September 2, 2025 • 17 mins
Step back into the dawn of American history with Elizabethan Sea-Dogs, where the spirit of the citizen, colonist, and pioneer comes alive! This captivating exploration reveals the daring adventurers of the Elizabethan era who paved the way for future generations in the New World. Under the brilliant leadership of Sir Francis Drake, the first of the modern admirals, English sailors claimed their dominion over the sea. Known as Sea-Dogs, they opened the gateway for explorers and settlers seeking their fortunes in America. Discover how this century of maritime quests and naval warfare laid the foundations for Anglo-American history and secured the path for countless pioneers eager to carve out their destinies.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter ten of Elizabethan Sea Dogs by William Wood. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter ten, the one,
and the fifty three. The next year, fifteen hundred and
eighty nine is famous for the unsuccessful Lisbon expedition. Drake
(00:21):
had the usual troubles with Elizabeth, who wanted him to
go about picking leaves and breaking branches before laying the
axe to the root of the tree. Though there were
in the narrow seas defensive squadrons strong enough to ward
off any possible blow. Yet the nervous landsmen wanted Koruna
and other ports attacked and their shipping destroyed, for fear
(00:44):
England should be invaded before Drake could strike his blow
at Lisbon. Then there were troubles about stores and ammunition.
The English fleet had been reduced to the last pound
of powder twice during the ten days battle with the Armada.
Yet Elizabeth wad was again alarmed at the expense of munitions.
She never quite rose to the idea of one supreme
(01:06):
and finishing blow, no matter what the cost might be.
This was a joint expedition, the first in which a
really modern English fleet and army had ever taken part.
With Sir John Norrie's in command of the army, there
was no trouble about recruits, for all men of spirit
flocked in to follow Drake and Norreys. The fleet was
(01:29):
perfectly organized into appropriate squadrons and flotillas, such as then
corresponded with the battleships, cruisers and mosquito craft of modern navies.
The army was organized into battalions and brigades with irregular
staff and all the proper branches of the service. The
fleet made for Corona, where Norris won a brilliant victory.
(01:53):
A curious little incident of exact punctilia is worth recording.
After the battle, and when the fleet was waighed for
a fair wind to get out of the harbor, the
ships were much annoyed by a battery on the heights.
Norris undertook to storm the works and sent in the
usual summons by a parliamentaire accompanied by a drummer. An
(02:15):
angry Spaniard fired from the walls, and the drummer fell dead.
The English had hostages on whom to take reprisals, but
the Spaniards were too quick for them. Within ten minutes,
the guilty man was tried inside the fort by drumhead
court martial, condemned to death, and swung out neatly from
the walls, while a polite Spanish officer came over to
(02:36):
assure the English troops that such a breach of discipline
should not occur again. Lisbon was a failure. The troops
landed and marched over the ground north of Lisbon, where
Wellington in a later day made works whose fame has
caused their memory to become an illusion in English literature
for any impregnable base the lines of Taurus Vedras. The
(03:00):
fleet in the army now lost touch with each other,
and that was the ruin of them all. Norris was
persuaded by Don Antonio, pretended to the throne of Portugal,
which Philip had seized, to march farther inland, where Portuguese
patriots were said to be ready to rise en mass. This.
Antonio was a great talker and a first rate fighter
(03:21):
with his tongue, but his Portuguese followers, also great talkers,
wanted to see a victory won by arms before they rose.
Before leaving Lisbon, Drake had one stroke of good luck.
