t 'she permitted some miserable scoundrel to lay a plan before
her for saving expense, by cutting down the seamen's diet.' The
'miserable scoundrel' had submitted a proposal for diminishing
the expenses which the administration was certainly ill able
to bear, The candid reader will draw his own conclusions when
he finds that the Queen did not approve the plan submitted; and
yet that not one of her assailants has let this appear.[71]

[Footnote 71: It may be stated here that the word 'rations' is
unknown in the navy. The official term is 'victuals.' The term
in common use is 'provisions.']

It is, of course, possible to concede that adequate arrangements
had been made for the general victualling of the fleet; and still
to maintain that, after all, the sailors afloat actually did
run short of food. In his striking 'Introduction to the Armada
Despatches' published by the Navy Records Society, Professor Sir
John Laughton declares that: 'To anyone examining the evidence,
there can be no question as to victualling being conducted on
a fairly liberal scale, as far as the money was concerned. It
was in providing the victuals that the difficulty lay.... When
a fleet of unprecedented magnitude was collected, when a sudden
and unwonted demand was made on the victualling officers, it
would have been strange indeed if things had gone quite smoothly.'

There are plenty of naval officers who have had experience, and
within the last ten years of the nineteenth century, of the
difficulty, and sometimes of the impossibility, of getting sufficient
supplies for a large number of ships in rather out-of-the-way places.
In 1588 the comparative thinness of population and insufficiency
of communications and means of transport must have constituted
obstacles, far greater than any encountered in our own day, to
the collection of supplies locally and to their timely importation
from a distance. 'You would not believe,' says Lord Howard of
Effingham himself, 'what a wonderful thing it is to victual such
an army as this is in such a narrow corner of the earth, where
a man would think that neither victuals were to be had nor a cask
to put it in.' No more effective defence of Elizabeth and her
Ministers could well be advanced than that which Mr. Oppenheim puts
forward as a corroboration of the accusation against them. He says
that the victualling officials 'found no difficulty in arranging
for 13,000 men in 1596 and 9200 in 1597 after timely notic