es had been sacrificed to tear from
France and Spain. The Caribbean Sea was the cradle of the Naval Empire
of Great Britain. There Drake and Hawkins intercepted the golden stream
which flowed from Panama into the exchequer at Madrid, and furnished
Philip with the means to carry on his war with the Reformation. The Pope
had claimed to be lord of the new world as well as of the old, and had
declared that Spaniards, and only Spaniards, should own territory or
carry on trade there within the tropics. The seamen of England took up
the challenge and replied with cannon shot. It was not the Crown, it was
not the Government, which fought that battle: it was the people of
England who fought it with their own hands and their own resources.
Adventurers, buccaneers, corsairs, privateers, call them by what name we
will, stand as extraordinary, but characteristic figures on the stage of
history, disowned or acknowledged by their sovereign as suited
diplomatic convenience. The outlawed pirate of one year was promoted the
next to be a governor and his country's representative. In those waters,
the men were formed and trained who drove the Armada through the Channel
into wreck and ruin. In those waters, in the centuries which followed,
France and England fought for the ocean empire, and England won it--won
it on the day when her own politicians' hearts had failed them, and all
the powers of the world had combined to humiliate her, and Rodney
shattered the French fleet, saved Gibraltar, and avenged York Town. If
ever the naval exploits of this country are done into an epic poem--and
since the Iliad there has been no subject better fitted for such
treatment or better deserving it--the West Indies will be the scene of
the most brilliant cantos. For England to allow them to drift away from
her because they have no immediate marketable value would be a sign that
she had lost the feelings with which great nations always treasure the
heroic traditions of their fathers. When those traditions come to be
regarded as something which concerns them no longer, their greatness is
already on the wane.

CHAPTER II.

In the train for Southampton--Morning papers--The new 'Locksley
Hall'--Past and present--The 'Moselle'--Heavy weather--The
petrel--The Azores.

The last week in December, when the year 1886 was waning to its close, I
left Waterloo station to join a West Indian mail steamer at Southampton.
The air was frosty; the fog la