ld turn with all tides, tack about, and take
advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention.']

The 'mosquito' fleet of Henry's time was represented by 'row-barges' of
his own invention. Now that the pinnace was growing in size and sail
power, while shedding half its oars, some new small rowing craft was
wanted, during that period of groping transition, to act as a tender or
to do 'mosquito' work in action. The mere fact that Henry VIII placed no
dependence on oars except for this smallest type shows how far he had
got on the road towards the broadside-sailing-ship fleet. On the 16th of
July, 1541, the Spanish Naval Attache (as we should call him now)
reported to Charles V that Henry had begun 'to have new oared vessels
built after his own design.' Four years later these same
'row-barges'--long, light, and very handy--hung round the sterns of the
retreating Italian galleys in the French fleet to very good purpose,
plying them with bow-chasers and the two broadside guns, till Strozzi,
the Italian galley-admiral, turned back on them in fury, only to see
them slip away in perfect order and with complete immunity.

By the time of the Armada the mosquito fleet had outgrown these little
rowing craft and had become more oceanic. But names, types, and the
evolution of one type from another, with the application of the same
name to changed and changing types, all tend to confusion unless the
subject is followed in such detail as is impossible here.

The fleets of Henry VIII and of Elizabeth did far more to improve both
the theory and practice of naval gunnery than all the fleets in the
world did from the death of Drake to the adoption of rifled ordnance
within the memory of living men. Henry's textbook of artillery,
republished in 1588, the year of the Armada, contains very practical
diagrams for finding the range at sea by means of the gunner's half
circle--yet we now think range-finding a very modern thing indeed. There
are also full directions for making common and even something like
shrapnel shells, 'star shells' to light up the enemy at night,
armor-piercing arrows shot out of muskets, 'wild-fire' grenades, and
many other ultra-modern devices.

Henry established Woolwich Dockyard, second to none both then and now,
as well as Trinity House, which presently began to undertake the duties
it still discharges by supervising all aids to navigation round the
British Isles. The use of quadrants, telescopes, an