The references to life at sea in the seventeenth-century merchantmen are not many, but here and there one comes across mention of some ship or experience. Pepys, whilst sailing down the Thames estuary on Sunday, April 8, 1660, writes in his diary: “We had a brave wind all the afternoon, and overtook two merchantmen that overtook us yesterday, going to the East Indies.” But there are two interesting passages in English literature which show that going to sea in the ships of this period was a terrible business. The first is found in the autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, an English historian and diplomatist, who describes his experience of crossing the English Channel in a French ship in the year 1609. The second is taken from Jonathan Swift’s famous _Gulliver’s Travels_. There is no need to ask why fiction should be dragged into history; for Swift borrowed this descriptive account of an East Indiaman in a storm almost word for word from James Love’s _The Mariner’s Jewel_, and it gives us a glimpse into the seafaring of the beginning of the eighteenth century that bears the stamp of authenticity. And it is such peeps into the past that are so invaluable to us in reconstructing the life led by the rough seaman at this time, who was learning by his mistakes, risking much by his ignorance, but doing so much for the great Merchant Service that was to spread all over the world. Herbert, together with Sir Thomas Lucy returning from France, took ship from Dieppe early in February and spent the night in the Channel during a gale of wind. “The master of our ship,” he wrote, “lost both the use of his compass and his reason. For, not knowing whither he was carried by the tempest, all the help he had was by the lightnings, which, together with thunder very frequently that night, terrified him, yet gave the advantage sometimes to discover whether we were upon our coast to which he thought, by the course of his glasses, we were near approached.” That is to say, the master was anxious about his dead reckoning, which was kept by guessing the distance run every hour. The time was kept by means of hourly and half-hourly glasses from Elizabethan times even to the eighteenth century aboard ship, according to the number of times the sand ran through.