with a view to solving the local problems, "these
Slav people have only tentatively approached the sea. Its traffic was
never native to them." If he had continued a little way down the coast
he would have seen many and many a neat little house whose owners are
retired sea-captains. "They are not mariners," says Mr. Belloc. If he
had made a small excursion into history he would have learned that
Venice--since it was to her own advantage--made an exception of
Dalmatia's shipping industry, and while she was placing obstacles along
the roads that a Dalmatian might wish to take, allowed the time-honoured
industries of the sea to be developed. Such fine sailors were the
Dalmatians that Benedetto Pesaro, the Venetian Admiral against the Turks
in the fifteenth century, deplored the fact that his galleys were not
fully manned by them, instead of those "Lombardi" whom he despised.
"They are," says Mr. John Leyland,[7] the naval authority--they are
"pre-eminently a maritime race. The circumstances of their geography,
and in a chief degree the wonderful configuration of their coast-line,
with its sheltered waters and admirable anchorages, made them
sea-farers.... The proud Venetians knew them as pirates and marauders
long ago." And "there has never been a better seaman," adds Mr. Leyland,
"than the pirate turned trader." In 1780 the island of Bra[vc] had forty
vessels, Lussin a hundred, and Kotor, which in the second half of the
eighteenth century quadrupled her mercantile marine, had a much larger
fleet than either of them. The best-known dockyards were those at
Kor[vc]ula and Trogir, while the great Overseas Sailing Ship Navigation
Company at Peljesac (Sabioncello) occupied an important position in the
world of trade. The company's fleet of large sailing vessels was of
native construction; both crews and captains were natives of the
country, so that it was in every way the best representative of the
Dalmatian mercantile marine of the period. When the Treaty of Vienna in
1815 gave Venice, Istria and the Eastern Adriatic to the Habsburgs the
vessels plying in those waters were very largely Slav. And with the
substitution of steam the Dalmatians are still holding their own, with
this difference, that the ships are now built, even as they are manned,
not by nobles and the wealthy _bourgeoisie_, but by men who come from
modest sea-faring or peasant families. In the Austrian mercantile marine
German capital formed 47.82 per cent., Italia