It is proper to remember all these conditions of the sea-vocation in reviewing the life of William Dampier. The habit of self-reliance makes the character of the sea-worthies of his age admirable, and it qualified them for their great undertakings and achievements. They were helped with nothing from science that can be mentioned with gravity. The ocean was to them as blank as it looks to the landsman's eye, and it was their business to find out the roads to the wonders and mysteries which lay hidden leagues down behind its familiar shining line. If a sailor nowadays is at fault he can seek and find the hints and assurances he desires in twenty directions. He has Admiralty charts of incomparable accuracy. He has a deep-sea lead with which he can feel the ground whilst his ship moves through the water at fourteen knots an hour. He has instruments for indicating the angle to which his vessel rolls, and for showing him instantly her trim as she sits upon the water. He has a dial that registers on deck, under his eye, the number of miles his ship has made since any hour he chooses to time her from. His chronometer may be accepted as among the most perfect examples of human skill. Dampier and such as he wanted all these adjuncts to their calling. But it cannot be disputed that they were the better sailors for the very poverty of their equipment in this way. It forced upon them faith in nothing but their own observation, so that there never was a race of sailors who kept their eyes wider open and examined more closely those points which have long since slided into the dull prosaics of the deep. No one can follow them without wonder and admiration. We find them in crafts of forty, twenty, even ten tons—boats half-decked and undecked—exploring the frozen silence of the North Pole, beating to the westward against the fierce surge of the Horn, seeking land amidst the vast desolation of the southern ocean, and making new history for their country upon the coast of North America and in the waters of the Mozambique. Their lion-hearts carry them all over the world, and they have nothing to help them but the lead-line over the side and a quadrant big enough to serve as a gallows. Nor was the ocean quite as it is now. In Dampier's time it was still gloomy with mysteries, and there lingered many a dark and terrifying superstition, whose origin was to be traced to those early Portuguese and Spanish sailors who chanted a litany when they saw St. Elmo's Fire glittering at the masthead, and exorcised the demon of the waterspout by elevating their swords in the form of crosses. The mermaid still rose in the tranquil blue waters alongside, and with impassioned eyes and white and wooing arms courted the startled seaman to share her coral pavilion at the bottom of the sea. The enchanted island, steeped in the purple splendour of a radiance that owed nothing of its glory to the heavens, was yet to be discovered by seeking. The