--'Of the navy,' said another, 'it is truly amazing that you should have such an efficient one, which you have built up in the course of no more than two or three decades. Assiduous and energetic as you must have been, there must have been some other circumstances which have helped you in arriving at that result, or at least I cannot think otherwise when I reflect calmly on the matter.' --'Your views are not far from fact,' I answered. 'It would be certainly amazing if a people who had only known perhaps canoes in a small stream, having no seafaring experience or tradition, built up a new navy as we have done. Many people have carelessly looked upon Japan as such, hence the misconception. Japan abounds in history and traditions of the sea from the dawn of her history. Our fleets often made distant expeditions, and fought battles far out of our own waters. The ships were, no doubt, rude and primitive compared with the modern ones. From the model of a warship made about three hundred years ago, which I have seen in a temple not far from Tokio, I think that our ships of those days were not much inferior to those of the West of a corresponding time. From the period when foreign intercourse was suspended, the construction of large ships was prohibited, be it a warship or a merchantman. The country was in perfect peace, and the navy was in use even less than the army, and this, therefore, is why such an enormous difference between the European system and ours had come into existence. Nevertheless, some feudal lords whose seats were situated on the sea-coast had a certain number of retainers specially destined for seafaring purposes. And, moreover, Japan being a country surrounded by the sea on all sides, merchantmen and fishing boats, rude as they were, were abundant; hence the stock of sailors has never been wanting. With the new advent of the Western nations to the Far East some fifty years ago, with their "black ships," the country awoke to the necessity of having strong ships, and the Shogunate, jealous as it was in the ascendency of the feudal lords, abolished the prohibition against building large ships. Towards the later years of the Shogunate it possessed a small but creditable navy in the European style. Many feudal lords also possessed some kind of Western ships, several of them possessing eight or nine ships. Of course, many of these ships were only corvettes, or schooners, or ordinary commercial steamers, but they were all used by those lords and manned chiefly by their retainers, and were called their navy. They differed from ordinary merchantmen. These ships were mostly bought from Western merchants; a few were the presents of the Western monarchs to the Shogun; some were constructed in Japan. The earliest steamship constructed in Japan was a steam-launch built about 1862 in the province of Ise for the Prince of Chosiu. It was navigated from there to Hagi, the old capital of Chosiu, on the coast of the Japan Sea.