We now revert to the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the desultory warfare which was carried on during the reign of Queen Anne events occurred to demonstrate the superiority in design of the French warship over its English opponent of the same nominal force. One in particular, an expedition under Count Forbin which was intended to cover a descent on the Scotch coast in favour of the Pretender, “showed, even in failure, that in material France held a lead on us.” Chased back to its ports from the latitude of Edinburgh by larger English forces, Forbin’s squadron proved a superiority over all our ships, both in speed and seaworthiness. In weather which disabled many of our vessels the French squadron arrived home with the loss of only three--and these all English built. At about the same time the capture by us of a 60-gun ship, the _Maure_, of extraordinarily large dimensions for her rate, showed the direction in which French design differed from our own. The recapture, not long afterwards, of the _Pembroke_, which was now found to carry only fifty, instead of her original number of sixty-four guns, corroborated (says Charnock) the direction in which improvement was sought and found. But for some time the lesson remained unlearnt. For a number of years the inferiority of our design was an accepted fact; “every action won by British valour was a stigma to British science.” Throughout the whole of this century we set no value on scientific principles as applied to naval architecture, and were content to remain copyists. Although before the advent of the Napoleonic wars we had thus endeavoured to reduce their balance of advantage, yet even so the French still maintained an absolute superiority in design. In the first half of the century this superiority was especially conspicuous; and, in conjunction with an inferiority of seamanship and workmanship which in the end more than neutralized all its advantages, it was the cause of the disreputable incongruities which Charnock has depicted in his well-known epigram: _Very few ships captured by the enemy from the British have ever continued long the property of their possessors. If it has so happened, that one of them, being in company with others of French construction, has ever fallen in with any English squadron, that ship, almost without exception, has been among those captured, and most frequently the first which has fallen. On the other hand, the recapture of any ship from the British, which was originally French, is a circumstance extremely uncommon. Captured French ships were sought for as the best commands, which not infrequently were the means of recapturing captured English vessels._ Very seldom was our failure to overhaul the speedy Frenchman attributed to inferiority of design; nearly always to the fortuitous circumstance that we were foul-bottomed and the enemy clean; which may have been sometimes true, but which was evidently a partial and inaccurate explanation.