Fertility of resource, dexterity to serve at all duties, skill at handling ship and canvas, were the results of sea-ship training. In the merchantmen great opportunities offered for advancement in all branches of the seaman's art. Long voyaging was better exercise for a progression in navigation than the daily pilotage of the war vessels. Blake, in his early days as a merchant supercargo, learnt his seafaring on rough trading voyages, and his training could not have been other than sound to persist, through twenty years shore-dwelling as a merchant at Bridgwater, until he was called from his counting-house to command our naval forces. Dampier was a tarry foremast hand in his day: whatever we may judge of his conduct, we can have nothing but admiration for his seamanship. Ill-equipped and short-handed, racked by sea-sores and scurvy, his expeditions were unparalleled as a triumph of merchant sea-skill. James Cook learned his trade on the grimy hull of an east-coast collier--to this day we are working on charts of his masterly surveys. In later years the merit of the trading vessels as sterling sea-schools was equally plain. During intervals of combatant service, or as prelude to a naval career, training on the merchants' ships was eagerly sought by ardent naval seamen who saw the value of its resource in practical seamanship, in navigation, and weather knowledge. Great captains did not disdain the measure of the instruction. They sent their heirs to sea in trading vessels to draw an essence in practice from their sea-cunning. Hardy, Foley, and Berry had borne a hand at the sheets and braces, and had steered a lading of goods abroad, before they came to high command of the King's ships. Who knows what actions in the victories of Copenhagen, the Nile, and Trafalgar (hinged on the cast of the winds) were governed by Nelson's early sea-lessons, under Master John Rathbone, on the decks of a West India merchantman? For long after, relations and interchange between the two Services were not so intimate. Until coming of the Great War, with a mutual appreciation, we had little in common. Our friend and peacemaker--the influence of seafaring under square sail--languished a while, then died. In steam-power, with its growth of development and intricacy of application, we found no worthy successor to present as good an office. In the long span of a hundred years of sea-peace we grew apart. The gulf between the two great Services widened to a breach that only the rigours of a world-conflict could reconcile.