THE SEA.
Admirals of the Caribbean. By Francis Russell Hart, F.R.G.S. (Allen and Unwin. IN. f3d. net.) "With the dawning of a new century (the nineteenth)," writes Mr. Hart, "the Caribbean Sea lost much of its import- ance as a battle-ground for European quarrels." It became, we might add, the happy hunting-ground of the nautical romancer. How many brave ships of fiction have sailed into its haunted waters never to return, or only as battered hulks after incredible adventures ! Mr. Hart, however, has replaced this romance of fancy, now grown a little attenuated, by that of fact. In sketching the adventures of Columbus and the Early Navigators, of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Henry Morgan, of Admirals De Pointis and Du Casse, and of Vernon and Rodney, he supplies us not only with a narrative of stirring event, but also with a living contribution to colonial history in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He does more. For few things are more interesting and less examined in the history of Protestantism than its close connexion with piracy. The relation has been continuous. Missionary zeal and colonialism, puritanism and the commercial spirit, are only its later developments. The material which Mr. Hart has gathered here would prove of excellent service as a starting-point to the student who, eschewing the doctrinal or nationalist effect of Protestantism, concentrated on this wider issue. Through all the brilliant heroisms of this book sounds an undertone of somewhat sombre greed. We hear it con- cisely expressed, for example, in the words with which Captain Morgan heartened his men to plunder Puerto Velo. If our number is small," he said, "our hearts are great. And the fewer persons we are, the more union and better shares we shall have in the spoil." It is, as it were, a curious, hollow echo of Shakespeare's great prelude to Agincourt ! The lust for honour and for gain was indeed nicely balanced in many of these pioneering admirals. Needless to say it detracts little from the glory, while it adds much to the significance of these achievements which Mr. Hart so lucidly records. His book is one in which the historian can take pride and the schoolboy pleasure. It is attractively illustrated.
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