284 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



ship or ships might be destroyed by the aid of artillery 

 carried swiftly from point to point. Not, of course, 

 that it entirely did away with hand-to-hand fighting 

 on board ship, for boarding tactics still held favour for 

 centuries, but it gave a small ship and a weak crew 

 possessed [of superior skill a great advantage which 

 they did not possess before, that of holding aloof 

 from a numerically superior enemy and defeating him 

 by sheer skill in manoeuvring and accuracy of aim. 

 It was the real advent of seamanship in naval warfare 

 on a grand scale, which had been led up to by the 

 long series of solitary sea-fights between the ships of 

 Spain and those of England. 



As yet, however, there was, properly speaking, no 

 navy of either England or Holland any more than 

 before, and even after, the Armada, there was for a 

 long time any navy of Spain. That is, neither country 

 possessed a fleet of ships solely equipped for fighting 

 and never engaging in trade, such as had been seen 

 in the Mediterranean for centuries. Every ship was 

 a trader ready to fight when the need arose, and it 

 might just as easily arise from the sight of a richly 

 laden ship of another nation, the plunder of which 

 would add immensely to the profits of the voyage, 

 as from the sight of a stranger eager to spoil. It was, 

 indeed, a transition period for seafaring, a time for the 

 abandonment of old ideas and the assimilation of new. 

 It was just beginning to dawn upon the minds of 

 Englishmen and Hollanders that as the fitting out 

 of a fleet of vessels, with the twin objects of robbery 

 and murder, as had so long been the case in the 

 Mediterranean, was totally irreconcilable with the 

 Christian ideal as understood by Reformers, so it was 



