At the masthead of the ships of this period, the chief ship of the fleet carried a vane or flag. The Bayeux tapestry also shows the _Mora_, William’s flagship. The truck is surmounted by a cross, and there appears to be a lantern immediately below of somewhat similar appearance to that on the Bœotian ship in Fig. 11. We do not know to what exact knowledge of seamanship the crews of William the Conqueror had attained,[46] but they would, at least some of them, have crossed many times between the two countries before in connection with trade, and they would have been able to acquire by experience and observation, the necessary knowledge of the strong channel tides which, although the coast-line between Pevensey to the eastward has altered since the eleventh century, probably were not much different from what they are to-day. They would have an excellent mark in Beachy Head whereby to make a good land-fall, and a sandy beach further to the eastward on which to disembark in the bay, nicely sheltered from westerly winds. William, having once landed in this country and vanquished Harold, did not neglect the care of the navy. By 1071, or roughly the date when the font was being placed in Brighton church just a few miles to the westward, there was a fleet in being. Trade, too, between France and England would now be even less fettered than before, and this would naturally make for an increase in the merchant shipping. Nevertheless the crews of William’s fleet would be more Norman than English. Nor was shipbuilding neglected in other parts of Great Britain, for Hakluyt gives a chronicle of the Kings of Man, in which we find that Godredus Crovan, who gathered together a fleet of ships and sailed to the Isle of Man, vanquished its people, and subdued Dublin, and “so tamed the Scots that none of them durst build a ship or a boate with above three yron nailes in it.” Under Henry I. the maritime industry prospered much, and the king collected a squadron of great size. Up to this time it had been the custom that any cargo cast ashore from a wreck became _ipso facto_ the property of the king. But Henry caused a law to be put into force that should any one escape from a wreck alive, the ship should not be treated as lost, and her contents should not have ceased to belong to her owner. In this reign too, we learn of _La Blanche Nef_, a fifty-oared vessel that had as many as three hundred souls on board when she foundered on the rocks off the race of Catteville in the year 1120.