GIFT-BOOKS.
THE STORY OF THE SEA.* THIS volume satisfactorily completes a work commenced last year. " Completes " is, perhaps, hardly the word. The whole "Story of the Sea" would demand for its telling many more volumes than two. If you begin with the Argonauts and come down as far as the ' Campania' you have manifestly no little ground to cover, and even the two stout volumes, with their fifteen hundred pages, which the clever handling of " Q " has made into an excellent piece of patchwork. must necessarily have many vacant spaces. "Patchwork" it certainly is, and so a little trying to a critic who has to estimate it as a whole. To pass from Jason to a chemical analysis of sea-water has something bizarre about it. Still, the patches are mostly purpurei. Wherever one may open the book, one is sure to light upon an interesting subject treated in a way which leaves little or nothing to be desired. One of the best of the miscellaneous papers here collected is that which, under the heading of " The Great Expedition against Syracuse," gives an excellent account of the culmination and decline of the nautical supremacy of Athens. Athenian seamanship was never
• The Story of the Sea. Edited by " Q." Assisted by Professor J. E. Laughton and others. London: Cassell and Co.
more brilliant than when the veteran Phormio defeated, in actions which are here lucidly described, the vastly superior fleets of Corinth and Sparta. Yet in the course of a few years it had almost disappeared. The cause was none other than exhaustion. The race of seamen was used up. And it was the Syracnsan expedition that did it. It is not a very far step from the Athenian command of the sea to our own. On this we have an interesting paper dealing with the services of Sir John Jervis. It was his discipline, with its iron severity, that restored it when it bad almost slipped out of our grasp. Mutiny was rife—one wonders, with the press - gang system at work, that it was not ten times worse—and it had to be suppressed at all costs. What a characteristic story is this. One of Jervis's Captains interceded for the life of a mutineer on the ground that he was a man of good character. " I am glad of it," said the Admiral, who must have had more of the triple brass about his heart than any sea-goer before him ; " I am glad of it, hitherto we have been hanging scoundrels. Now men will know that no amount of good character will atone for the crime of mutiny." Another striking story is that of the 'Marlborough.' Such was the condition of the crew that the Captain came on board Jervis's ship to beg for help in the execution of a mutineer who had been condemned. The Admiral's rule was that it should be done solely by the crew of the mutinous ship. Nor would he depart from it.. " If you can't command the Marlborough," he said to its Captain, "I will send on board an officer who can." He then made arrangements for compelling obedience. In the last extremity the 'Marlborough' was to be sent to the bottom in the face of the fleet. And hanged the man was by his own com- rades, though, curiously enough, there was a hitch at the last moment in the working of the rope which must have made every man in the fleet hold his breath. Not long after this came the great battle of Cape St. Vincent. It might never have been fought but for Nelson's splendid dis- obedience to the mistaken order which the Admiral issued at a critical moment ; but it would be highly unjaat that Jervis should lose the credit for a result to which a series of skilful and courageous operations, carried on in the face of the cruellest ill-luck, had been leading up. Another subject, by no means remote, is handled in a chapter headed "The Dockyards of England and Europe," and is full of interesting detail. We wish that we could have been told more about the non-English dockyards ; unfortunately the writer has not given, perhaps was not able to give, more than an enumeration of them. What will be the fate of the fleets which they are busy, more busy and more speedy than they have ever been before, in turning out, is made the subject of an ingenious narrative by a. war correspondent of the future, who tells the story of how the British fleet vanquished the " Bohemian." A very exciting story it is. Much of the detail of an engagement of modern fleets on the scale of Trafalgar must be a matter of conjecture ; but that it will be bloody beyond all the battles of the past can hardly be doubted.
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