towards a place from
which the wind was blowing. Tacking probably came bit by bit, like
other new inventions. But Fletcher of Rye, whom Henry always
encouraged, seems to have been the first man who really learnt how to
sail against the wind. He did this by tacking (that is, zigzagging)
against it with sails trimmed fore and aft. In this way the sails, as
it were, slide against the wind at an angle and move the ship ahead,
first to one side of the straight line towards the place she wants to
reach, and then, after turning her head, to the other. It was in 1539
that Fletcher made his trial trip, to the great amazement of the
shipping in the Channel. Thus by 1545, that year of naval changes, the
new sailing age had certainly begun to live and the old rowing age had
certainly begun to die. The invention of tacking made almost as great
a change as steam made three hundred years later; for it shortened
voyages from months to weeks, as steam afterwards shortened them from
weeks to days. Why did Jacques Cartier take months to make voyages
from Europe and up the St. Lawrence when Champlain made them in weeks?
Because Champlain could tack and Jacques Cartier could not. Columbus,
Cabot, and Cartier could no more zigzag towards a place from which the
wind was blowing dead against them than could the ships of Hiram, King
of Tyre, who brought so many goods by sea for Solomon. But Champlain,
who lived a century later, did know how to tack the _Don de Dieu_
against the prevailing south-west winds of the St. Lawrence; and this
was one reason why he made a voyage from the Seine to the Saguenay in
only eighteen days, a voyage that remained the Canadian record for
ninety years to come.

The year 1545 is coupled with the title "King of the English Sea"
because the fleet which Henry VIII then had at Portsmouth was the first
fleet in the world that showed any promise of being "fit to go foreign"
and fight a battle out at sea with broadside guns and under sail.

True, it had some rowing galleys, like those of other old-fashioned
fleets; and its sailing men-of-war were nothing much to boast of in the
way of handiness or even safety. The _Mary Rose_, which Henry's
admiral, Sir Edward Howard, had described thirty years before as "the
flower of all the ships that ever sailed," was built with lower
portholes only sixteen inches above the water line. So when her crew
forgot to close these ports, and she listed over while going about
(t