320 THE SEA. 



of the first creation, and the people their primitive innocence." These happy natives were 

 described as living after the manner of the golden age ; as free from toil, spending- their time 

 in fishing, fowling, and hunting, and gathering the fruits of the earth, which ripened without 

 their care. They had no boundaries to their lands, nor individual property in cattle, but 

 shared and shared alike. All this, which was rather too good to be absolutely true, seems 

 to have been implicitly believed. The letters of patent, however, granted to poor Sir 

 Humphrey Gilbert, and subsequently to Sir Walter Raleigh, mark a most important epoch in 

 the world's history, for from those small starting-points date the English efforts at colonising 

 America the great New World of the past, the present, and the future. Where then a 

 few naked savages lurked and lazed, fished and hunted, forty millions of English-speaking 

 people now dwell, whose interests on and about the sea, rising in importance every day, are 

 scarcely excelled by those of any nation on the globe, except our own. Some points in 

 connection with this colonisation, bearing as they do on the history of the sea and maritime 

 affairs, will be treated in the succeeding volume. 



The reader, who while living " at home in ease/' has voyaged in spirit with the writer 

 over so much of the globe's watery surface, visiting its most distant shores, will not be 



one of those who under-rate 



" The dangers of the seas." 



Nor will current events allow us to forget them. " The many voices " of ocean as Michelet 

 puts it its murmur and its menace, its thunder and its roar, its wail, its sigh, rise from 

 the watery graves of six hundred brave men, who but a few weeks ago formed the bulk of 

 two crews, the one of a noble English frigate, the other a splendid German ironclad, both 

 lost within sight of our own shores. Early in this volume wooden walls were compared 

 with armoured vessels, and we are painfully reminded by the loss of both the Euryflice 

 and Grosser Knrfiist how unsettled is the question in its practical bearings. Its discussion 

 must also be resumed as a part of the history of ships and shipping in the ensuing volume. 

 Till then, kind reader, adieu ! 



END OF VOLUME I. 



QASSELL. FETTER, -GALPI-N &-Co., BELLB-SAUVAOE WORKS, I.OM oy, E.G. 



