it is clear enough why they should be concerned with navigation. It is further to be noted of the seamen of the Golden Horn that whether they belong to the Black Sea or the White, and whether they sacrifice to the Seven Sleepers or to St. Nicholas, the jargon of their trade is almost purely Italian. Even the boatmen in the harbour shout _sía_ when they want each other to back water, not suspecting that the gondoliers in Venice do exactly the same—though the gondoliers may not spell it quite as I do. The names of a few kinds of ships and of a few parts of them have been slightly Turkified or Grecicised, as the case may be, but an Italian sailor would be lost only on a steamer. There a Turkish captain uses English words as glibly as you or I. On a motor-boat, however, he would pass to French. It is rather surprising that the Greeks, who were always a seafaring people, should have taken over so much of the ship language of their Latin conquerors. The case of the Turks is less surprising, for they are tent men born. Nor have their coreligionaries in general ever been great adventurers upon the deep. The Caliph Omar even went so far as to forbid them sea voyages. Nevertheless, the science of navigation owes much to the Arabs, and we get from them our words arsenal and admiral—meaning “house of construction” and “prince of the sea”—while some of the greatest exploits of the Turks were connected with the sea. The deep valley of Kassîm Pasha, inside the Azap Kapou bridge, is supposed to have been the final scene of one of the most celebrated of those exploits, the one successfully carried out by Sultan Mehmed II during his siege of the city, when he hauled a squadron of eighty galleys out of the Bosphorus, dragged them over the hills in a night, and relaunched them inside the chain that locked the Golden Horn. That chain may be seen to-day in the military museum of St. Irene. Kassîm Pasha does not seem to me altogether to fit the contemporary descriptions, although it would offer the easiest route. There is no doubt, however, about the famous arsenal that sits solidly at the mouth of the valley to this day. How many days it will continue to sit there is another matter, for its long water-front may become more valuable for commercial purposes than for those of a modern shipyard. It was founded by Sultan Selim I in 1515, was enlarged by his son Süleïman the Magnificent, and reached the climax of its importance under his grandson Selim II. Those were the great days when the Captains of the White Sea were the terror of the Mediterranean, and when a disaster like the battle of Lepanto, in which the Turks lost two hundred and twenty-four ships and thirty thousand men, could not shake the empire. The Grand Vizier Sokollî Mehmed Pasha said to the Venetian Balio, apropos of that battle and of the conquest of Cyprus by the Turks which preceded it: “There is a great difference between your loss and ours.