Men turn to the sea as a profession for a variety of reasons; but the amateur yachtsman embraced the sea as a mistress with a complete and very genuine passion. To those who seek her thus, the sea has much to tell; she will whisper a thousand secrets ’twixt dusk and dawn to the little ships resting snug in her curlew-haunted creeks, or riding lazy to a long cable in the lee of desolate sand-banks--things denied to the busy wayfarer on her wide thoroughfares. Yachtsmen as a class are meditative folk. A man who spends his week-ends alone, or in the company of one other in a three-ton yacht, has opportunities for reflection denied to the devotees of other pursuits. He learns more than the ways of the tides and Primus stoves. In the queer, uneasy tranquillity of the decade before the war there came in gradually increasing numbers to our east and south-east coasts an unobtrusive visitor. Few people encountered him, because he chose sequestered places to visit, but the yachtsman met him, talked much with him, and afterwards sat in the cuddy and smoked many pipes, thinking about him and his unholy thirst for information. There were other yachtsmen, of a more restless and inquiring turn of mind, who went farther afield with lead-line and compass, “observin’ ’ow the world was made.” Where the short yellow seas stumbled across leagues of shoals, and windmills and the brown sails of barges broke the sky-line above low-lying sand-hills, they learned and saw many things. One even wrote a book about these things,[2] that he who ran might read. The trouble was that people ashore entrusted with the destinies of Empire were running about so busily that they hadn’t time to read. They were catching votes and such-like, as children snatch at falling leaves in autumn. So the yachtsman carried on yachting and cultivating the acquaintance of the slow-speaking, slow-moving skippers of the coast-wise traffic and the crab-gaited community that manned the east-coast fishing craft. Useful men to know sometimes at the pinch of a sudden crisis. Then, with the red dawn of August 4th, 1914, came war at last, and the yachtsman pulled a deep breath of something like relief, knocked out the ashes of his pipe, and went ashore, forbearing to say “I told you so” to the harassed Whitehall officials he went in search of. This was a war of the sea, and the yachtsman clewed up his business ashore, sent his wife to stay with her mother, and placed all his knowledge of the coasts of Northern Europe and the seas between them at the disposal of the Navy.