Much of the history of this ancient and interesting town is obscured by the mists of the ages which have passed since the first settlement was made upon the western shore of the lovely river. But we know that the waters “upon which Roman triremes and Danish galleys, and later huge captured galleons swung with the tide,” saw also the assembling together, at the close of the twelfth century, of the Crusaders’ fleet, which sailed the long voyage through the Bay to the Mediterranean to join Richard Cœur de Lion at Messina. Two centuries later the adventurous spirit which has always animated the men of Devon in general, and of Dartmouth in particular, found vent in one of those predatory expeditions against the coasts of Normandy and Brittany for which the place was afterwards to gain so renowned a name. In the last year of the fourteenth century one John Hawley, deciding upon an “enterprise against those pestilent rogues the French,” chartered all the shipping of which Dartmouth could boast for this purpose, and in retaliation for the depredations of “the French pirates upon the coasts of Devon,” set sail for the shores of Normandy and Brittany. How successful this enterprising merchant’s little private naval war turned out may be judged from the fact that he and his captains, or they for him, captured thirty-four French ships with their cargoes amounting to 1,500 tuns of wine. It is little to be wondered at that after the return of the ships Dartmouth “ran red with the luscious wines of France, and that none need go dry so long as they would drink success to the bold men of the Dart and confusion to the French.” Such expeditions as that of Hawley, however, were sure to have their counterpart in retaliatory descents by the French; and the history of the town--during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries especially--if written, would be one long story of daring and piratical adventures on the part of the men of the Dart, and surprises and alarms from the French, who on several occasions visited the town and plundered it.