y high appreciation
of those tender gifts and of your personal worth, together with the
many acts of kindness and consideration shown to me when I have been
your guest, that gives me the desire to inscribe this book to you and
Lady Knott, and to the memory of your gallant sons, Major Leadbitter
Knott, D.S.O., who was killed while leading his battalion in a
terrific engagement in Flanders, and Captain Basil Knott, who fell so
tragically a few months previously at his brother's side.

With every sentiment of esteem,
I am, dear Sir James,
Ever yours sincerely,

WALTER RUNCIMAN.

March 1919.

PREFACE

This book has evolved from another which I had for years been urged to
write by personal friends. I had chatted occasionally about my own
voyages, related incidents concerning them and the countries and
places I had visited, the ships I had sailed in, the men I had sailed
with, and the sailors of that period. It is one thing to tell
sea-tales in a cosy room and to enjoy living again for a brief time in
the days that are gone; but it is another matter when one is asked to
put the stories into book form. Needless to say for a long time I
shrank from undertaking the task, but was ultimately prevailed upon to
do so. The book was commenced and was well advanced, and, as I could
not depict the sailors of my own period without dealing--as I thought
at the time--briefly with the race of men called buccaneers who were
really the creators of the British mercantile marine and Navy, who
lived centuries before my generation, I was obliged to deal with some
of them, such as Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher, Daimper, Alexander Selkirk
of Robinson Crusoe fame, and others who combined piracy with commerce
and sailorism. After I had written all I thought necessary about the
three former, I instinctively slipped on to Nelson as the greatest
sea personality of the beginning of the last century. I found the
subject so engrossing that I could not centre my thoughts on any
other, so determined to continue my narrative, which is not, and never
was intended to be a life of Nelson. Perhaps it may be properly termed
fragmentary thoughts and jottings concerning the life of an
extraordinary human force, written at intervals when I had leisure
from an otherwise busy life.

Even if I had thought it desirable, it was hardly possible to write
about Nelson without also dealing with Britain's great adversary and
Nelson's distracted opinion of him.