It is two centuries ago since the Sovereign was launched, a vessel of 1657 tons. There is a curious account of her in Heywood.[[18]] She was a big ship for those times, and is about as good an example as I know to illustrate the mighty change that has been worked in two hundred years. Her dimensions were—Length of keel, 128 ft.; beam, 48 ft.; length over all (that is, from the fore-end of her “beak” to the stern), 232 ft., making a difference of 104 ft. as between the length of her keel and that of her upper deck and head! She was 76 ft. high from the bottom of her keel to the top of her lantern, of which kind of furniture she carried five, in the biggest of which ten persons could comfortably stand upright. Her decorations were extraordinarily gorgeous. “All sides,” we read, “were carved with trophies of artillery and types of honour, as well belonging to sea as land, with symbols appertaining to navigation; also their two sacred Majesties’ badges of honour; arms with several angels holding their letters in compartiments, all which works are guilded over, and no other colour but gold and black.” Her figure-head was a Cupid, or a child bridling a lion; her bows were also apparently ornamented with six figures; on the stern was carved Victory “in the midst of a frontispiece; upon the beak-head sitteth King Edgar on horseback, trampling on seven kings.”[[19]] It would have seemed like a violation of the choicest canons of old romance to furnish such a pageant as this with the plain guns grimly generalized with which the vessels of succeeding days fought for king, commonwealth, home and beauty. We look in the description of her for culverin and cannon royal, for the chace ordnance and small artillery of those gilt, plumed, and glowing times, and find them sure enough. It must have been heartrending to the curled and booted captain of those days to have offered so gay and brilliant a fabric to the iron bullets and fiery arrows of the foe. Think of the Cupid being knocked on the head, and King Edgar violently hammered off his horse!

[18]. Quoted by Ralph Willett in his “Disquisition on Shipbuilding,” 1800.

[19]. “The prime workman,” says Heywood, “is Captain Phineas Pett, overseer of the work, whose ancestors—father, grandfather, and great grandfather—for the space of two hundred years, have continued in the same name, officers and architects in the Royal Navy.” This, as Willett points out, indicates a regular establishment as far back as 1437, the reign of Henry VI.

It is interesting to observe how such a ship entered into action. First, the vessel’s company were divided into three parts—one to tack the ship, the second to ply the small shot, the third to attend the great guns. Sail was to be shortened to foresail, main and fore-top sail. A “valiant and sufficient man” was sent to the helm. Of course every officer was expected to do his duty; the boatswain to sling the yards, to “put forth” the flag, ancient and streamers, to arm the top and waist cloths, to spread the netting, provide tubs for water, and the like. Then the gunner was to see that his mates had care of their “files, budge barrels, and cartridges, to have his shot in a locker for every piece, and the yeoman of the powder to keep his room and to be watchful of it.” A hundred years later found some enlargement of these plain prescriptions.[[20]] The boatswain and his mates see to the rigging and sails; the carpenter and his crew prepare shot-plugs and mauls and provide against injury to the pumps; the master and his mates attend the braces; the lieutenants visit the different decks; crows, “handspecs,” rammers, sponges, powder-horns, matches, and train tackles are placed by the side of every cannon; the hatches are closed to prevent the men from deserting their posts by skulking below. The marines are drawn up in rank and file; the gun-lashings are cast adrift and the tompions withdrawn; after which the enemy is to be beaten! This is the routine of a hundred years ago. What is it now? Not less widely different from the discipline of the times of forty-two pounders, of round, grape, and canister, of chain, bar, star, and other dismantling missiles, than was the routine of the epoch of double dogs and pestilent serpetens from the days of the spears of the Picts and the coracle of the nude Briton. Yet what did those little minions and sakers do for us? We shall have reason to be well satisfied if the hundred-ton gun of to-day obtain for us one-half the triumphs which were achieved for our country by those little cannon-royal and brass swivels of the times of Raleigh, Blake, and Shovel.

[20]. See Falconer’s “Dictionary.”

THE HONOUR OF THE FLAG.

Whatever may have been the other causes of our wars with the Hollanders, one was unquestionably the herring. No doubt the insinuations of Richelieu greatly perturbed the phlegmatic Batavian, and helped him into a fighting posture; but the bloater was at the bottom of it. We took that fish for a text whereon to discourse concerning our title to dominion over the sea; and though in these days it is as much the mackerel as the herring, as much the cod as the mackerel, as much the turbot as the cod over which the dispute continues, the old battles in the heart of which Blake curled his whiskers and Tromp flourished his broomstick are still fought, though, to be sure, without Ruyter’s fire-ships or the eloquent thunder of Monk’s cannon-royal.

The conflict now is shorn of its old glory. It is waged, indeed, close into the Thames, though not so high as the Hope; nor, in the direction of the Medway, does it approach Sheerness; and upon the eastern coast the struggle is often within view of Scarborough and the Norfolk cliffs. But there is no more smoke of battle. It is the Dutchman sneaking across the Englishman’s trawling gear with “the devil”; it is the Frenchman shearing under cover of the blackness through the league long drift-nets of the Shoreham or Penzance smack. Years have brought to this nation the philosophic mind. Instead of declaring war we station a gunboat, put on a concerned face when we hear of the Dover and Brixham men assaulting the crews of the Boulogne and Calais craft, and read without emotion of the capture of a bellicose Hans Butter-box by a small steamer with a whip at her masthead. Yet the honour of our flag is so inextricably woven with the literature and traditions of these fishing squabbles that, spite of the insignificance to which the easy indifference of “my lords” would reduce them in our day, the reflection of a great and piercing light in our history is upon them, from the lustre of which they gather a complexion that is not wholly sentimental.

In 1609 Hugo Grotius wrote a book, which he called “Mare Liberum.” It is heavy reading in these times of Wilkie Collins and Miss Braddon, and the heavier, perhaps, for being in Latin. But it was deemed a treatise of very great eloquence, especially by the Dutch, to whose ocean-rights it specially referred. In short, the object of Grotius was to prove the weakness of our title to the sovereignty of the seas, the deep, in his opinion, being a gift from God and common to all nations. This was answered by John Selden, the most amazing scholar that any age or country ever produced, of so candid and great-hearted a nature, as is particularly exhibited in his Table-Talk, that it is difficult to read his astonishing answer to Grotius without wishing that his patriotism had dealt with a subject more answerable to his convictions than this question of sea rights. But his “Mare Clausum” is a volume that one would think must be of abounding and enduring interest to Englishmen. It was translated into English by special command by Marchmont Nedham (as he spells his name), and published in that form in 1652. It probably has few readers now. Yet such was the opinion of its potency as a sustained argument that it was believed, to use the language of Nedham, “had he (i.e. Selden) persisted with the same firm resolution in this honourable business of the sea, as he did in other things that were destructive to the nation’s interest, the Netherlanders had been prevented from spinning out their long opportunitie to an imaginarie claim of prescription; so that they would have had less pretence to act those insolencies now which in former times never durst enter the thoughts of their predecessors.”