In those days the fight could not but be severe. No mighty ironclads, no huge three-deckers, existed. No P. and O. liners, no great merchant ships ranged the seas. Our forefathers tackled the waste of waters with what we should consider the merest cockleshells. Even in these days we know what is meant by “perils of the seas;” but in those days the term must have carried a hundred-fold deeper meaning, both to the brave fellows who ventured on the stormy main, and to the waiting wives and mothers on land. All the more honour to them that they were not daunted. Each man’s victory or failure in life’s battle cannot but help to shape the course which his descendants in future ages will pursue. The Sea for us has a vivid personality. We know grand old Neptune so well, with his trident and his snowy hair, his dashing waves and his impenetrable depths, his gentle breezes and his furious gales, his moods of mild serenity and his fits of vehement wrath. He has his faults; but in spite of all we love him. At one time the Sea was for men a type of the Infinite, of the Immeasurable, of the Boundless. We use still the same words; but they have lost some of their force. In these days the whole ocean has been mapped out from shore to shore. We know exactly what countries lie round each part of it. We can tell how long and how wide it is in any direction. As we stand on the shore, and talk of the “boundless ocean,” we are perfectly well aware that we are looking across to France or Spain, to Germany or Ireland or America. Grand and far-reaching the sea still is, but to us no longer “boundless.” In ages gone by, those who stood upon the coasts of Palestine or Egypt, of Greece or Italy, gazed towards unknown horizons, across what was to them an illimitable ocean. The civilised world consisted of a few countries bordering the Mediterranean on the east; and those countries shaded off into unexplored barbaric regions. As for the “great Sea,” as they called that which we regard as hardly more than a huge inland lake, it was in their eyes the embodiment of Infinitude. At a very early period, long before the English Nation was dreamt of, before the Roman Empire had grown into being, while the polished Greek of the future was still a semi-savage, a nation of Ocean-lovers already existed. These were the Phenicians, foreshadowing in their pluck and enterprise the sea-going British of later times. They, unlike the sailors of other nations, did not merely hug the shore, but ventured out into the trackless ocean. They, unlike the sailors of other nations, did not go upon the sea only in daylight, but they traversed it also in the dark hours of night.