APPENDIX. 



493 



" The period has now arrived at which it is essential for the wellbeing of 

 the service in general, and indispensable to our private concerns, that our 

 arrears, so long uncalled for, should be liquidated ; and, far as it is from our 

 desires to press our claims upon the government, yet we cannot abstain from 

 so doing, in justice to the state we have the honour to serve, as well as to 

 ourselves : because the want of regularity in the internal affairs of a naval 

 service is productive of relaxation of discipline, seeing that just complaint 

 cannot be repressed, nor the complainants chastised ; and because discontent 

 spreads like a contagious disease, and paralyses the system. 



" If the Supreme Government would permit us to entreat their attention to 

 the relative conduct of Great Britain and Spain in the management of their 

 naval affairs, and the respective effects of such different management to the 

 interests of those nations, we might notice the extraordinary fact, that the 

 navy of Spain, though well equipped, provisioned, and stored, and though 

 navigated under scientific officers, and with seamen equally conversant in 

 nautical affairs with those of England ; yet, from being placed under the su- 

 perintendance of military and civil governors, and the total want of stimulus 

 to individual exertion, did never, from the commencement of the Spanish 

 wars with Britain, capture from the numerous fleets, squadrons, and detached 

 vessels of that nation, which were intercepting their commerce and blockad- 

 ing their ports, one single ship of war of any description whatsoever. Spain 

 allowed no reward for the capture of ships of war ; vainly imagining that 

 large bodies of men might, for successive periods of years, be made to undergo 

 hardships and privations, and to encounter dangers and death, for no other 

 reward than their provisions, and that pittance in the shape of pay which 

 they could as readily obtain by following the safe and ordinary, and compara- 

 tively easy, avocations of life : while, on the other hand, it has been the 

 policy of England to pay to her navy the entire pecuniary value of all its 

 prizes, ships, fortifications, and captures of every description ; and not only 

 so, but even to grant, as a further stimulus to exertion, an additional bounty 

 out of the public treasury. 



" The consequence is, that England, though a small island, derives from the 

 maritime strength a power and influence in the affairs of the world extending 

 to every extremity of the globe, while Spain has not only lost most of her 

 foreign acquisitions, but almost her own existence as an independent nation. 

 It would seem, however, from the last account of the proceedings of the 

 government of that country, that the importance of reviving a maritime 



