292 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



a blockade of the Spanish coasts that the treasure 

 ships from America, upon which Spain had grown to 

 depend, were unable to reach her ports. They were 

 snapped up one by one and their enormously valuable 

 freights sent to England. But we are not so much 

 concerned with matters of history except in the 

 briefest fashion; what is far more germane to the 

 present article is the gradual development of naval 

 warfare. The ships were growing in bulk much faster 

 than the enlargement of the guns could keep pace 

 with them, and as the motive power was still the 

 fluctuating and unstable wind, seamanship as opposed 

 to mere fighting qualities was more and more becoming 

 a fine art. Indeed, it is nothing short of miraculous 

 to modern seamen how those old sailors ever did 

 manage to handle such unwieldy craft, wherein every 

 principle making for speed and handiness in a vessel 

 was systematically violated. Doubtless many of these 

 vessels could and did go at a fair speed through the 

 water with a gale of wind astern, but whenever the 

 wind drew abeam it must have been a terrible task to 

 keep them from drifting dead to leeward like a barge 

 laden with a haystack. 



Yet the soldier-admiral Blake, by dint of en- 

 couraging his seamen and diligently learning from 

 them, so handled these clumsy craft of his that he 

 succeeded in performing a feat in which his great 

 successor failed the attack on Santa Cruz. Nor does 

 it in the slightest degree detract from the glory of his 

 exploit that the wind blew fair into the harbour for 

 attack, driving his ungainly vessels into the narrow 

 entrance between the formidable forts, and blowing 

 his cannon smoke away from him into the eyes of his 



