no less than £1 11s. a month. And yet, when opportunity allowed, the captain used to send his crew ashore in the ship’s boats “to walk in the fields ... to take the air.” But among the officers there was too much “excessive banqueting on board” and a great waste of powder, as, for instance, when guns were fired at the drinking of a man’s health. And the same authority has something very interesting to tell us concerning the ceremonial wearing of the flag on board ship. I have no intention of confusing our chronological sequence, but I must ask the reader for a moment to recall that incident which was one of the indirect if not the real causes of the first Anglo-Dutch wars. It will be remembered--which English schoolboy does not remember it well?--that when Captain Young, one May Day in 1652, was bound down Channel and met a convoy of Dutchmen coming up, he was angered to find the foreigner declined to salute, and an engagement immediately followed. Now, writing long before that incident had ever occurred, Monson definitely states that if a foreign fleet should pass on our seas and meet our admiral’s ship, the former were expected to acknowledge our sovereignty by coming under the lee of the admiral, by striking their topsails and taking in their flag. “And this hath never been questioned,” he adds, except out of ignorance, as in the case of Philip II, when he met the Lord Admiral of England when the former was sailing to England in order to marry Queen Mary. The custom was that if any foreign ship were to arrive in one of our ports or to pass a fort or castle, she must, as she entered, and before coming to anchor, take in her flag three times “and advance it again.” But should the English admiral be in the harbour, the foreigner was not to display his flag at all. Prior to the reign of James I, all admirals wore the St. George’s flag at the topmast head. But when the Union of Scotland had been effected there was added the cross of St. Andrew. An admiral at anchor took in his flag in the evening and fired a gun and set the watch. “The flag carried under the poop of a ship,” he remarks, “shews a disgrace,” and is never used except when it is won or taken from an enemy.