A Spanish convoy brought in a Hanseatic, Dutch and German
fleet of merchantmen, loaded down with contraband of war, destined
(03:42):
for Philip's new armada. Drake swooped on it immediately and
took sixty well found ships. Then he went west to
the Azores, looking for what he calls some comfortable little
dew of heaven. That is, of course, more prizes of
a richer kind. But sickness broke out, the men died
off like flies. Storms completed the discomfiture, and the expedition
(04:05):
got home with a great deal less than half its
strengthen men, and not enough in value to pay for
its expenses. It was held to have failed, and Drake
lost favour. With the Son of Drake's glory in eclipse
at Court, and with Spain and England resting from warfare
on the grander scale, there were no more big battles
(04:27):
the following year, But the year after that fifteen hundred
ninety one is rendered famous in the Annals of the
Sea by Sir Richard Grenville's fight in Drake's old flagship,
The Revenge. This is the immortal battle of the one
in the fifty three from which Raleigh's prose and Tennyson's
verse have made a glory of the pen fit to
(04:48):
match the glory of the sword. Grenville had sat with
Drake and Sir Philip Sidney on the Parliamentary committee which
recommended the Royal Charter granted to Sir Walker to Raleigh
for the founding of the first English colony in what
is now the United States. Grenville's grandfather, Marshal of Calais
(05:08):
to Henry the eighth, had the faculty of rhyme, and,
in a set of verses very popular in their own day,
showed what the Grenville family ambitions were. Who seeks the
way to win renown? Or flies with wings to high desire?
Who seeks to wear the laurel crown? Or half the
mind that would aspire? Let him his native soil issue,
(05:31):
Let him go range and seek anew. Grenville himself was
a wild and roving blade, no great commander, but an
adventurer of the most daring kind by land or sea.
He rather enjoyed the consternation he caused by aping the
heirs of a pirate king. He had a rough way
with him at all times, and Ralph Lane was much
(05:54):
set against his being the commander of the Virginia voyage,
of which Lane himself was the governor on land, but
in action he always was beyond a doubt. The very
bow i d l of a first class fighting man.
A striking instance of his methods was afforded on his
return from Virginia, when he found an armed Spanish treasure
(06:14):
ship ahead of him at sea. He had no boat
to board her with, but he knocked some sort of
one together out of the ship's chests and sprang up
the spaniard's side with his boarding party, just as this
makeshift boat was sinking under them. The last fight of
the Revenge is almost incredible from the odds engaged fifty
(06:37):
three vessels to one, but it is true, and neither
Raleigh's glowing prose nor Tennyson's glowing verse exaggerates it. Lord
Thomas Howard, almost famished for want of prey, had been
cruising in search of treasure ships when Captain Middleton, one
of the gentlemen adventurers who followed the gallant Earl of Cumberland,
(06:57):
came in to warn him that Don Alonzo de bazz
On was following with fifty three sail. The English crews
were partly ashore at the Azores, and Howard had barely
time to bring them off, cut his cables, and worked
to windward. Of the overwhelming Spaniards, Grenville's men were last.
The Revenge had only her one hundred fighters on deck
(07:19):
and her ninety six below when the Spanish fleet closed
round him. Yet, just as he had sworn to cut
down the first man who touched a sail, when the
master thought there was still a chance to slip through,
so now he refused to surrender on any terms at all.
Then running down close hauled on the starboard tack decks
cleared for action, and crew at battle quarters, he stood
(07:42):
right between two divisions of the Spanish fleet till the
mountain like san Fleep of fifteen hundred tons, ranging up
on his weather side, blanketed his canvas and left him
almost be calm. Immediately, the vessels which the Revenge had weathered,
hauled their wind and came up on her from to leeward.
(08:03):
Then at three o'clock in the afternoon of the first
of September fifteen hundred and ninety one, that immortal fight began.
The first broadside from the Revenge took the sam Philippe
on the water line and forced her to give way
and stop her leaks. Then two Spaniards ranged up in
her place, while two more kept station on the other side,
(08:24):
And so the desperate fight went on all through that
afternoon and evening and far on into the night. Meanwhile, Howard,
still keeping the weather gage, attacked the Spaniards from the
rear and thought of trying to cut through them, but
his sailing master sorrey would be the end of all
her Majesty's ships engaged, as it probably would, so he
bore away, wisely or not, as critics may judge for themselves.
