Mr. Henry Caer of Portishead, who has been good enough to send me these extracts, thinks that "burnt" in the last entry means that their ship had been burnt. [28] i.e. "yield". [29] This, the old Grecian signal to engage, in 1292 "signified certain death and mortal strife to all sailors everywhere". In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was constantly used as an emblem of "Defiance" and "No Quarter". The mutineers at the Nore hoisted it in 1797, as did the Paris Communists in 1871. [30] A species of grape-shot. CHAPTER IX The Honour of the Flag "Ye mariners of England! That guard our native seas; Whose flag has braved, a thousand years, The battle and the breeze! Your glorious standard launch again To match another foe. . . . . . . . The meteor flag of England Shall yet terrific burn Till danger's troubled night depart, And the star of peace return." "Ye Mariners of England." THOMAS CAMPBELL. MOST people, as they listen to the inspiring strains of "Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves", feel a wholesome consciousness of pride and satisfaction in having the privilege of belonging to a nation whose sons have almost always been pre-eminent on the ocean; but few stop to consider what is implied by the expression "rule the waves". We are not in any doubt at the present moment of at least one meaning of the words. Had not our fleet instantly asserted its supremacy at the very outbreak of the great war with Germany we should have found it very difficult to get along at all, either with the war or with "business as usual". Does everybody realize, even now, that the war forced us to try to do two stupendous things at once--to carry on the biggest struggle in our history and to keep going the biggest trade and commerce in the world? It is quite certain that if we had not been able to maintain our "ruling of the waves", we should soon have been in a state of commercial collapse.