Where are they off to? Are they patrolling, or are they bent on a raid on the enemy's magazines, hangars, and gun positions? We do not know, but our ignorance does not worry us. We know the kind of man that is flying down there towards the southern horizon, and are quite satisfied that he will "make a good job" of whatever he has in hand. Just as the sun dips, out comes a destroyer from the shadow of the land to pilot us through the mine-field, and so we are brought "into the harbour where we would be". We have plenty of hard work before us—some of it very sad work. There are our poor wounded shipmates down below in the sick-bay who have to be taken ashore to hospital, and there are the last honours to be paid to those other gallant comrades and shipmates who have "fought the good fight" and are now making their last voyage en route for that promised land where "there shall be no more sea".
And now let us consider how this guardian fleet and the men who man it came into being. In the following pages my object will be not so much to describe well-known sea-fights as to give a series of pictures of the sailor and of the navy at different stages of "our island story".
CHAPTER I
A Lesson from Cæsar
"Storm and sea were Britain's bulwarks,
Long ere Britons won their name;
Mightier far than pikes and halberds
Wind and wave upheld her fame;
Storm and sea are Britain's brothers,
Keep, with her, their sleepless guard;
Britain's sons, before all others,
Share with them their watch and ward.
Chorus—
"'Forward! On!' the sea-king's war-word
Ages back—to do or die.[1]
'Ne'er a track but points us forward!'[2]
Ages on—our lines reply."
E. H. H. In Officers' Training Corps and Naval
Cadets' Magazine, March, 1913.
Whenever we want to find out anything about the early history of Great Britain, we have, almost invariably, to turn to the writings of our old friend Julius Cæsar. In attempting to trace the beginnings of the Royal Navy, that magnificent organization "whereon", point out the Articles of War, "under the good Providence of God, the Wealth, Safety, and Strength of the Kingdom chiefly depend", we have to conform to the same rule, and consult this authority. From Cæsar's De Bello Gallico we learn that in his time the Ancient Britons made use of boats with a wooden frame, supporting wicker-work instead of planking, and rendered watertight by a covering of skins—just such boats, in fact, though probably larger—as, under the name of "coracles", are used to this day on the Wye and some other rivers and estuaries.
The portability and rapid construction of these boats commended them to Cæsar's military eye, and later on, in one of his Continental wars, he ordered his soldiers to make some light boats in imitation of those he had seen in Britain, in order to carry his army across a river. But, though Cæsar especially mentions these vessels, he does not say that the British of his day had no other or larger vessels. Though they made use of hides and wicker, they must have known something of wooden vessels. There is no doubt that they or their ancestors had large "dug-outs", hollowed from huge trunks of trees in the same way as Robinson Crusoe constructed his famous boat. We know this because many of these have been discovered buried in the mud of our rivers. One of them, found in the bed of the Rother in 1822, was 60 feet in length and 5 feet wide. Others have been found in Lincolnshire, Scotland, and Sussex, though none of them was nearly as long as the Rother boat. We must remember, too, that the Phœnicians had traded to Cornwall for tin, probably for centuries, and the Britons must have been familiar with their comparatively advanced types of shipbuilding.
But many writers on naval matters are of the opinion that our British ancestors, whose coracles are described by Cæsar, had, even at that time, really stout and formidable ships. The reason is this. The Veneti, a race who inhabited western Brittany, and the country at the mouth of the Loire, were a kindred race, and when attacked by Cæsar received assistance from Britain. Now the strength of the Veneti seems to have been in their ships, which gave the Roman galleys considerable trouble, and it seems more than likely that the British assistance they received came in the form of a squadron of similar vessels.