(08:48):
One vessel, the Little George, Noble of London of Vitteler,
stood by the Revenge, offering help before the fight began,
but Grenville, thanking her gallant skipper, ordered him to save
his dust by following Howard. With never less than one
enemy on each side of her, the Revenge fought furiously
on borders. Away, shouted the Spanish colonels as the vessels closed,
(09:13):
repel borders, shouted Grenville in reply, and they did repel them,
time and again, till the English pikes dripped red with
Spanish blood. A few Spaniards gained the deck, only to
be shot, stabbed, or slashed to death towards midnight, Grenville
was hid in the body by a musket shot fired
from the tops, the same sort of shot that killed Nelson.
(09:35):
The surgeon was killed while dressing the wound, and Grenville
was hit in the head, but still the fight went on.
The Revenge had already sunk two Spaniards, a third sank afterwards,
and a fourth was beached to save her, but Grenville
would not hear of surrender. When day broke, not ten
unwounded Englishmen remained. The pikes were broken, the powder was spent.
(09:56):
The whole deck was a wild entanglement of mass spars,
saved and rigging. The undaunted survivors stood dumb as their
silent cannon. But every Spanish hall in the whole encircling
ring of death bore marks of the Revenge's rage. Four
hundred Spaniards, by their own admission, had been killed, and
quite six hundred wounded. One hundred Englishmen had thus accounted
(10:18):
for a thousand Spaniards besides all those that sank. Grenville
now gave his last order sink me the ship master gunner,
but the sailing master and flag captain, both wounded, protesting
that all lives should be saved to avenge. The dead
manned the only remaining boat and made good terms with
the Spanish admiral. Then Grenville was taken very carefully aboard
(10:40):
Don Bazan's flagship, where he was received with very possible
mark of admiration and respect. Don Bazan gave him his
own cabin, the staff surgeon, dressed as many wounds. The
Spanish captains and military officers stood hat in hand, wondering
at his courage and stout heart. For that he showed
not any sign of faintness nor changing of his color.
(11:04):
Greenville spoke Spanish very well and handsomely acknowledged the compliments
they paid him. Then, gathering his ebbing strength for one
last effort, he addressed them in words that have religiously
recorded here, I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind,
for that I have ended my life as a true soldier,
ought to do that, hath fought for his country, queen, religion,
(11:28):
and honor. Wherefore my soul most joyfully departeth out of
this body. And when he had said these and other
such like words, he gave up the ghost with a
great and stout courage. Grenville's latest wish was that the
revenge and he should die together. And though he knew
it not, he had this wish fulfilled. For two weeks later,
(11:49):
when Don Bazan had collected nearly a hundred more sail
around him for the last stage home from the West Indies,
a cyclone such as Noe living Man remembered burstful on
the crowded fleet. Not even the Great Armada lost more
vessels than Do Bazan did in that wreck ingulfing week.
No less than seventy went down, and with them sank
(12:10):
the shattered revenge. Beside her own heroic dead Drake might
be out of favorite court. The Queen might grumble at
the sad extravagance of fleets. Diplomats might talk of untying
Gordian knots that the sword was made to cut. Courtiers
and politicians might wonder with which side to curry favor
when it was an issue between two parties, peace or war.
(12:33):
The great mass of ordinary landsmen might wonder why the
sea affair was a thing they could not understand. But
all this was only the mint and cuman of imperial things,
compared with the exalting deeds that Drake had done for
once the English sea dogs had shown the way to
all America by breaking down the barriers of Spain. England
had ceased to be merely an island in a northern sea,
(12:56):
and had become the mother country of such an empire
in republic as neither record nor tradition can show the
like of elsewhere. And England felt the triumph. She thrilled
with pregnant joy. Poet imposement both gave voice to her delight.
