within a few hundred miles of its bases inland, yet their sea-power wore out his land-power in less than two years.

Russia was at that time a great world-power, stretching without a break from the Baltic to Alaska, which she owned. What, then, kept Canada free from the slightest touch of war? The only answer is, the Royal Navy, that Navy which, supported by the Mother Country alone, enabled all the oversea Dominions to grow in perfect peace and safety for this whole hundred years of British wars. Moreover, Canada was then, and long remained, one of the greatest shipping countries in the world, dependent on her own and the Mother Country's shipping for her very life. What made her shipping safe on every sea? The Royal Navy. But, more than even this, the Mother Country spent twenty-five hundred millions of her own money on keeping Canada Canadian and British by land and sea. And here, again, nothing could have been done without the Navy.

The Navy enabled the Mother Country to put down the Indian Mutiny, a mutiny which, if it had succeeded, would have thrown India back a thousand years, into the welter of her age-long wars; and these wars themselves would soon have snuffed out all the "Pacifist" Indian Nationalists who bite the British hand that feeds them, though they want Britain to do all the paying and fighting of Indian defence. The Navy enabled the Mother Country to save Egypt from ruin at home, from the ruthless sword of the Mahdi in the Soudan, and from conquest by the Germans or the Turks. The Navy also enabled the Mother Country to change a dozen savage lands into places where people could rise above the level of their former savage lives.

All this meant war. But if these countries had not been brought into the British Empire they could only have had the choice of two evils—either to have remained lands of blood and savagery or to have been bullied by the Germans. And if the British do not make friends of those they conquer, how is it that so many Natives fought for them without being in any way forced to do so, and how is it that the same Boer commander-in-chief who fought against the British in the Boer War led a Boer army on the British side against the Germans? The fact is that all the white man's countries of the British Empire overseas are perfectly free commonwealths in which not only those of British blood but those of foreign origin, like Boers and French-Canadians, can live their lives in their own way, without the Mother Country's having the slightest wish or power to force them to give a ship, a dollar, or a man to defend the Empire without which they could not live a day. She protects them for nothing. They join her or not, just as they please. And when they do join her, her Navy is always ready to take their soldiers safe across the sea. No League of Nations could ever better this.

Nor is this the only kind of freedom that flourishes under the White Ensign of the Navy. The oversea Dominions, which govern themselves, make what laws they please about their trade, even to charging duty on goods imported from the Mother Country. But the parts of the Empire which the Mother Country has to rule, (because their people, not being whites, have not yet learnt to rule themselves), also enjoy a wonderful amount of freedom in trade. And foreigners enjoy it too; for they are allowed to trade with the Natives as freely as the British are themselves. Nor is this all. During the hundred and nine years between Trafalgar and the Great War most of the oversea colonies of Holland, Spain, and Portugal could have easily been taken by British joint expeditions. But not one of them was touched.

There never was the slightest doubt that the Navy's long arm could reach all round the Seven Seas. When the Emperor of Abyssinia imprisoned British subjects wrongly and would not let them go, the Navy soon took an army to the east coast of Africa and kept it supplied till it had marched inland, over the mountains, and brought the prisoners back. When the Chinese Mandarins treated a signed agreement like a "scrap of paper" (as the Germans treated the neutrality of Belgium) they presently found a hundred and seventy-three British vessels coming to know the reason why, though the Chinese coast was sixteen thousand miles from England. No, there is no question about the Navy's strong right arm. But it has no thievish fingers.

The Empire has grown by trade rather than by conquest. There have been conquests, plenty of them. But they have been brought on either by the fact that other Powers have tried to shut us out of whole continents, as the Spaniards tried in North and South America, or by fair war, as with the French, or by barbarians and savages who would not treat properly the British merchants with whom they had been very glad to trade. Of course there have been mistakes, and British wrongs as well as British rights. But ask the conquered how they could live their own lives so much in their own way under a flag of their own and without the safeguard of the Royal Navy.

