The _Renown_ is the most recent, the fastest, and the best armed battle-cruiser in the world. She received at her christening the proud traditions, extending over three hundred years, of the battles of the British Navy, having had no less than seven fighting predecessors of the same name, beginning with the gallant little wooden frigate _Renommée_, captured in 1653 from the French and transferred to the British squadrons where she became the first of the famous _Renowns_. The present vessel was built as lately as 1916, when British need was great. She remains a record of what those strenuous times could do. For all her thirty-two thousand tons and gigantic armament of mammoth guns this great battle-cruiser slides through the water with the smoothness of the otter. She moved steadily at eighteen knots an hour from the time she left Portsmouth, a pace which, for this last word in fighting machines, is mere half-speed, though it is as fast as most suburban trains can travel. She is so big that surprisingly little motion is noticeable at sea, though waves wash freely over forecastle and quarter-deck, contracting the space available for the exercise and training of the large fighting crew she carries. This intimacy with the ocean is an impression acquired early and vividly by the civilian on board a fighting ship. A voyage on a big liner is a quite super-marine experience by comparison, with a picturesque and phosphorescent basis some distance below a sleepy deck-chair, and not necessarily observed at all. A battleship penetrates rather than sails the sea, and takes very little interest in keeping any part of herself dry. It is impossible to ignore the ocean on such a vessel. The _Renown_ was no less amphibian than others of her class. The accommodation contrived for the Prince was itself liable to ruthless visitation, and even the cabin on the superstructure, which held the chroniclers of his Odyssey, and was the highest inhabited spot beneath the bridge, occasionally took considerably more than enough water to dilute the ink.