the womb of time, though it is a curious and significant fact that its discovery largely coincided with that great renaissance of the sea-instinct of England, embodied in the persons of the Elizabethan sailors. Up to then, the English national purview had been almost wholly insular and focussed on the Continent. The Anglo-Continental dreams of the Norman and Plantagenet kings had scarcely died; and they had died hard. The loss of Calais, perhaps the culminating factor in bringing about the new vision so soon to dawn, had seemed, at the time, nothing but a disgrace and a disaster, and far from the beginning of a greater epoch.

Yet it was no less than this, and, thence onward, we see the England, that had been on the world's edge, looking toward the New World, and perceiving, by right of its position and history, a wider destiny opening overseas. Fighting more stubbornly than ever against every attempt to make it an appanage of Europe, the eyes of England began to turn more and more constantly to those just-discovered realms with their incalculable future. In the imagination of the Celt, the organizing power of the Roman, the tenacity of the Saxon, the daring of the Norman, and in the sea-lore of them all, it seemed that Fate had been slowly forging a new instrument for the new task. It was only the realization of it that was to seek in the composite race that had thus been built up; and it is not too much to say, perhaps, that the loss of Calais was the right-about-turn that brought this about. Not Europe but the West was the new watchword. But the corollary to that was a new conception of the sea. It was no longer the means of defense, insulating Britain from her foes. It was the highway of her full and peculiar national expression. As never before and not often perhaps since, the sense of what admiralty meant flooded through the nation; and though, as in all the enterprises of human society, the motives in this one were no doubt mixed—though the desire for gold and the lust of fighting for fighting's sake were dominant in the minds of many of those sailors—it is equally clear that, for the best and finest of them, the idea of admiralty had a definite spiritual meaning.

As we gather from their letters and records, they had begun to realize in themselves the upholders and missionaries of a nobler life. They were in true succession to the best of those Norman knights, whose spiritual contribution to England they had inherited; and, in admiralty, as they dreamed of it, we may trace the reincarnation, with a fuller and wider outlook, of that older chivalry.

These then were their objects, and the means was the navy, whose first foundations, as we now know it, had already been laid in the reign of Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII. Up to that time, though the Government had possessed the right, in times of war, to employ merchant shipping, there had been no definite navy, permanently established, in the modern sense of the word. In return for certain privileges, merchant ship-owners—and especially, in earlier days, those of the Cinque Ports—were under contract, on demand of the king, to supply a specified number of vessels, manned and equipped for war. It was with fleets so assembled that, in 1212, the English had raided Fécamp and prevented a French invasion; that, two years later, in a similar action under William Longsword, they had again destroyed the French Fleet; and that, in 1334, one of the greatest British naval victories had been won at Sluys over vastly superior numbers. And, though the Cinque Ports had, by this time, already dwindled from their earlier importance, similar arrangements were in force, when Henry VIII came to the throne, with the merchant shippers of Bristol, Plymouth, Newcastle, and many other quickly growing ports.

Under Henry VIII, however, we find coming into being the important Government dockyards of Portsmouth, Deptford, and Woolwich, and every provision made for the regular supply of the timber requisite for their needs. The same reign witnessed the establishment of the Navy Office, out of which our present Admiralty has grown, and the granting of a charter to Trinity House—that corporation of "godly disposed men who, for the actual suppression of evil disposed persons bringing ships to destruction by the shewing forth of false beacons, do bind themselves together in the love of our Lord Christ, in the name of the Master and Fellows of the Trinity Guild, to succour from the dangers of the sea all who are beset upon the coasts of England, to feed them when a-hungered, to bind up their wounds, and to build and light proper beacons for the guidance of mariners." And, although at the time of the Armada, as indeed ever since in moments of maritime urgency, a large bulk of the British Fleet consisted of transformed merchantmen belonging to private owners, the Elizabethan admirals found at their disposal the rudiments, at any rate, of a specialized navy.

How gloriously, and to what purpose, against what was then the greatest Power in the world, they used their inferior instrument, with its improvised auxiliaries, is the birth-story of British admiralty. Pitted not only for life, but, as it was to turn out, for the common freedom of the seas, they showed the world a spectacle of such a victory against odds as it had scarcely beheld since the Homeric ages. On the one hand, it saw an empire, one of the greatest ever known, under the ablest of statesmen and soldiers—an empire including Spain and Portugal, most of the Netherlands, and nearly the whole of Italy; Tunis, Oran, Cape Verde, and the Canary Islands in Africa; Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Cuba in America; the mastery of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; and a yearly revenue ten times that of England—and on the other a little island, of which Wales and Scotland were still largely independent, containing a population less by two million than that of London and its suburbs to-day, and possessing beyond its own coast not a yard of territory overseas.

Such were the odds, and the issue was but one more instance of the inevitable decisiveness of the human factor—a factor that to-day, perhaps, such has been the extravagant growth in the weight and precision of modern weapons, has tended to become once more a little obscured. That history has revealed it again, just as it revealed it for us in the case of the Elizabethans, we hope to show; and, if fortune fought for them, it was not until they had proved themselves superior to it in skill, courage, and equanimity.

"Touching my poor opinion," wrote Sir Francis Drake to Queen Elizabeth on April 15, 1588, how strong your Majesty's Fleet should be to encounter this great force of the enemy, God increase your most excellent Majesty's forces both by sea and land daily; for this I surely think there was never any force so strong as there is now ready or making ready against your Majesty and true religion, but that the Lord of all strength is stronger and will defend the truth of His word, for His own name's sake, unto the which be God all glory given. Thus all humble duty, I continually will pray to the Almighty to bless and give you victory over all His, and your enemies.

"We met with this fleet," wrote Hawkins to Sir Francis Walsyngham on July 31st in the same year, "somewhat to the westward of Plymouth upon Sunday in the morning, being the 21st of July, where we had some small fight with them in the afternoon. By the coming aboard one of the other of the Spaniards, a great ship, a Biscayan, spent her foremast and bowsprit; which was left by the fleet in the sea, and so taken up by Sir Francis Drake the next morning. The same Sunday there was, by a fire chancing by a barrel of powder, a great Biscayan spoiled and abandoned, which my Lord took up and sent away.