These things being so, the Empire, which is itself the first real League of Nations the world has ever seen, would be wrong to give up any of the countries it holds in trust for their inhabitants; and its enormous size is more a blessing than a curse. The size itself is more than we can quite take in till we measure it by something else we know as being very large indeed. India, for instance, has three times as many people as there are in the whole of the United States; though India is only one of the many countries under the British Crown. So much for population. Now for area. The area added to the British Empire in the last fifty years is larger than that of the whole United States. Yet we don't hear much about it. That is not the British way. The Navy is "The Silent Service."



PART II

THE GREAT WAR

(1914-1918)

CHAPTER XXII

THE HANDY MAN

We have not been through the Sailing Age without learning something about the "Handy Man" of the Royal Navy, whether he is a ship's boy or a veteran boatswain (bo's'n), a cadet or a commander-in-chief, a blue-jacket or a Royal Marine ("soldier and sailor too"). But we must not enter the Age of Steam and Steel without taking another look at him, if only to see what a great part he plays in our lives and liberties by keeping the seaways open to friends and closed to enemies. Without the Handy Man of the Royal Navy the Merchant Service could not live a day, the Canadian Army could not have joined the other British armies at the front, and the Empire itself would be all parts and no whole, because divided, not united, by the Seven Seas. United we stand: divided we fall.

The sea is three times bigger than the land, but three hundred times less known. Yet even our everyday language is full of sea terms; because so much of it, like so much of our blood, comes from the Hardy Norsemen, and because so much of the very life of all the English-speaking peoples depends upon the handy man at sea. Peoples who have Norse blood, like French and Germans, but who have never lived by sea-power, and peoples who, like the Russians and Chinese, have neither sea-power nor a sea-folk's blood, never use sea terms in their ordinary talk. They may dress up a landsman and put him on the stage to talk the same sort of twaddle that our own stage sailors talk—all about "shiver my timbers," "hitching his breeches," and "belaying the slack of your jaw." But they do not talk the real sea sense we have learnt from the handy man of whose strange life we know so little.

When we say "that slacker's not pulling his weight" we use a term that has come down from the old Rowing Age, when a man who was not helping the boat along more with his oar than he was keeping her back with his weight really was the worst kind of "slacker." But most of the sea terms we use in our land talk come from the Sailing Age of Drake and Nelson. To be "A1" is to be like the best class of merchant ships that are rated A1 for insurance. "First-rate," on the other hand, comes from the Navy, and means ships of the largest size and strongest build, like the super-dreadnoughts of to-day. If you make a mess of things people say you are "on the wrong tack," may "get taken aback," and find yourself "on your beam ends" or, worse still, "on the rocks." So you had better remember that "if you won't be ruled by the rudder you are sure to be ruled by the rock." If you do not "know the ropes" you will not "keep on an even keel" when it's "blowing great guns." If you take to drink you will soon "have three sheets in the wind," because you will not have the sense to "steer a straight course," but, getting "half seas over," perhaps "go by the board" or be "thrown overboard" by friends who might have "brought you up with a round turn" before it was too late. Remember three other bits of handy man's advice: "you'd better not sail so close to the wind" (do not go so near to doing something wrong), "don't speak to the man at the wheel" (because the ship may get off her course while you are bothering him), and, when a storm is brewing, mind you "shorten sail" and "take in a reef," instead of being such a fool as to "carry on till all is blue." When you are in for a fight then "clear the decks for action," by putting aside everything that might get in your way. The list could be made very much longer if we took the whole subject "by and large" and "trimmed our sails to every breeze" when we were "all aboard." But here we must "stow it," "make everything ship-shape," trust to the "sheet-anchor," and, leaving the age of mast and sail, go "full steam ahead" into our own.

"Full steam ahead" might well have been the motto of Nelson's flag-captain, Hardy, when he was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty; because, twenty years before the first steam armoured ship was launched, he wrote this opinion: "Science will alter the whole Navy. Depend on it, steam and gunnery are in their infancy." There were just a hundred years between Trafalgar and laying the keel of the first modern Dreadnought in 1905. But Hardy foresaw the sort of change that was bound to come; and so helped on toward Jellicoe and Jutland. That is one reason why foreigners cannot catch the British Navy napping.