musket-arrows be used, to have great regard that they use not but half the ordinary charge of powder, otherwise more powder will make the arrow fly double.' Now these arrows we know to have been in high favour for their power of penetrating musket-proof defences about the time of the Armada. They were a purely English device, and were taken by Richard Hawkins upon his voyage to the South Sea in 1593. He highly commends them, but nevertheless they appear to have fallen out of fashion, and no trace of their use in Jacobean times has been found.[6]

A still more suggestive indication exists in the heading which is prefixed to Gorges's Appendix. It runs as follows:—'A form of orders and directions to be given by an admiral in conducting a fleet through the Narrow Seas for the better keeping together or relieving one another upon any occasion of distress or separation by weather or by giving chase. For the understanding whereof suppose that a fleet of his majesty's consisting of twenty or thirty sail were bound for serving on the west part of Ireland, as Kinsale haven for example.' The words 'his majesty' show the Appendix was penned under James I; but why did Gorges select this curious example for explaining his orders? We can only remember that it was exactly upon such an occasion that he had served with his father in 1578. There is therefore at least a possibility that the orders in question may be a copy or an adaptation of some which Sir William Gorges had issued ten years before the Armada. Certainly no situation had arisen since Elizabeth's death to put such an idea into the writer's head, and the points of rendezvous mentioned in Gorges's first article are exactly those which Sir William would naturally have given.

On evidence so inconclusive no certainty can be attained. All we can say is that Gorges's Appendix points to a possibility that Ralegh's remarkable twenty-ninth article may have been as old as the middle of Elizabeth's reign, and that the reason why it has not survived in the writings of any of the great Elizabethan admirals is either that the tactics it enjoins were regarded as a secret of the seamen's 'mystery' or were too trite or commonplace to need enunciation. At any rate in the face of the Gorges precedent it cannot be said, without reservation, that this rudimentary form of line ahead or attack in succession was invented by Ralegh, or that it was not known to the men who fought the Armada.

Amongst other articles of special interest, as showing how firmly the English naval tradition was already fixed, should be noticed the twenty-fifth, relating to seamen gunners, the twenty-sixth, forbidding action at more than point-blank range, and above all the fifth and sixth, aimed at obliterating all distinction between soldiers and sailors aboard ship, and at securing that unity of service between the land and sea forces which has been the peculiar distinction of the national instinct for war.

As to the tactical principle upon which the Elizabethan form of attack was based, it must be noted that was to demoralise the enemy—to drive him into 'utter confusion.' The point is important, for this conception of tactics held its place till it was ultimately supplanted by the idea of concentrating on part of his fleet.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Hakluyt printed several sets of instructions issued to armed fleets intended for discovery, viz.: 1. Those drawn by Sebastian Cabota for Sir Hugh Willoughby's voyage in 1553. 2. Those for the first voyage of Anthony Jenkinson, 1557, which refers to other standing orders. 3. Those issued by the lords of the Council for Edward Fenton in 1582, the 20th article of which directs him to draw up orders 'for their better government both at sea and land.' But none of these contain any fighting instructions.

[2] Boteler's MS. was not published till 1685, when the publisher dedicated it to Samuel Pepys. The date at which it was written can only be inferred from internal evidence. At p. 47 he refers to 'his Majesty's late augmentation of seamen's pay in general.' Such an augmentation took place in 1625 and 1626. He also refers to the 'late king' and to the colony of St. Christopher's, which was settled in 1623, but not to that of New Providence, settled in 1629. He served in the Cadiz Expedition of 1625, but does not mention it or any event of the rest of the war. The battle order, however, which he recommends closely resembles that proposed by Sir E. Cecil (post, p. 65). The probability is, then, that his work was begun at the end of James I's reign, and was part of the large output of military literature to which the imminent prospect of war with Spain gave rise at that time.

[3] See Drake and the Tudor Navy, ii. Appendix B.

[4] See Article 1 of the Instructions of 1816, post, p. 342.

[5] In all previous English instructions the prayer article had come towards the end. In the Spanish service it came first, and it was thence probably that Ralegh got his idea.

[6] Laughton, Defeat of the Armada, i. 126; Account, &c. (Exchequer, Queen's Remembrancer), lxiv. 9, April 9, 1588; Hawkins's Observations (Hakl. Soc), § lxvi.