Hear this new note of exaltation born of England's victory
on the sea. As God hath combined the sea and
(13:18):
land into one globe, so their mutual assistance is necessary
to secular happiness and glory. This sea covereth one half
of this patrimony of man. Thus should man at once
lose the half of his inheritance if the art of
navigation did not enable him to manage this untamed beast,
and with the bridle of the winds and the saddle
(13:40):
of his shipping, make him serviceable. Now for the services
of the sea they are innumerable. It is the great
purveyor of the world's commodities, the conveyor of the excess
of rivers, uniter by traffic of all nations, It presents
the eye with divers colors and motions, and is as
it were with rich brooches and with many islands. It
(14:02):
is an open feel for merchandise in peace, a pitched
feel for the most dreadful fights in war. Yields diversity
of fish and foul for diet, material for wealth, medicine
for sickness, pearls and jewels for adornment, the wonders of
the Lord and the deep for all instruction. Multiplicity of
nature for contemplation to the thirsty earth, fertile moisture to
(14:22):
distant friends, pleasant meeting to weary persons, delightful refreshing to
studious minds. A map of knowledge, a school of prayer, meditation,
devotion and sobriety. Refuge to the distressed, Portage to the merchant,
Customs to the prince, Passage to the traveler, springs, lakes
and rivers to the earth. It hath tempests and calms
(14:43):
to chastise sinners and exercise the faith of seamen, manifold
affections to stupefy the seples. Philosopher maintaineth as in our island,
a wall of defense and watery garrison to guard the state.
It entertains, the sun with vapors, the stars with unnatural
looking in glass, the sky with clouds, the air with temperateness,
(15:03):
the soil with supplements, the rivers with ties, the hills
with moisture, the valleys with fertility. But why should I
longer detain you? The sea yields action to the body,
meditation to the mind, and the world to the world
by this art of arts navigation. Well might this pious Englishman,
the Reverend Samuel Purchase, exclaim with David, thy ways are
(15:26):
in the sea, and thy paths and the great waters,
and thy footsteps are not known, the poets saying of
Drake in England too, could this encompassment of all the
world be more happily admired than in these four short lines.
The stars of heaven with thee proclaim, if men here
silent were the Sun himself could not forget his fellow traveler.
(15:51):
What wonder that, after number, the DEAs and the Pacific,
the West Indies, and the Spanish Main, Kadiz, and the Armada,
What wonder after this that Shakespeare English to the court
rings out this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
this earth of majesty, This seat of Mars, this other
Eden demi paradise, this fortress built by nature for herself
(16:16):
against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed
of men, This little world, this precious stone set in
the silver sea, which serves it in the office of
a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house
against the envy of less happy lands, This blessed plot,
this earth, this realm, this England. This England never shall
(16:40):
lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, but when
it first did help to wound itself. Now these her
princes are come home again. Come the three corners of
the world in arms, and we shall shock them. Nought
shall make us rue. If England to herself do rest
but true. End of Chapter ten.
Chapter ten of Elizabethan Sea Dogs by William Wood. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter ten, the one,
and the fifty three. The next year, fifteen hundred and
eighty nine is famous for the unsuccessful Lisbon expedition. Drake
(00:21):
had the usual troubles with Elizabeth, who wanted him to
go about picking leaves and breaking branches before laying the
axe to the root of the tree. Though there were
in the narrow seas defensive squadrons strong enough to ward
off any possible blow. Yet the nervous landsmen wanted Koruna
and other ports attacked and their shipping destroyed, for fear
(00:44):
England should be invaded before Drake could strike his blow
at Lisbon. Then there were troubles about stores and ammunition.
The English fleet had been reduced to the last pound
of powder twice during the ten days battle with the Armada.
Yet Elizabeth wad was again alarmed at the expense of munitions.
She never quite rose to the idea of one supreme
(01:06):
and finishing blow, no matter what the cost might be.
This was a joint expedition, the first in which a
really modern English fleet and army had ever taken part.
With Sir John Norrie's in command of the army, there
was no trouble about recruits, for all men of spirit
flocked in to follow Drake and Norreys. The fleet was
(01:29):
perfectly organized into appropriate squadrons and flotillas, such as then
corresponded with the battleships, cruisers and mosquito craft of modern navies.
The army was organized into battalions and brigades with irregular
staff and all the proper branches of the service. The
fleet made for Corona, where Norris won a brilliant victory.
(01:53):
A curious little incident of exact punctilia is worth recording.
After the battle, and when the fleet was waighed for
a fair wind to get out of the harbor, the
ships were much annoyed by a battery on the heights.
Norris undertook to storm the works and sent in the
usual summons by a parliamentaire accompanied by a drummer. An
(02:15):
angry Spaniard fired from the walls, and the drummer fell dead.
