were in convoy. The sloops, cutters, gun-brigs, and local craft of all
kinds were supposed to look after that, while the Line was busy
elsewhere. So the merchants passed resolutions against the inadequate
protection afforded to the trade, and the narrow seas were full of
single-ship actions; mail-packets, West Country brigs, and fat East
Indiamen fighting, for their own hulls and cargo, anything that the
watchful French ports sent against them; the sloops and cutters
bearing a hand if they happened to be within reach.


THE OLDEST NAVY

It was a brutal age, ministered to by hard-fisted men, and we had put
it a hundred decent years behind us when--it all comes back again!
To-day there are no prisons for the crews of merchantmen, but they
can go to the bottom by mine and torpedo even more quickly than their
ancestors were run into Le Havre. The submarine takes the place of the
privateer; the Line, as in the old wars, is occupied, bombarding and
blockading, elsewhere, but the sea-borne traffic must continue, and
that is being looked after by the lineal descendants of the crews of
the long extinct cutters and sloops and gun-brigs. The hour struck,
and they reappeared, to the tune of fifty thousand odd men in more
than two thousand ships, of which I have seen a few hundred. Words of
command may have changed a little, the tools are certainly more
complex, but the spirit of the new crews who come to the old job is
utterly unchanged. It is the same fierce, hard-living, heavy-handed,
very cunning service out of which the Navy as we know it to-day was
born. It is called indifferently the Trawler and Auxiliary Fleet. It
is chiefly composed of fishermen, but it takes in every one who may
have maritime tastes--from retired admirals to the sons of the