trust mostly
to the novelists, who, except in rare instances, draw untrustworthy
exaggerations.

No doubt there are families who have, so to speak, specialized their
traditions for generations; and a naval family's traditions for the last
two centuries would make a most entertaining book. Suppose, for instance,
there were living at Portsmouth a man whose family for generations had
prided itself on some one of its members having shaken hands with all the
great sailors who at some time or other in their careers must have sailed
from Spithead. This man could tell us how his father had actually shaken
hands with Nelson.

There died in February, 1898, in Melbourne, Australia, Lieutenant Pascoe,
son of Nelson's flag-lieutenant at Trafalgar, so that the first
proposition is established. Now Nelson's Pascoe could easily have been
patted on the head by Cook, and the father of any of Cook's men could
easily have sailed with Dampier. Looked at in this way, it does not seem
difficult to span the gulfs between each of these naval epochs, and if
one compares Dampier's _Roebuck_ and her crew with Cook's _Endeavour_ and
her crew and with the ships and seamen of Nelson's time, it still seems
easy enough; but between us and them steam and iron have come, and we are
as far apart from those others as the Martians are from us.

At the time when Cook started on his voyage England had for several years
been engaged in, and was almost constantly at, naval war. From the French
and Spanish prizes we got many valuable hints in the designing of ships,
and our builders improved upon them with the best workmanship and
materials in the world, so that the warships of Cook's time differed
little from, and in many cases were, the hulks which, until very recent
years, lay in our naval seaports. It ought not to be necessary to remind
readers that Nelson's _Victory_, still afloat in Portsmouth harbour, was
launched in 1765.

[Illustration: CAPTAIN JAMES COOK, R.N. From picture in the National
Portrait Gallery, painted by John Webber, K.A. _To face p._ 48.]

The sailors were for the most part pressed men, but there was a notable
difference between them and the seamen of Dampier's time. They were, and
remained for long after, wild, improvident, overgrown children such as the
nautical novelists who wrote a few years later [Sidenote: 1769]
have pictured them; but the lawless rascals who manned king's ships or
were pirates by turns, as fortune