ea a more capable
and determined enemy than the Dutch. In fact, the republic of the United
Provinces was perhaps the only state that ever contended on anything like
equal terms against England for the command of the sea.

When at last Monk and Rupert were ready to sail they had to wait for a
favourable wind and tide, and, with the help of their pilots, solve a
somewhat delicate problem. This problem was something like that which a
general on land has to solve when it is a question of moving a large force
through defiles of which the other end is watched by the enemy's main army.
But it had special complications that the soldier would not have to take
into account.

Monk's fleet sailing in line ahead, the only order in which it could
traverse the narrow channels, would cover about nine miles from van to
rear. There were then no accurate charts of the Thames estuary such as we
now possess, and the pilots of the time believed the possible ways out for
large ships to be fewer and more restricted than we know them to be at
present. They advised Monk to take his fleet out from the Nore through the
Warp and the West Swin, which form a continuous, fairly deep channel on the
Essex side of the estuary along the outer edge of the Maplin Sands. At the
outer end of the Maplins a long, narrow sandbank, known as the Middle
Ground, with only a few feet of water over it at low tide, divides the
channel into two parallel branches, the East Swin and the Middle Deep. At
the end of the Middle Ground these two channels and a third (known as the
Barrow Deep) unite to form the broad King's Channel (also known as the East
Swin), where there is plenty of sea room, and presently this again expands
into the open sea.

In those old days of sailing-ships a fleet working its way out of the
narrower channels inside the Middle Deep in presence of an enemy would
court destruction if the whole of its fighting strength could not be
brought out into the wide waters of the King's Channel on a single tide. If
only part of it got out before the tide turned, the van might be destroyed
during the long hours of waiting for the rearward ships to get out and join
in.

On 19 July Monk brought his ships out to the Middle Ground, beside which
they remained anchored in a long line till the 21st, waiting for a
favourable wind and a full tide. The ebb flows fast through the narrows
from west to east, and weighing shortly before high water on the 22nd, the
fleet spre