campaign which Purchas printed. Though William, the
son, freely quotes the experiences of the Armada campaign of 1588, he
is not known to have ever held a naval command, and he calls himself
'unexperienced.' We may take it therefore that his treatise was mainly
inspired by Ralegh, to whom indeed a large part of it is sometimes
attributed. This question, however, is of small importance. The gist
of the matter is a set of fleet orders which he has appended as a
precedent at the end of his treatise, and it is on these orders that
Ralegh's are clearly based. They commence with fourteen articles,
consisting mainly of sailing instructions, similar to those which
occur later in Ralegh's set. The fifteenth deals with fighting and
bloodshed among the crews, and the sixteenth enjoins morning and
evening prayer, with a psalm at setting the watch, and further
provides that any man absenting himself from divine service without
good cause shall suffer the 'bilboes,' with bread and water for twelve
hours. The whole of this drastic provision for improving the seamen's
morals has been struck out by a hurried and less clerkly hand, and in
the margin is substituted another article practically word for word
the same as that which Ralegh adopted as his first article. The same
hand has also erased the whole numbering of the articles up to No. 16,
and has noted that the new article on prayers is to come first.[5]
The articles which follow correspond closely both in order and
expression to Ralegh's, ending with No. 36, where Ralegh's special
articles relating to landing in Guiana begin. Ralegh's important
twenty-ninth article dealing with the method of attack is practically
identical with that of Gorges. Ralegh, however, has several articles
which are not in Gorges's set, and wherever the two sets are not word
for word the same, Ralegh's is the fuller, having been to all
appearances expanded from Gorges's precedent. This, coupled with the
fact that other corrections beside those of the prayer article are
embodied in Ralegh's articles, leaves practically no doubt that
Gorges's set was the earlier and the precedent upon which Ralegh's was
based.

An apparent difficulty in the date of Gorges's treatise need not
detain us. It was dedicated on March 16, 1618-9, to Buckingham, the
new lord high admiral, but it bears indication of having been written
earlier, and in any case the date of the dedication is no guide to the
date of the orders in the App