The English had hostages on whom to take reprisals, but
the Spaniards were too quick for them. Within ten minutes,
the guilty man was tried inside the fort by drumhead
court martial, condemned to death, and swung out neatly from
the walls, while a polite Spanish officer came over to
(02:36):
assure the English troops that such a breach of discipline
should not occur again. Lisbon was a failure. The troops
landed and marched over the ground north of Lisbon, where
Wellington in a later day made works whose fame has
caused their memory to become an illusion in English literature
for any impregnable base the lines of Taurus Vedras. The
(03:00):
fleet in the army now lost touch with each other,
and that was the ruin of them all. Norris was
persuaded by Don Antonio, pretended to the throne of Portugal,
which Philip had seized, to march farther inland, where Portuguese
patriots were said to be ready to rise en mass. This.
Antonio was a great talker and a first rate fighter
(03:21):
with his tongue, but his Portuguese followers, also great talkers,
wanted to see a victory won by arms before they rose.
Before leaving Lisbon, Drake had one stroke of good luck.
A Spanish convoy brought in a Hanseatic, Dutch and German
fleet of merchantmen, loaded down with contraband of war, destined
(03:42):
for Philip's new armada. Drake swooped on it immediately and
took sixty well found ships. Then he went west to
the Azores, looking for what he calls some comfortable little
dew of heaven. That is, of course, more prizes of
a richer kind. But sickness broke out, the men died
off like flies. Storms completed the discomfiture, and the expedition
(04:05):
got home with a great deal less than half its
strengthen men, and not enough in value to pay for
its expenses. It was held to have failed, and Drake
lost favour. With the Son of Drake's glory in eclipse
at Court, and with Spain and England resting from warfare
on the grander scale, there were no more big battles
(04:27):
the following year, But the year after that fifteen hundred
ninety one is rendered famous in the Annals of the
Sea by Sir Richard Grenville's fight in Drake's old flagship,
The Revenge. This is the immortal battle of the one
in the fifty three from which Raleigh's prose and Tennyson's
verse have made a glory of the pen fit to
(04:48):
match the glory of the sword. Grenville had sat with
Drake and Sir Philip Sidney on the Parliamentary committee which
recommended the Royal Charter granted to Sir Walker to Raleigh
for the founding of the first English colony in what
is now the United States. Grenville's grandfather, Marshal of Calais
(05:08):
to Henry the eighth, had the faculty of rhyme, and,
in a set of verses very popular in their own day,
showed what the Grenville family ambitions were. Who seeks the
way to win renown? Or flies with wings to high desire?
Who seeks to wear the laurel crown? Or half the
mind that would aspire? Let him his native soil issue,
(05:31):
Let him go range and seek anew. Grenville himself was
a wild and roving blade, no great commander, but an
adventurer of the most daring kind by land or sea.
He rather enjoyed the consternation he caused by aping the
heirs of a pirate king. He had a rough way
with him at all times, and Ralph Lane was much
(05:54):
set against his being the commander of the Virginia voyage,
of which Lane himself was the governor on land, but
in action he always was beyond a doubt. The very
bow i d l of a first class fighting man.
A striking instance of his methods was afforded on his
return from Virginia, when he found an armed Spanish treasure
(06:14):
ship ahead of him at sea. He had no boat
to board her with, but he knocked some sort of
one together out of the ship's chests and sprang up
the spaniard's side with his boarding party, just as this
makeshift boat was sinking under them. The last fight of
the Revenge is almost incredible from the odds engaged fifty
(06:37):
three vessels to one, but it is true, and neither
Raleigh's glowing prose nor Tennyson's glowing verse exaggerates it. Lord
Thomas Howard, almost famished for want of prey, had been
cruising in search of treasure ships when Captain Middleton, one
of the gentlemen adventurers who followed the gallant Earl of Cumberland,
(06:57):
came in to warn him that Don Alonzo de bazz
On was following with fifty three sail. The English crews
were partly ashore at the Azores, and Howard had barely
time to bring them off, cut his cables, and worked
to windward. Of the overwhelming Spaniards, Grenville's men were last.
