FOREWORD
In the years immediately preceding the Great War, already so hard to reconstruct, it was not uncommonly suggested that the British seafaring instinct had begun to decline. In our professional navy most thinkers had confidence, as in a splendid machine ably manned; but, as regarded the population as a whole, it was feared that modern industrialism was sapping the old sea-love. That this has been disproved we hope to make clear in the following pages—a first attempt, as we believe, to give, in narrative form, a reasonably complete and consecutive history of the naval war. We have indeed gone further, for we have tried to show not only that the spirit of admiralty has survived undiminished, but that we have witnessed such a re-awakening of it, both in Great Britain and America, as has had no parallel since the days of Elizabeth. We have also tried to make clear that, in a thousand embodiments, in men and boys fallen or still living, it has shone with a spiritual even more than any material significance; and that it has again declared itself to be the peculiar expression in world-affairs of the English-speaking races.
Nor was the little apparent interest shown, just before the war, in the navy and the navy's exercises very remarkable. Our attitude, as a people, toward it had always been a curious union of apathy and adventure. We had been sea-worshippers so long that our reverence had often been dulled by much familiarity, and to such an extent, at times, that, only by the supremest efforts, had we, as a nation, escaped catastrophe. But if, on the one hand, we had lost the neophyte's fire, we had perhaps gained a little in tolerance. The seas had not found in us jealous masters. Our harbours and ships had been at the world's disposal. No empire in history had been so leisurely or less designedly built up, as none was to prove, perhaps, to have been so apparently loosely but yet so organically knit—probably because the idea of empire had always meant less to us than the growing idea of admiralty. Nor is that so obscure as it may at first seem, since, in spite of so much outward indifference, the call of the sea, as closer examination will show, was still among the most insistent to which we responded. There was scarcely a cottage, for instance, even in the remotest highlands, in which the picture of a ship did not hang upon the walls, or that had failed to send a son or a brother or a cousin to serve either in the navy or the mercantile marine. Even in the greyest and most smoke-laden of our central industrial cities, wherever there was a pond, the children sailed their little boats upon it; and, once a year, as to some lustral rite, the town-bred inhabitant took his family to the coast.
That these were indications of any racial significance the non-seagoing Briton had seldom, perhaps, realized. That, because of them, his language had become a familiar tongue in the uttermost parts of the earth; that because of them every would-be world-tyrant, since Philip of Spain, had been frustrated; that because of them the freedom of nations, no less than that of individuals, had slowly become humanity's gospel—this had been as little present to him as to the inhabitant of Turnham Green that he was living in the greatest harbour of the world; and yet that it was so was but a matter of fact, and indeed the natural outcome of our origin. Since Britain had become an island every wave of invaders had necessarily come to it in ships and with experience of the sea. However various may have been their other contributions to the ultimate nation into which they were to be merged, this had been common to them, they had all been seamen, of whatever temperament or complexion; and, while of the earliest inhabitants of what are now the British Islands, no boat-lore can definitely postulated, the discovery of the famous barge in the Carse of Stirling shows that, 3,000 years before Christ, there must have been some knowledge of navigation; while, of the first Celtic immigrants enough must be assumed, at any rate, to have enabled them successfully to cross the Channel.
Of these the Gaelic Celts, landing from Spain upon the coasts of Devon and Cornwall and in Ireland, seem to have been the pioneers, followed by a stronger invasion of Cymric Celts, who landed in Kent and Essex, and afterward drove the Gaels before them into the northern and western fastnesses. Of later Aryans, the first members of the great Teutonic family to land on these shores were, almost certainly, the Belgae, who settled on the south and east coasts; while the Scillies and Cornwall appear to have been regularly visited by Phoenician traders and Greek merchants from Marseilles—a sea-borne commerce that continued for many years after the first Roman expedition.
This took place under Julius Cæsar, first in B.C. 55, and its ostensible purpose seems to prove the existence of some kind of pre-Roman British fleet—Cæsar's declared object being to punish the Britons for having sent assistance in ships and men to the Veneti, a kindred Celtic tribe, with which he was at war on the mainland. He appears to have encountered no opposition from it, however, for when he set sail from the coast of France, somewhere between the present ports of Calais and Boulogne, his fleet of war-galleys and transports crossed unchallenged, as far as the sea was concerned.
Achieving little more on his first visit than a demonstration of the power of Rome, on his return, a few months later, with 30,000 men, including cavalry, he penetrated deeply inland, although it was not until nearly a century later that Britain became definitely a Roman province; and it was not until the reign of Vespasian at Rome and his deputy Julius Agricola in Britain that Roman vessels for the first time circumnavigated Great Britain and Scotland. The father-in-law of Tacitus, and himself an extremely able and far-sighted administrator, it was by Agricola that the earliest definite foundations of what was to become the British nation may be said to have been laid. Securing the confidence of the islanders, he not only encouraged amongst them the absorption of Roman culture, but protected them against any excess of official exploitation; and, although he was presently recalled by the Emperor Domitian, the principles of administration that he had laid down were generally adopted and developed by his successors in office—forming, in many respects, those of that greater empire whose foundations were already being laid.
It would be hard to exaggerate, indeed, the debt of the nations of British origin to the three and a half centuries of Roman rule, during which period the Christian religion was first preached in these islands. And, though it failed, if that had been its design, to create a strong and independent and self-governing colony—so that when the Roman power was finally withdrawn, owing to impending disasters at the core of the Empire, the Islanders became a prey, if not an easy one, to the next Saxon invaders—its legend of equity as between man and man, its perception and methods of development of natural resources, and its patient thoroughness of execution appealed to the minds and survived in the practice of every succeeding race of immigrants.
That together with these qualities and those to be infused with the next current of invasion there was a real love of the sea among this early population has sometimes been doubted; and Ruskin in one of his essays seems definitely to deny this, adducing Chaucer as an argument. In this great poet of a later period, the first representative voice of emerging England, he finds no expression of it and indeed a positive aversion from all that the sea and sea-travel stood for. But whether or not that be the case, and though there were undoubtedly periods, notably just before the rise of Alfred, wherein the nation as a whole, if it may so be spoken of, had largely forgotten the importance of sea-power, each of the three great tribes, who had then overrun the land, had depended for their success upon their maritime skill.