no more than a father differs from his son.

One famous Tudor vessel deserves some special notice, not because of her
excellence but because of her defects. The _Henry Grace a Dieu,_ or
_Great Harry_ as she was generally called, launched in 1514, was Henry's
own flagship on his way to the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. She
had a gala suit of sails and pennants, all made of damasked cloth of
gold. Her quarters, sides, and tops were emblazoned with heraldic
targets. Court artists painted her to show His Majesty on board wearing
cloth of gold, edged with the royal ermine; as well as bright crimson
jacket, sleeves, and breeches, with a long white feather in his cap.
Doubtless, too, His Majesty of France paid her all the proper
compliments; while every man who was then what reporters are to-day
talked her up to the top of his bent. No single vessel ever had greater
publicity till the famous first _Dreadnought_ of our own day appeared in
the British navy nearly four hundred years later.

But the much advertised _Great Harry_ was not a mighty prototype of a
world-wide-copied class of battleships like the modern _Dreadnought_.
With her lavish decorations, her towering superstructures fore and aft,
and her general aping of a floating castle, she was the wonder of all
the landsmen in her own age, as she has been the delight of picturesque
historians ever since. But she marked no advance in naval architecture,
rather the reverse. She was the last great English ship of medieval
times. Twenty-five years after the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Henry was
commanding another English fleet, the first of modern times, and
therefore one in which the out-of-date _Great Harry_ had no proper place
at all. She was absurdly top-hampered and over-gunned. And, for all her
thousand tons, she must have bucketed about in the chops of the Channel
with the same sort of hobby-horse, see-sawing pitch that bothered
Captain Concas in 1893 when sailing an exact reproduction of Columbus's
flagship, the _Santa Maria_, across the North Atlantic to the great
World's Fair at Chicago.

In her own day the galleon was the 'great ship,' 'capital ship,'
'ship-of-the-line-of-battle,' or 'battleship' on which the main fight
turned. But just as our modern fleets require three principal kinds of
vessels--battleships, cruisers, and 'mosquito' craft--so did the fleets
of Henry and Elizabeth. The galleon did the same work as the old
three-decker of Nelson's time or th