Comparing a ship of the seventeenth century with a modern sailing craft of the same tonnage, the most striking defects that would appear in the former were the clumsiness in proportions. The lowness of the bow and the height of the stern seem to us nowadays ridiculous: so they were. But it was just one of the stages reached in the transition from those lofty forecastles and stern-castles that we saw originate in early times. But masts and spars were now no longer the stumpy items they had been. There was an improvement, too, in the existing rule of tonnage-measurement. Up to 1628 it had been far from reliable, being reckoned by the capacity for storing so many tuns of wine. From the time of Henry V. and long after, ton as applied to shipping denoted the capacity to hold a barrel measuring 42 cubic feet in the hold below deck. Therefore a vessel of 900 tons was capable of holding 900 such barrels. As the barrels were circular and could not be packed close together, the tonnage was really greater than what was given.[97] But from 1628 it was to be estimated from the length of the keel, leaving out the false post (a piece bolted to the after edge of the main sternpost), the greatest breadth within the plank, the depth from that breadth to the upper edge of the keel, and then to multiply these and divide the result by one hundred.[98] We have seen how, in the sixteenth century, the greatest rivals of the English were the Spaniards. Now, in the seventeenth century, it was the Dutch. Gradually they had been getting stronger and stronger until about the middle of the seventeenth century they had reached their zenith in prosperity and power. They had accumulated considerable wealth, were building fine, capable ships, and about the time we are speaking of had no equals in either of these possessions. Before the close of the sixteenth century we have seen them engaging on the first Arctic Expedition and inventing a new rig for small vessels. All through the reigns of James and Charles I. they had gone on developing. It was not until about the close of Elizabeth’s reign that Holland had commenced to build ships purely for fighting purposes, but by the year 1624 their men-of-war were the superior of ours. They kept their ships well, and we find incidentally that it was the practice of the Dutchmen to tallow the bottom of their ships while the English had allowed their vessels to become overgrown with weeds and barnacles below the water-line. The competition between the two countries set ablaze so much jealousy that an explosion was bound to come sooner or later. It did come during the Commonwealth, but though the Civil Wars of Charles I. had the same ill effects on our Navy as the Wars of the Roses, yet under Blake the Dutch were beaten, our Navy became again the finest in the world, and settled for the future the position which English fleets should occupy in respect of other nations. Highly ruinous as this war was to Dutch