If the Royal Navy, which has its own views on efficiency, says these things of them, further remarks seem needless.
THE SEA TRAFFICKERS
Quit now the dusty terraces and taverns of the town,
And to the great green meadows you shall with us go down;
By the long capes and islands the open highways run
For us the pilgrims of the sea, and pupils of the sun.
'Tis Neptune pours the wine for us, the deep-sea Muses sing,
And through our airy palaces the flutes of morning ring:
We traffic with the stars, we trade adown the Milky Way,
We are the pilots of romance, merchants of Arcady.
Unfold a map of the world and observe how small a part of the earth's surface is land, how much less habitable land, how vast on the other hand—nearly three-quarters of the whole—the interminable plain of sea. Here you have an almost limitless expanse and without a barrier, here you have what was once the dividing flood, the estranging ocean, what is now Nature's great medium of communication. There are no difficult mountains to cross, no scorching deserts, the way lies open. One can sail round the world without touching land, one cannot walk round it without somewhere crossing the sea. Imagine then a road which leads everywhere and you have the first clue to the meaning of that majestic thing, sea-traffic. These immense regions, once so forbidding, and until a few hundred years ago, unknown, uncharted ocean solitudes, are now the broad highway of all the nations. Across them vessels under every flag, laden with all that men produce or peoples require, follow the plotted curves of the chart, and "toss the miles aside" with the same confidence, the same continuity as the trains on their iron tracks across Europe and America. They depart and arrive along the familiar belts of passenger and trade routes with the regularity and exactness of the great land expresses. Safe in times of peace from all dangers save the natural perils of the sea, the freedom of this, the broadest and busiest of all highways, open to all, used by all, vital to the modern structure of civilisation, is unchallenged. Imagine this highway closed and the whole fabric falls to pieces, trade expires, commerce is at an end, famine and chaos impend over half the inhabited regions of the globe.
Seated between the old world and the new, at the centre of traffic, at the midmost point of all the markets Britain laid hold of her great opportunity. All the great routes were open to her, South to Africa, South West to the Spanish Main and Panama, West to America and Canada, North East to the Baltic, East through the pillars of Hercules to the Mediterranean, a route prolonged by the Suez Canal to India, China and Japan. The opportunity was, indeed, great and to meet it she built her merchant navy, "the most stupendous monument," as Bullen wrote, "of human energy and enterprise that the world has ever seen." What the nations bought and sold the ships of England carried. Necessity gave assistance, for as islanders her own people had need of overseas products and sent abroad their own manufactures. Nor was it disadvantageous that in order to build her fortunes she had to exhibit enterprise and cultivate hardihood. No one will say that the sea-farer's life is an easy one. But its discipline and hardships brought their reward in the courage and sustained vigour of the race. When it was a new thing the romance of this ocean travel took hold of the Elizabethan imagination, and the poets rhapsodised over "Labrador's high promontory cape," "the Pearled Isles," "the famous island, Mogadore," "the golden Tagus or the Western Inde."
"I should but lose myself and craze my brain
Striving to give this glory of the main
A full description, though the Muses nine
Should quaff to me in rich Mendaeum wine."
The Elizabethan poets gloried too in Britain's insularity,