"of ascribing to seamen a want of those motives which impel "all men to adventure and exertion. The result of my own "experience is that seamen fight from two leading motives :"1st, Prize-money. 2nd, From a well-grounded belief in their "own disciplinary experience, which refuses to be beaten, and is "not satisfied with less than conquest. Take away the first "motive and we may find difficulty on an emergency in getting men to accomplish the second."-Lord Dundonald's Autobiography, vol. i., p. 54.

66

CHAPTER VI.

THE SEA THE ONLY ROAD FOR TRADE.

THE land divides the peoples of the earth; the sea unites them. Though the sea has always been regarded with fear if not with horror by the greater number of mankind, and though most men remain of Horace's opinion that he must have had a breast encircled by oak and triple brass who first dared to fit out and launch a ship, yet it remains historically true that the first intercommunications between nation and nation were by water; that human effort has always most successfully followed the coast-line; that where the sea reaches, there human activity is always most to be found; and that where the sea reaches not, there all communication with the rest of the world comes least and last of all. Thus, while the whole coast of Africa and those parts adjacent thereto have been known and traded with for centuries, it is but yesterday that any communication has been set up with, or so much as any knowledge gained of, the interior of that vast peninsular continent by the outside world; and the same may be said of those parts of Asia, and even of Europe, which are most remote from the sea. Nor are things likely ever to alter in this respect (unless, indeed, some means be discovered of navigating the airs as freely as we now navigate the seas), for the impediments in the way of free communication by land are

such as must otherwise for ever prevent it from competing on equal terms with the sea. On land a mountain, a morass, a river, a forest, a climate, or even so apparently insignificant a creature as a fly— such as the tsetse-has been and still is found to be an insurmountable obstacle to intercommunication, so that populations between whom such an obstacle intervenes, although living within a short distance of each other, are practically as much separated as though a hemisphere divided them. No such obstacles exist on the seas, which (except for the entirely insignificant case of the few ports in the northern hemisphere closed in the winter by ice) afford an ever open road from every point on their shores to every other point, however remote. And, as this road is, of all, the least interrupted of any, so also is it the easiest, the cheapest, and, on the whole, the safest of all, while every day tends to make it safer, and its use more certain. Storm and tempest, ten times greater than any that Horace ever knew, are now held of so little account that they scarce affect by a few hours an Atlantic passage of 3,000 miles; even the greater danger of fog is scarcely regarded; and the greatest danger of all-the land-is on all the great ocean highways so marked and guarded by light, beacon, and buoy, as to have lost most of its dangers whether by day or by night. If, indeed, we regard the marvellous passenger-service which has grown up between North America and Europe, and consider the safety, certainty, and exactitude with which the great liners in that service make their passages, in summer and winter, through fine weather and foul, scarcely varying a few hours in a passage now reduced to a little over six days, whether they meet storm or calm, we should be brought near to

the belief that the marine engineer and the marine constructor have, between them, almost abolished the dangers of the seas. The improvements, moreover, which have been accumulated during the last thirty years are so vast, and have recently succeeded each other with so much rapidity, that we may reasonably expect them to be followed by others even more important, and tending still more to increase the certainty, safety, and rapidity of seatransit.

The extent to which the trade between the various nations of the world is carried on by sea, is perhaps hardly suspected by many. Nor is it easy to come at the figures; for although the useful statistical abstracts published by the Board of Trade give the total imports and exports respectively of each country, and give also, on a different and distant page, the percentage of each that is carried by sea, yet the figures resulting from those percentages are not worked out.

In order, therefore, to arrive at as near an approximation as might be to the exact proportion of the trade between the nations of the earth which is carried by sea, as compared with the proportion carried by land, I have been at some pains to collate certain tables of statistics published by the Board of Trade, and to work out the figures which would result from the percentages given in those tables. The result of my labours is embodied in the following table.