Unfortunately it is rather too easy to produce instances of the wrong handling of ships in sea pictures, which otherwise are quite acceptable, and of imperfect understanding of the action of vessels afloat. Some of the earlier masters who had studied the sea and knew its ways well made curious mistakes when they brought in a ship as a central feature in their composition. They would fairly often poise a craft of much solidity and considerable tonnage on the very crest of a wave where there was certainly not a sufficient body of water to support it; or they would put a ship so close to a gently shelving beach that there was an obvious and immediate danger of its running aground, a position that would alarm even the boldest of sailors. They were as a rule cheerfully ignorant of the intricacies of rigging and of the set of sails, and occasionally they seemed to credit a ship with an uncanny power of progressing at full speed in the teeth of a stiff breeze. All this resulted from inadequate study of technicalities that a seafaring man would treat as a matter of course--from insufficient acquaintance with things that, after all, scarcely came within the scope of a landsman’s experience. But the present-day painter is expected to be more precise; and if he does not fulfil this expectation he will find that there are plenty of people who are ready and willing to call him to account. He has to face a more critical generation than his predecessors knew, a generation which travels more and has much wider opportunities of acquiring knowledge of many subjects, and he has to reckon with a familiarity with marine details that has become an eminently British characteristic. Picturesque improbabilities would not be left unquestioned now; there would be scathing comments by nautical experts, and even the ordinary man would not hesitate to voice his doubts. Perhaps we have grown a little pedantic in this demand for strict reality, but, all the same, it is not unreasonable to require from the painter who puts a ship into his picture evidence that he knows a fair amount about that ship’s construction and how it should behave in the situation he assigns to it. Even a piece of imaginative fantasy is none the worse for being based judiciously on solid fact.