,
as did the northern islands of Orkney and Shetland. Scapa Flow, that
magnificent harbour in the Orkneys, was a stronghold of Norsemen many
centuries before their descendants manned the British Grand Fleet there
during the recent war. The Isle of Man was taken by Norsemen. Dublin,
Waterford, and other Irish cities were founded by them. They attacked
Wales from Anglessey; and, wherever they conquered, their armies were
based on the sea.

If you want to understand how the British Isles changed from a Celtic
to a Nordic land, how they became the centre of the British Empire, and
why they were the Mother Country from which the United States were
born, you must always view the question from the sea. Take the sea as
a whole, together with all that belongs to it--its islands, harbours,
shores, and navigable rivers. Then take the roving Norsemen as the
greatest seamen of the great seafaring Nordic race. Never mind the
confusing lists of tribes and kings on either side--the Jutes and
Anglo-Saxons, the Danes and Normans, on one side, and the Celts of
England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, on the other; nor yet the
different dates and places; but simply take a single bird's-eye view of
all the Seven Seas as one sea, of all the British Norsemen as one
Anglo-Norman folk, and of all the centuries from the fifth to the
twentieth as a single age; and then you can quite easily understand how
the empire of the sea has been won and held by the same strong
"Hardy-Norseman" hands these fifteen hundred years.

There is nothing to offend the Celts in this. They simply tried to do
what never can be done: that is, they tried to hold a sea-girt country
with nothing but an army, while their enemy had an army and a fleet.
They fought well enough in the past on many a stricken field to save
any race's honour; and none who know the glorious deeds of the really
Celtic Highland, Welsh, or Irish regiments can fail to admire them now.
But this book is about seamen and the sea, and how they have changed
the fate of landsmen and the land. So we must tell the plain truth
about the Anglo-Norman seamen without whom there could be no British
Empire and no United States. The English-speaking peoples owe a great
deal to the Celts; and there is Celtic blood in a good many who are of
mostly Nordic stock. But the British Empire and the American Republic
were founded and are led more by Anglo-Normans than even Anglo-Normans
know. For the Anglo-Norman