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In the “Comedy of Errors,” Act I., Scene 1, we have a phrase that should have been coined by an ancient Greek sailor-poet: “The always-wind-obeying deep”; and a little lower down the page a touch of sea-lore that would of itself suffice to stamp the writer as a man of intimate knowledge of nautical ways: “A small spare mast, such as seafaring men provide for storms.” Who told Shakespeare of the custom of sailors to carry spare spars for jury-masts?

In “Macbeth,” the first witch sings of the winds and the compass card, and promises that her enemy’s husband shall suffer all the torments of the tempest-tossed sailor without actual shipwreck. She also shows a pilot’s thumb “wrack’d, as homeward he did come.” Who in these days of universal reading needs reminding of the allusion to the ship-boy’s sleep in Act III., Scene 1, of “Henry IV.,” a contrast of the most powerful and convincing kind, powerful alike in its poetry and its truth to the facts of Nature? Especially noticeable is the line where Shakespeare speaks of the spindrift: “And in the visitation of the winds who take the ruffian billows by the top, curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them with deaf’ning clamours in the slippery clouds.”