eight, or even nine
fold, if we take the difference between the
figures for 1792 and 1812.

"It is a common error to suppose that our ships in
the old wars were manned entirely by seamen. A
knowledge of how the men were raised shows that
this cannot have been so; and confirmation can be
had from a very brief study of ships' muster
books. Only about a third of the crew of a
line-of-battle ship were, in the seaman's phrase,
'prime seamen.' The rest were either only partly
trained or were frankly not sailor men. The
_Victory_ at Trafalgar was not an ill-manned
ship--here is an analysis of her crew: officers,
commissioned and warrant, 28; petty officers,
including marines, 63; able seamen, 213; ordinary
seamen and boys, 225; landsmen, 86; marines, 137;
artificers, 18; quarter gunners, 12;
supernumeraries and domestics, 37.

"During the whole of our naval history down to
1815 it was the invariable rule that in peace time
the battle fleets were laid up unmanned, and only
enough ships were kept in commission to 'show the
flag' and to police the sea. This accounts for the
very large increase of the naval personnel which
immediately became necessary when there was a
threat of war; and it accounts also for the
difficulty which was always experienced in raising
the men. This difficulty was even greater than we
are apt to suppose, for the Merchant Service has
never been able to give the navy more than a
fraction of the total number of men needed, and
the machinery for raising extra men has, until
this war, always been of a most primitive nature.

"When war came the ships were commissioned,
without crews. This could be done because from the
latter part of the seventeenth century there was a
permanent force of officers. Then the officers had
to find their own crews. They began by drawing
their proportion of marines, and then proceeded
to invite seamen to volunteer. In this way they
got a number of skilled seamen, men who had been
in the navy before, and came back to it either as
petty officers or in th