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INTRODUCTORY

T is curious that a sea-going people such as the English should have written so little poetry, of a high quality, about the sea and its sailors until comparatively recent times. It might be said that until the end of the eighteenth century our poets hardly saw the beauty of the sea, though they felt its terror. We have poems, such as Donne's "Storm" and "Calm," expressing its horrors and its desolation; and later we have poems, like Falconer's "Shipwreck," expressing its force and fury. These, in their way, are excellent, but they are not exhaustive. They recognise and make significant the grimmest aspects, and only those, of the sea, and of the life of its followers. In this they are not singular. their loathing of the waters and of sea life they resemble most early English sea poetry. Nearly all the English poets, from Chaucer to Keats, have a dislike for, or a dread of, the sea, and a hatred of sea-life and no high opinion of sailors. "Chaucer," says someone, "dismisses

the sea with a shudder."

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He accepts the Shipman as a roadmate, and describes him with delicate art, but he describes him as a ruffian who would rather break cargo than be sober, and to whom the ginger that is hot in the mouth is the one thing worth praying for of all the things in the world. Gower, his follower, seldom leaves dry land; though for a page or so he sings gracefully about the Sirens. To the metrical romanticists

the sea is a wilderness haunted by magical ships plying from wonderful countries. To the Elizabethans (as Shakespeare, Markham, Webster, and Heywood) it is a place of tempest, or the scene of battle, or the haunt of pirates. To the Jacobeans (as Browne, Fletcher, Dekker, and Daborne) it is magical or tempestuous, or the haunt of pirates. To Donne, as I have said, it was desolate and horrible. To Sackville, the courtier, it was little save a place of exile, where one could have wine and hard knocks and a little quiet dice, but no ladies. To Falconer it was dangerous and deadly.

None of these poets took delight in the contemplation of the sea. Shakespeare, indeed, invites to merriment upon the sands. Fletcher dreams about beautiful islands, peopled by goddesses or princesses. Heywood tells us of sea captains drinking wine at a tavern. The others "dismiss the sea with a shudder." Nashe alone seems to have a word of praise for her. To Nashe she is the original home of "Solyman Herring," "our dappert Piemont Huldrick Herring," "the puissant red herring, the golden Hesperides red herring, the Meonian red herring, the red herring of Red Herrings Hall." To Nashe she is the "glassy fieldes of Thetis," the "boiling desert," full of "careeringest billowes," over which go the smacks of Yarmouth" and never bruise one bubble.” From Nashe alone does the sea get sympathetic treatment; and the sympathy of Nashe is not worth a very great deal. It was not until the nineteenth century that she came to her own. Then Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and a school of landscape painters taught us to regard her, as we regard her now, not as a hedge but as an outlet, not as an enemy but as a manifestation.

Our sea heroes have received, on the whole, as scanty recognition as their element. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the poets who honoured our sailors were generally ballad-singers, greater in their zeal than in

their poetry. There are a few poems " by eminent hands" to eminent sailors, such as Peele's address to Drake and Hawkins, the noble passage in Browne's Pastorals, Drayton's poem to the Virginian Voyage, and Marvell's poem to Blake; but these are exceptions. As a rule our great poets have left our great seamen unsung. We have no great epic poem on the deeds of our sailors. The ballad-singers have done their best for us, and "the best in this kind" are excellent ballads, such as "Andrew Barton," and "The Winning of Cales," and the ballad of Vernon taking Porto Bello. Our true sea epics are written in prose rather than in verse. They are to be found in the three folios of Hakluyt, in the four quartos of Purchas, in Mandeville, in " Sir Francis Drake Reviv'd," in Sir Walter Raleigh's story of the Revenge, in the books of Exquemeling, Shelvocke, Dampier, Walter, Cook, and Burney. Of these epics, some three or four, not more, appear to have taken firm hold upon the national imagination.

Though the sea and the sea heroes have remained for the most part unsung, the fault is rather racial than personal. Until the nineteenth century the English had little sense of the majesty and grandeur of certain aspects of nature; and though they could fear and turn to use, they could not glory in the splendour and beauty, of breaking water. As a nation they have regarded their great men in something the same way. They have broken their hearts or obeyed them or accepted them blindly, but they have never gloried in them, so that we need not look, in books of early English poetry, for any rapture of perception of the sea's beauty, nor rapture of praise of a hero's noble effort. Our poetical strength is not in rapture nor in panegyric, but in narrative and in characterisation, more especially the characterisation of homely types. We have had few great poems of the sea, and no great epic of

the sea heroes, but we have had unmatchable sea characters in our poetry and in our prose fiction.

The sailor has been expressed for us with perfect art and perfect truth, though he himself may complain of the treatment he has received. The poets have not loved him. They have not been attracted by him. They have dismissed him, not with a shudder, but with a volley of his own oaths or with a scrap of his own song, as a sort of monster, a sort of sea-bear, a sort of a bawling rough Commodore Trunnion. So far as I know there are not half a dozen attractive naval characters, created and celebrated in poetry or in prose fiction, prior to the early nineteenth century. If a poet or a novelist desired a common seaman or a sea captain in his art, he followed the type of Chaucer's shipman or of Shakespeare's boatswain for the one, and that of Congreve's "young Ben' or Smollett's Commodore, or Edmund Thompson's Captain Mizen for the other. Heywood's sea captains, at the inn, are perhaps the best we have prior to Miss Austen and Captain Marryat, though our fiction makers have always done well with pirates, as with Captain Ward and Captain Roberts.

We cannot wonder that the poets have said so little that is beautiful about the sailor. There is little to say about him; and that little, to a perceptive person, is very readily apparent. The poetic, or sea-bear sailor, who bawls and drinks and raps you out oaths and bangs upon tables with his cudgel, is always to be found. One can find him on blue water ships at the present time; and where he exists he is the best man in the vessel. He is not fitted to command, but he is excellent before the mast. He has hardly changed since Chaucer's time. One could find a dozen like Chaucer's shipman in any dock in Liverpool or New York or Sydney or San Francisco. He no longer wears "faldyng," or rough Irish frieze, but he