Rudyard Kipling.
WITH Whales we have reached the highest class among Ocean creatures. Yet it is impossible to end here. Some few pages must be given to those among men who “go down to the Sea in ships,” who “do business in great waters.”
Not that in any sense can Man be reckoned as an inhabitant of the “Mighty Deep.” But thousands of men spend the greater part of their lives upon the Deep; tens of thousands more continually pass and repass over its surface.
In the beginning of history ships became soon a necessity, partly as a means of going from place to place along the coasts or of travelling to other Continents and Islands, and partly for the purpose of catching fish. Those early vessels were crude and ramshackle affairs, from a modern point of view.
Unclothed and woad-stained Britons, ancestors to the Welsh of our day, had their boats, wood-ribbed and skin-covered, or osier-framed and hide-clothed. Rickety constructions at the best. Yet in them half-savage sailors went over the stormy Channels, to Ireland and to France, and even ventured into the Bay of Biscay.
Enterprising Romans, with better ships, did more; and before the close of the First Century they had made their way round Great Britain. No light feat this, in days when lighthouses and buoys existed not; when the geography of sand-banks and rocks was unknown.
The boats in which our Saxon and Viking ancestors came to invade the wild little Island of Britain, though of light structure, were superior to the primitive British skiffs; and in the contest which followed they had the upper hand.
Later on the Danes, with vessels sixty or seventy feet long, built of heavy timbers and rowed by thirty men apiece, proved in their turn too much for Saxon resistance, at a time when the Saxons had become established as the people of the Island.
King Alfred, of noble memory, coming to the throne, found his country a prey to these marauding Danes. He then and there grasped the principle, which still has sway in England’s counsels, that the very existence of Britain as a Nation rests upon the strength of her Navy. With all possible despatch he had a new fleet built, composed of vessels which were for the most part double the size of the largest Danish boats. They were longer, wider, stouter, and were rowed each by from forty to sixty men.
The first Naval battle which followed may be looked upon as a foreshadowing of Trafalgar; for the English boats gained a complete victory over those of the enemy, and thereby England obtained command of the sea.