ng, swooping, flapping about, and all busy fishing. Or
perhaps there will be a group of brown divers, floating placidly on the
waves, and then suddenly disappearing, one or two at a time or several
in a moment. And possibly a great black creature may appear a little way
off, tossing and seeming to turn somersaults in the water, and another
and another, and one may find oneself among a school of porpoises, and
hear the curious puffing sounds they make that are not quite like
anything else. From a little distance out, looking back across the
changing lights that glance over the water, one gets a quite fresh view
of the harbour's mouth, shut in by its high cliffs, half veiled by soft
masses of green.

Dartmouth had a great stake in the country's welfare in early days, and
was a port of much stir and traffic. From here sailed many of the ships
that Richard I gathered together to take the English who were going with
him on the Third Crusade. William Rufus started once from this harbour
when there was trouble in Normandy, and King John paid the town two
visits. In Edward III's time Dartmouth had already become renowned for
her shipping and sent six ships for the King's service in a fight in
which engaged the combined French, Flemish, and Genoese fleets; and she
sent two more a few years later to help in his war against Scotland.
Fifty years later this loan was entirely eclipsed by the magnificence of
contributing no fewer than thirty-one ships to the siege of Calais.

Chaucer's words have often been quoted:

'A schipman was ther; wonyng far by weste,
For ought I woot, he was of Dertemouth.'

As if it were more likely that a typical seaman would come from
Dartmouth than anywhere else! In no harbour could that great
training-ship the _Britannia_ have been more appropriately moored, nor
could a more fitting place be chosen for the long range of buildings on
the hill above, the Naval College that has superseded it. Risdon tells
us that the town has been 'sundry times subject to the attacks of
foreigners,' and particularly mentions one occasion in the reign of
Henry III, when the French made such a furious onslaught, that the women
turned out by the side of their menkind and hurled flints at the enemy.
These found themselves 'courageously resisted by the towns-men
and-women, Amazonian-like.'

In 1470 Dartmouth was a step in the retreat of Warwick, 'the
King-maker,' when Edward IV pursued him as far as Exeter. Warwick