The Revenge had only her one hundred fighters on deck
(07:19):
and her ninety six below when the Spanish fleet closed
round him. Yet, just as he had sworn to cut
down the first man who touched a sail, when the
master thought there was still a chance to slip through,
so now he refused to surrender on any terms at all.
Then running down close hauled on the starboard tack decks
cleared for action, and crew at battle quarters, he stood
(07:42):
right between two divisions of the Spanish fleet till the
mountain like san Fleep of fifteen hundred tons, ranging up
on his weather side, blanketed his canvas and left him
almost be calm. Immediately, the vessels which the Revenge had weathered,
hauled their wind and came up on her from to leeward.
(08:03):
Then at three o'clock in the afternoon of the first
of September fifteen hundred and ninety one, that immortal fight began.
The first broadside from the Revenge took the sam Philippe
on the water line and forced her to give way
and stop her leaks. Then two Spaniards ranged up in
her place, while two more kept station on the other side,
(08:24):
And so the desperate fight went on all through that
afternoon and evening and far on into the night. Meanwhile, Howard,
still keeping the weather gage, attacked the Spaniards from the
rear and thought of trying to cut through them, but
his sailing master sorrey would be the end of all
her Majesty's ships engaged, as it probably would, so he
bore away, wisely or not, as critics may judge for themselves.
(08:48):
One vessel, the Little George, Noble of London of Vitteler,
stood by the Revenge, offering help before the fight began,
but Grenville, thanking her gallant skipper, ordered him to save
his dust by following Howard. With never less than one
enemy on each side of her, the Revenge fought furiously
on borders. Away, shouted the Spanish colonels as the vessels closed,
(09:13):
repel borders, shouted Grenville in reply, and they did repel them,
time and again, till the English pikes dripped red with
Spanish blood. A few Spaniards gained the deck, only to
be shot, stabbed, or slashed to death towards midnight, Grenville
was hid in the body by a musket shot fired
from the tops, the same sort of shot that killed Nelson.
(09:35):
The surgeon was killed while dressing the wound, and Grenville
was hit in the head, but still the fight went on.
The Revenge had already sunk two Spaniards, a third sank afterwards,
and a fourth was beached to save her, but Grenville
would not hear of surrender. When day broke, not ten
unwounded Englishmen remained. The pikes were broken, the powder was spent.
(09:56):
The whole deck was a wild entanglement of mass spars,
saved and rigging. The undaunted survivors stood dumb as their
silent cannon. But every Spanish hall in the whole encircling
ring of death bore marks of the Revenge's rage. Four
hundred Spaniards, by their own admission, had been killed, and
quite six hundred wounded. One hundred Englishmen had thus accounted
(10:18):
for a thousand Spaniards besides all those that sank. Grenville
now gave his last order sink me the ship master gunner,
but the sailing master and flag captain, both wounded, protesting
that all lives should be saved to avenge. The dead
manned the only remaining boat and made good terms with
the Spanish admiral. Then Grenville was taken very carefully aboard
(10:40):
Don Bazan's flagship, where he was received with very possible
mark of admiration and respect. Don Bazan gave him his
own cabin, the staff surgeon, dressed as many wounds. The
Spanish captains and military officers stood hat in hand, wondering
at his courage and stout heart. For that he showed
not any sign of faintness nor changing of his color.
(11:04):
Greenville spoke Spanish very well and handsomely acknowledged the compliments
they paid him. Then, gathering his ebbing strength for one
last effort, he addressed them in words that have religiously
recorded here, I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind,
for that I have ended my life as a true soldier,
ought to do that, hath fought for his country, queen, religion,
(11:28):
and honor. Wherefore my soul most joyfully departeth out of
this body. And when he had said these and other
such like words, he gave up the ghost with a
great and stout courage. Grenville's latest wish was that the
revenge and he should die together. And though he knew
it not, he had this wish fulfilled. For two weeks later,
(11:49):
when Don Bazan had collected nearly a hundred more sail
around him for the last stage home from the West Indies,
a cyclone such as Noe living Man remembered burstful on
the crowded fleet. Not even the Great Armada lost more
vessels than Do Bazan did in that wreck ingulfing week.
