The captain to-day is the brain of the ship. The economy of No longer is the hoarse voice of the captain heard shouting to the tops or to the gun-deck in stentorian tones. The superintending brain disciplined for all emergencies in the seclusion of the cabin or the conning-tower simply the essential orders; that is, puts in array and play forces of men and material by word of mouth or stroke of pen, which destroy. Absence of display characterizes the best type in personnel and material of modern naval warfare, the economy of the essential. character izes both personnel and material. The Morale in its relation to navies a subject of broad inquiry. Changes in naval warfare in methods and men. The evolu- A directing intellect, equable and working with precision, a ship, facile of movement, of surpassing velocity, ordnance, of executive potency, these are the factors which describe at once the actuality of the present and the ideals of the future. The morale, without which these factors are utterly futile, belongs to a wider field of consideration. 2. Of Ships of War. It is a far cry from Salamis to Santiago. Methods and means and men have all changed in naval warfare. Naval architecture and ordnance have developed in successive centuries not unlike the evolution of Natural Science, except that invention has interjected its modifying influences as a Deus ex Machina. The beginning of ships was "the split reed" drifting on the stream, the floating log, the canoe, the raft, then on with successive steps, the boat with poles and oars, the banks of oars, and the beak for ramming, and at the same time the sail. For two thou sand years these primitive forms lasted, varied in slightly different ways, from the time of the Phoenicians to the Armada, after which sails were mainly used as a motive power. This event marks the end of an era. The aboli tion of oars ends the galley period and ushers in the period f sails. The galleons and marked the galleasses transition In the meantime the biremes and triremes of the ancients, enlarging to sixteen banks of oars, had changed into the mediæval galleys, which were merely enlargements of the earlier types, the bow and stern lifted higher and a larger number of sails. The Venetians at Lepanto introduced the galleasses, a type between the galleys and the galleons, having the advantages of both. Three banks of oars still remained, but a significant change compounded was made by inserting portholes for large cannons between the banks and single oars. They proved their efficacy in the van of that battle, so that one might say in the grammar of shipbuilding: positive, galley; comparative, galleass; superlative, galleon.; The latter were huge and unwieldy and were used by the Spaniards as treasure-ships. of sails and oars. Harry. The Great Harry,1 a wonderful specimen of The Great shipbuilding, had a very high poop as well as bow; on the poop a signal lantern nearly on a level with the round tops, an enormous beak, balconies at bow and stern, six round towers at angles of the poop gangway and forecastle "like the turrets of a chateau," four masts with round tops like inverted cones, and innumerable streamers. 1 Henry Grace à Dieu, built in England in 1514 |