With Seppings’ improvements, Trafalgar would have been a well-nigh bloodless victory for the British Fleet. It took Trafalgar, however, to inspire and teach Seppings. Of every great sea-fight something of the same kind may be said. The lead had to be given. Yet those who best laboured to remove the worst disabilities of “the means” of Blake, contributed in that measure to Nelson’s successes years and years later on. Their efforts may surely be deemed worthy of record, for all that between the unknown designer of the _Great Harry_ in the sixteenth century and the designers of Super-Dreadnoughts of to-day there may have been lapses and defects in details. There was never a lapse on account of which the user was unable to defeat any hostile user with whom he came into conflict. The “means” provided served. The creators of warships consistently improved their creations: but they were not improved without care and thought on the part of those who produced them. To those who provided the means and to the rank and file it fell that many an admiral was able to do what he did. These admirals “made history.” But ever there were “those others” who made that “history making” possible, and who so made it also. In dealing with the warships of other eras, I have been fortunate in securing the co-operation of Mr. W. L. Wyllie, R.A., who has translated into vivid pictorial obviousness a number of details which old prints of an architectural nature entirely fail to convey. With a view to uniformity, this scheme, though reinforced by diagrams and photographs, has been carried right into our own times. Some things which I might have written I have on that account left unrecorded. There are some things that cold print and the English language cannot describe. These things must be sought for in Mr. Wyllie’s pictures. In conclusion, I would leave the dedication page to explain the rest of what I have striven for in this book. F. T. J. PREFACE TO NEW EDITION This book was originally written three years ago. Since it was first published the greatest war ever known has broken out. To meet that circumstance this particular edition has been revised and brought to date in order to present to the reader the exact state of our Navy when the fighting began. Modern naval warfare differs much from the warfare of the past; at any rate from the warfare of the Nelson era. But if men and _matériel_ have altered, the general principles of naval war have remained unchanged. Indeed, there is some reason to believe that the wheel of fortune has brought us back to some similitude of those early days when to kill the enemy was the sole idea that obtained, when there were no “rules of civilised war,” when it was simply kill and go on killing.