by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
Copyright, 1901_
by A. T. Mahan.
All rights reserved
November, 1901
University Press · John Wilson
and Son · Cambridge, U.S.A.





PREFACE


Although the distinguished seamen, whose lives and professional
characteristics it is the object of this work to present in brief
summary, belonged to a service now foreign to that of the United States,
they have numerous and varied points of contact with America; most of
them very close, and in some instances of marked historical interest.
The older men, indeed, were during much of their careers our fellow
countrymen in the colonial period, and fought, some side by side with
our own people in this new world, others in distant scenes of the
widespread strife that characterized the middle of the eighteenth
century, the beginnings of "world politics;" when, in a quarrel purely
European in its origin, "black men," to use Macaulay's words, "fought on
the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the great
lakes of North America." All, without exception, were actors in the
prolonged conflict that began in 1739 concerning the right of the ships
of Great Britain and her colonies to frequent the seas bordering the