27. The Assault at Wolfe's Cove, Quebec, 1759.
(From an old print published in London, 1760.)
The youthful Nelson saw it fly aloft when he served as captain's coxswain on a British man-of-war searching for the North Pole, and twenty-five years later when in glorious action he won his title as Baron Nelson of the Nile.
The Cape Colony was first acquired, and the West Coast of Africa, New South Wales and Vancouver Island were all added under its display, showing how the mariners of Britain were carrying it far across the distant seas, more distant then than now, for those sea-dogs of the "sceptred isles," boldly raising their new Union Jack upon the mast, braved the unknown oceans, and sailed their ships wherever billows rolled or winds could waft them.
So it came that, as its "glory roll" so vividly tells, it was under this second Union Jack the colonial possessions which dot the world around were either occupied by doughty Britons or were wrested from the flags of other nations to form the foundation of that Greater Britain which, from these beginnings, has since grown up in all the regions beyond the seas.
[CHAPTER XIII.]
THE TWO-CROSSED JACK IN CANADA.
Although the Union Jack has been built up on the local Jacks of the three island kingdoms, its greatest glories have been won in expeditions sent far across the seas to other lands. The people of the parent isles have never needed to raise it as their signal in driving invaders from their own shores, and in this way it does not bear that added vitality to them which it bears to the resident Canadian, that of being associated with brave defence of home and native land. To the Englishman, Irishman or Scotsman, in his own island home, it is an emblem of foreign conquest; to the immigrant and to the Canadian-born it is much more, as being the patriot signal of his national defence.