acob van Heemskerk,
unlike many of the navigators and ocean warriors who had made and were
destined to make the Orange flag of the United Provinces illustrious over
the world, was not of humble parentage. Sprung of an ancient, knightly
race, which had frequently distinguished itself in his native province of
Holland, he had followed the seas almost from his cradle. By turns a
commercial voyager, an explorer, a privateer's-man, or an admiral of
war-fleets, in days when sharp distinctions between the merchant service
and the public service, corsairs' work and cruisers' work, did not exist,
he had ever proved himself equal to any emergency--a man incapable of
fatigue, of perplexity, or of fear. We have followed his career during
that awful winter in Nova Zembla, where, with such unflinching cheerful
heroism, he sustained the courage of his comrades--the first band of
scientific martyrs that had ever braved the dangers and demanded the
secrets of those arctic regions. His glorious name--as those of so many
of his comrades and countrymen--has been rudely torn from cape,
promontory, island, and continent, once illustrated by courage and
suffering, but the noble record will ever remain.

Subsequently he had much navigated the Indian ocean; his latest
achievement having been, with two hundred men, in a couple of yachts, to
capture an immense Portuguese carrack, mounting thirty guns, and manned
with eight hundred sailors, and to bring back a prodigious booty for the
exchequer of the republic. A man with delicate features, large brown
eyes, a thin high nose, fair hair and beard, and a soft, gentle
expression, he concealed, under a quiet exterior, and on ordinary
occasions a very plain and pacific costume, a most daring nature, and an
indomitable ambition for military and naval distinction.

He was the man of all others in the commonwealth to lead any new
enterprise that audacity could conceive against the hereditary enemy.

The public and the States-General were anxious to retrace the track of
Haultain, and to efface the memory of his inglorious return from the
Spanish coast. The sailors of Holland and Zeeland were indignant that the
richly freighted fleets of the two Indies had been allowed to slip so
easily through their fingers. The great East India Corporation was
importunate with Government that such blunders should not be repeated,
and that the armaments known to be preparing in the Portuguese ports, the
homeward-bound fl