Excerpt from The Story of the British Navy, From the Earliest Times, to the Present Day
The fewest words will suffice to indicate the aims and scope of this history.
One of our most popular admirals not long since remarked that what had always surprised him was the extraordinary ignorance or indifference to naval matters on the part of the public in general all over the world. Now, when it is realised that no nation in the world possesses such a golden record of sea-service as ours; no country has stored up in its archives such a wealth of magnificent data, it is unfortunate that such indifference or ignorance should exist. Without wishing to trespass on the thorny field of politics it must be conceded that an island nation such as ours depends for its very existence on its ships of war. As far back as the ninth century it was Alfred the Great who saw clearly that he who would be secure on land must first be supreme on sea. In Elizabethan times no less a person than Sir Walter Raleigh wrote that "whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade: whosoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself." Tennyson, our great poet-laureate of the nineteenth century, emphasised the same idea: -
"You, you, if you shall fail to understand
What England is, and what her all-in-all,
On you will come the curse of all the land,
Should this old England fall
Which Nelson left so great."
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