No less than seventy went down, and with them sank
(12:10):
the shattered revenge. Beside her own heroic dead Drake might
be out of favorite court. The Queen might grumble at
the sad extravagance of fleets. Diplomats might talk of untying
Gordian knots that the sword was made to cut. Courtiers
and politicians might wonder with which side to curry favor
when it was an issue between two parties, peace or war.
(12:33):
The great mass of ordinary landsmen might wonder why the
sea affair was a thing they could not understand. But
all this was only the mint and cuman of imperial things,
compared with the exalting deeds that Drake had done for
once the English sea dogs had shown the way to
all America by breaking down the barriers of Spain. England
had ceased to be merely an island in a northern sea,
(12:56):
and had become the mother country of such an empire
in republic as neither record nor tradition can show the
like of elsewhere. And England felt the triumph. She thrilled
with pregnant joy. Poet imposement both gave voice to her delight.
Hear this new note of exaltation born of England's victory
on the sea. As God hath combined the sea and
(13:18):
land into one globe, so their mutual assistance is necessary
to secular happiness and glory. This sea covereth one half
of this patrimony of man. Thus should man at once
lose the half of his inheritance if the art of
navigation did not enable him to manage this untamed beast,
and with the bridle of the winds and the saddle
(13:40):
of his shipping, make him serviceable. Now for the services
of the sea they are innumerable. It is the great
purveyor of the world's commodities, the conveyor of the excess
of rivers, uniter by traffic of all nations, It presents
the eye with divers colors and motions, and is as
it were with rich brooches and with many islands. It
(14:02):
is an open feel for merchandise in peace, a pitched
feel for the most dreadful fights in war. Yields diversity
of fish and foul for diet, material for wealth, medicine
for sickness, pearls and jewels for adornment, the wonders of
the Lord and the deep for all instruction. Multiplicity of
nature for contemplation to the thirsty earth, fertile moisture to
(14:22):
distant friends, pleasant meeting to weary persons, delightful refreshing to
studious minds. A map of knowledge, a school of prayer, meditation,
devotion and sobriety. Refuge to the distressed, Portage to the merchant,
Customs to the prince, Passage to the traveler, springs, lakes
and rivers to the earth. It hath tempests and calms
(14:43):
to chastise sinners and exercise the faith of seamen, manifold
affections to stupefy the seples. Philosopher maintaineth as in our island,
a wall of defense and watery garrison to guard the state.
It entertains, the sun with vapors, the stars with unnatural
looking in glass, the sky with clouds, the air with temperateness,
(15:03):
the soil with supplements, the rivers with ties, the hills
with moisture, the valleys with fertility. But why should I
longer detain you? The sea yields action to the body,
meditation to the mind, and the world to the world
by this art of arts navigation. Well might this pious Englishman,
the Reverend Samuel Purchase, exclaim with David, thy ways are
(15:26):
in the sea, and thy paths and the great waters,
and thy footsteps are not known, the poets saying of
Drake in England too, could this encompassment of all the
world be more happily admired than in these four short lines.
The stars of heaven with thee proclaim, if men here
silent were the Sun himself could not forget his fellow traveler.
(15:51):
What wonder that, after number, the DEAs and the Pacific,
the West Indies, and the Spanish Main, Kadiz, and the Armada,
What wonder after this that Shakespeare English to the court
rings out this royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
this earth of majesty, This seat of Mars, this other
Eden demi paradise, this fortress built by nature for herself
(16:16):
against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed
of men, This little world, this precious stone set in
the silver sea, which serves it in the office of
a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house
against the envy of less happy lands, This blessed plot,
this earth, this realm, this England. This England never shall
(16:40):
lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, but when
it first did help to wound itself. Now these her
princes are come home again. Come the three corners of
the world in arms, and we shall shock them. Nought
shall make us rue. If England to herself do rest
but true. End of Chapter ten.
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