THE SHIP UNDER SAIL. By E. Keble Chatterton. (Fisher Unwin,
Ltd. ma.) BOOKS of naval reminiscences are things apart, even as the sea services are things apart. They tell of a life quite foreign to the dweller in cities : of wars and rumours of wars ; of visits to strange corners of the earth ; of the sudden hush which descends upon the forces of disorder when a ship of His Majesty sails into the bay ; of distressed mariners rescued ; of the quaint sayings of the men of the sea, who, while nurtured in a discipline compared with which the rule of a monastery is a rest-cure, yet retain a perfect independence of spirit. What naval officers—with one or two exceptions— do not mention are their own achievements, and the incessant and monotonous routine of hard work, day in and day out, by which alone the Navy achieves perfection. These aspects of sea service are regarded as a matter of course by naval officers, and—mistakenly—as wearisome to their readers. They prefer to chronicle the exceptional : such as a general action, a bombardment or a shooting trip in the Greek Islands. Hence, perhaps, the popular and fallacious notion that naval officers are " breezy " ; the truth being that they are habitually inclined to a philosophic melancholy ; a mood which they are too courteous to inflict upon the public. Admiral Sir Herbert King-Hall's " Naval Memories and Traditions " contains in little the history of the Navy from 1874, when he joined the Service, to 1919, when he hauled down his flag. As a mid- shipman, he went up the Dardanelles when Vice-Admiral Sir Geoffrey Phipps-Hornby made his famous passage in 1878. He took part in the Egyptian War of 1882, to which campaign he devotes two pages ; served as first lieutenant in H.M.S. Undaunted, Captain Lord Charles Beresford, of whom he writes " as a leader of men I have known few equal to him, and none superior " ; served in the South African War as Naval transport officer ; commanded H.M.S. Indomitable, in which the Prince of Wales visited Canada in 1908 ; was Commander-in-Chief at the Cape when War was declared in 1914, and commanded the squadron which destroyed the Konigsberg in the Rufiji river ; and in January, 1918, was appointed in command of the Orkney and Shetland Islands, with his headquarters at Scapa Flow. Trained in the old Navy of masts and sails, Sir Herbert notes the succession of changes -through which the New Navy was evolved. But throughout all developments, officers and men and tradition remain, and historical continuity is unbroken. Visiting Antigua about 1887, Sir Herbert found in the archives of the island letters written by Captain Horatio Nelson, of H.M.S. Boreas, a hundred years previously. Captain Nelson, as senior naval officer, severely reproved the dockyard officials for disrespect and neglect of duty. These epistles are models of their kind, Sir Herbert King- Hall's grandfather was surgeon on board H.M.S. Favorite, which visited St. Helena in 1818. Sir Herbert, who visited the place in 1891 as Lieutenant in H.M.S. Raleigh, publishes some extracts from his grandfather's diary, in which Mr. King-Hall discloses something of the extraordinary intrigues centreing about Napoleon. Sir Herbert's father, Captain King-Hall, commanded H.M.S. Styx upon the Cape Station, of which his son was to become Commander-in-Chief. The reader of Sir Herbert King-Hall's pleasant pages will receive an impression that, generally speaking, His Majesty's ships were everywhere on all seas, ready at need, and the decisive, if unobtrusive, element in international affairs. It was true, Sir Herbert retired from active service before the dangerous reductions of the Navy were effected, and before the interest of the public was—even more dangerously— diverted from its ancient friend, the sea, to the insubstantial and delusive air.
The sea changes not, nor does its unique relation to England change. Even the ship does ,not alter in essentials. In " The Ship under Sail," Mr. E. Keble Chatterton describes the shape and rig of a vessel of ancient Egypt, which sailed the Nile between 3,000 and 4,000 years before the Christian era, and which differed little from the Burmese junk of yesterday. Mr. Keble Chatterton traces the development of the sailing ship through the centuries, from square rig to fore-and-aft rig, to the huge five-masted steel sailing-ship Ks,benhavn, recently built in England, owned in Denmark, with her forty-four sails, making 5o,000 square feet of canvas. The most beautiful ships ever built were the English men-of- war of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The art of sailing found its ultimate expression in the clipper ships of the mid-nineteenth century ; and, having attained perfection, it was superseded by the steamship. But the sailing vessel survives, and will continue to survive. Mr. Keble Chatterton's admirable work enables even the landsman clearly to understand the fascinating process of the evolution of the various types of craft in which the men of all ages carried their wealth, and fought for it, and so made civilisation.
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