There is a letter to my mother from one of her aunts, Southsea, 4 October 1861, “We went to see ‘the Warrior’ in dock, and a most beautiful sight she is. We went all over her, she is immense! It is thought she must roll much in anything of a heavy sea, and Kit and other Naval men think she ought not to be sent into danger, such ships being fitter to defend the coasts instead of new batteries. That unhappy ‘Great Eastern’! Will anyone ever venture in her again?” The Great Eastern had been caught in an Atlantic gale three weeks before, and the passengers found it very uncomfortable--“The two cows that fell with their cowshed down into the ladies’ cabin were killed by the violence of the shock.” I remember the Great Eastern very well, and also the Warrior--I saw her first in 1864, in Torbay. She was the earliest of our ironclads, and was completed in 1861. In the old days of little wooden ships this part of England had a much larger share in shipping. Before _Lloyd’s Register_ began, there were two rival registers of shipping--the shipowners’ red book, which began in 1799, and the underwriters’ green book, which began some years before, but lost many of its supporters by changing its system of classification in 1797. The underwriters had kept surveyors at twenty-four ports in Great Britain and Ireland; and six of the twenty-four were less than twenty miles from here--Dartmouth, Teignmouth, Exmouth, Starcross, Topsham and Exeter. And in 1799 the shipowners put surveyors at twenty-two of these, omitting Exmouth and Starcross, and adding six other ports, making twenty-eight in all. There were eighty-eight surveying ports in 1834, when _Lloyd’s Register_ was started; and these included Dartmouth, Teignmouth, Topsham and Exeter, but the two last had only one surveyor between them. In another fifty years all four had ceased to be surveying ports, and the nearest surveyor was at Plymouth. I wrote the article on Ships in the great _Dictionnaire des Antiquités_ edited by Daremberg and Saglio; and while at work on it, I found that I was cramped for space, and therefore asked for more. But the answer was that they had given me as much space for ‘Navis’ as they had given Navarre for ‘Meretrices,’ and my subject could not possibly require more space than his.