THE OCEAN AS A BATTLE-FIELD 259 



under God, a prime necessity for the advancement and 

 well-being of the whole world, and being equally 

 certain that her prosperity and power has excited the 

 fiercest envy and cupidity on the part of other nations, 

 which it is unnecessary to specify, I look upon the 

 might of her navy as the only safeguard against the 

 evil desires of those nations, which, if they only could 

 possibly compass the destruction of that safeguard, 

 would be immediately exercised with the utmost ruth- 

 lessness for the purpose of reducing her to a condition 

 of helpless vassalage to them. This, of course, will be 

 looked upon as a prime example of British hypocrisy ; 

 but even those who will call it so know, however dis- 

 tasteful the knowledge may be to them, that it is 

 within the bounds of the strictest statement of fact. 



So much by way of introduction, and now we must 

 make a long leap backwards into the twilight of time. 

 The same difficulty of finding a basis of fact for our 

 remarks besets the subject in hand as was noted in 

 the chapters on the " Ocean as a Universal Highway," 

 viz. that the records we have of the doings of the early 

 maritime peoples are very scanty, and vitiated by 

 fable, while of the exploits of others, whom we feel cer- 

 tain had their share in early nautical enterprise, such 

 as the Chinese, we have practically no record at all, 

 fabulous or otherwise. It seems certain, however, that 

 the same essentially nautical people whom we have 

 agreed to regard as pioneers of European nautical 

 commerce, whatever may have happened before their 

 days in the Far East, the Phoenicians, were also the 

 earliest sea-warriors. That, I think, would naturally 

 follow, because there would undoubtedly be among 

 them reckless men who would be tempted to take a 



