At the end of the seventeenth century, captains in the Navy were being paid £1 10s. a month during the time of peace, but during war this was raised to £3. The idea of a naval uniform originated in France in the year 1669, but the practice of all grades of naval officers wearing uniform did not become general until the time of the first Empire. During the reign of our Charles II, ships of the English Navy carried as officers, captains, lieutenants, masters, pursers, surgeons, and chaplains. The seventeenth-century French Navy owed a very considerable debt to the far-sighted enterprise of Colbert, but _directly_ it owed a very great deal to the labours of its chaplains, who instructed the pilots in their work and taught naval aspirants the mysteries of astronomy and navigation. During the first part of the seventeenth century the finest shipbuilders had been the Dutch, for, thanks to their East Indian and other colonies, Holland had every reason for building big ocean-going ships. No one in Spain, England, or France could for a time build ships like theirs. And so it was but natural that the zealous French went to Holland, lived there for some time in order to learn shipbuilding, translated the best Dutch authorities on this subject into French, and returned home to build on even more scientific lines. Therefore in the eighteenth century the French could build vessels as no one else in the world. It was from the latter, in turn, that the English at last acquired so much skill that the old rule-of-thumb methods of ship construction were for ever banished and the era of scientific shipbuilding entered upon. In such scientific matters as the improvement of gunnery, the log, the stability and better under-water design of ships, France led the way for those vast reforms which were subsequently to follow.