Yet in this church is gathered much of Deptford’s olden story, and in it are the memorials of captains and constructors of the Navy in times when Deptford was much more of a dockyard and seaport than a stirring quarter of London: monuments dating from before the days of Charles the Second and Pepys. Here you shall find that of Peter Pett, master shipwright in the King’s yard, who died in 1652. The Latin epitaph upon this master craftsman quaintly describes him as “a thoroughly just man, and the Noah of his generation.” It further goes on to say that “he walked with God and brought to light an invention even greater than that recorded of his prototype (for it was an ark by which our mastery of the sea and our rights were saved from shipwreck). He was called away from the tempests of this world, God being his pilot, and his soul resting in the bosom of his Saviour as in an ark of glory.” This seventeenth-century Noah and inventive saviour of his country was the designer of the new frigate type of ship, the Dreadnought of its day. Here also is the monument of Captain George Shelvocke, who thrice circumnavigated the globe, and died in 1742. The north side of the church facing Deptford Green, which as already remarked is not any longer a green, and cannot have been for some two hundred years or more, forms a striking picture, for a group of red-brick eighteenth-century buildings, built on to it, is obviously associated with the church itself, although of absolutely domestic character. The great days of Deptford began in the reign of Henry the Eighth, with the rise of the Royal Navy. It had been described as “a mean fishing village” until the “King’s Yard,” as the dockyard was named, was established in 1513--the first of our naval dockyards. There the earliest ships of the Navy took the water; vessels with the strange, and long since impossible, names of _Jesus_, _Holy Ghost_, _John Baptist_, _Great Nicholas_, and the like: sacred names whose use in such a connection would in our own days offend the ear with a sense of blasphemy. The naming of ships in that manner went out of fashion with the Reformation, and thereafter no English _Holy Trinity_ set forth to deal out death and destruction upon the high seas. It was left to the Spaniards to couple holiness with conflict and slaughter, and for such awful names as _Madre de Dios_, _Sanctissima Trinidad_, and _Espiritu Sancto_ to be associated with warfare.