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- American Navy. They may be found in the second volume of the
“United States Statutes at Large,” under chapter xxxiii.—“An act
for the _better_ government of the Navy of the United States.”
[5] For reference to the latter (L’Ord. de la Marine), _vide_ Curtis’s
_Treatise on the Rights and Duties of Merchant-Seamen, according to
the General Maritime Law_, Part ii., c. i.
Nor is it a dumb thing that the men who, in democratic Cromwell’s time,
first proved to the nations the toughness of the British oak and the
hardihood of the British sailor—that in Cromwell’s time, whose fleets
struck terror into the cruisers of France, Spain, Portugal, and
Holland, and the corsairs of Algiers and the Levant; in Cromwell’s
time, when Robert Blake swept the Narrow Seas of all the keels of a
Dutch Admiral who insultingly carried a broom at his fore-mast; it is
not a dumb thing that, at a period deemed so glorious to the British
Navy, these Articles of War were unknown.
Nevertheless, it is granted that some laws or other must have governed
Blake’s sailors at that period; but they must have been far less severe
than those laid down in the written code which superseded them, since,
according to the father-in-law of James II., the Historian of the
Rebellion, the English Navy, prior to the enforcement of the new code,
was full of officers and sailors who, of all men, were the most
republican. Moreover, the same author informs us that the first work
undertaken by his respected son-in-law, then Duke of York, upon
entering on the duties of Lord High Admiral, was to have a grand
re-christening of the men-of-war, which still carried on their sterns
names too democratic to suit his high-tory ears.
But if these Articles of War were unknown in Blake’s time, and also
during the most brilliant period of Admiral Benbow’s career, what
inference must follow? That such tyrannical ordinances are not
indispensable—even during war—to the highest possible efficiency of a
military marine.
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