The English nation, more than perhaps any other, has been characterised not so much by her inventiveness as by her skill in adapting other nations’ ideas. The present age of electricity and other inventions illustrates the general truth of this statement. Thus, her ships of to-day are the result of continually improving on the designs of other nations. From Norway she got her first sailing ships; from the Mediterranean she assuredly derived considerable knowledge in maritime matters generally. Certainly from Spain she learned much of the art of navigation, of rigging and of shipbuilding. From the French, as we go down through time, she acquired a vast increase of her knowledge of ship-designing and shipbuilding. Not the least of this was the importance to a vessel of fine lines. The Dutch taught us a good deal of seamanship and tactics, as we know from Pepys’s Diary. Finally, about the year 1850, after the American clippers had raced all our big ships of the mercantile marine off the ocean, England learned to build clippers equally fast and superior in strength, and so regained the sea-carrying trade she had lost. In yacht designing also she has learned much from American architects, as the Germans within the last few years have learned from us. Sailing ships are the links which bind country to country, continent to continent. They have been at once the means of spreading civilisation and war. It is a fact that the number of new ships to be built increases proportionately as the trade of a country prospers, and one of the first signs of bad trade is the decrease in the shipbuilder’s orders. But, good trade or bad trade, peace or war, there will always be a summons in the sea which cannot be resisted. It summoned the Egyptians to sail to the land of Punt to fetch incense and gold. It summoned the Phœnicians across the Bay of Biscay to the tin mines of Cornwall. It called the Vikings to coast along the Baltic shores for pillage and piracy. It called the Elizabethans to set forth from Bristol and London in order to find new trade routes, new markets for their goods, fresh sources of their imports. It calls some for trade, some for piracy, some for mere adventure, as in the case of the yachtsman of to-day. It seduces ships from the safety of snug harbours only to be tossed about by the billows of a trackless expanse. The sea ever has been, ever is, and ever will be, uncertain, fickle, unkind. In spite of the fact that for 8000 years and more shipbuilders, designers, and seamen have by experience and invention sought every possible means to overcome its terrors and to tame its fury; in spite of the fact that these men have never succeeded in getting the upper hand, yet the call of the sea will ever be obeyed. When once she has fascinated you, when once you have consented to her cry and got the salt into your veins, you become as much the slave of the sea as any Roman underling that pulled at the oar of an ancient galley.