sider many other discoveries modern which were known to the
ancients. For instance, an Italian author, some three centuries ago,
describes a ship weighed in his time out of the lake of Riccia, where it
had lain sunk and neglected for above thirteen hundred years. It was
supposed to have belonged to Trajan.

He observed, he says, "that the pine and cypress of which it was built
had lasted most remarkably. On the outside it was built with double
planks, daubed over with Greek pitch, caulked with linen rags, and over
all a sheet of lead, fastened on with little copper nails."

Here we have caulking and sheathing together known in the first century
of the Christian era; for, of course, the sheet of lead nailed over the
outside with copper nails was sheathing, and that in great perfection,
the copper nails being used instead of iron, which, when once rusted in
the water by the working of the ship, soon lose their hold, and drop
out.

Captain Saris, in a voyage to Japan in the year 1613, describes a junk
of from eight to ten hundred tons burden, sheathed all over with iron.
As in the days of the Plantagenets the country had not the advantage of
possessing a Board of Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, nor, indeed,
any office in which the records of the ships built, altered, rebuilt, or
pulled to pieces were kept, or, indeed, any naval records whatever, we
are without the means of ascertaining what special improvements were
introduced either in shipbuilding or in the fitting or manning of ships
during each particular reign. Indeed, for several centuries very slow
progress appears to have been made in that art, which ultimately tended
to raise England to the prosperous state she has so long enjoyed.

CHAPTER THREE.

THE NAVY IN THE DAYS OF THE PLANTAGENETS--FROM A.D. 1087 TO A.D. 1327.

William Rufus, in 1087, had scarcely a vessel which deserved the name of
a ship of war. The trade of the country, however, was carried on by
small craft, of which there were great numbers; there remained also some
of the transports of former years, but William when expecting the
invasion of his kingdom by his brother Robert, found to his sorrow that
he possessed no ships of sufficient size to compete with those of the
Normans. Being unwilling to weaken his land forces by sending them on
board such ships as he possessed, he engaged all the large
trading-vessels of the country, and invited mariners to embark in the
transports. H