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Of all the changes which the sea-vocation has witnessed none is so complete as the battle-ship’s armaments. The process has indeed been gradual; great sharpness of transition has only been visible within the last twenty-five years; yet it is not necessary to talk of hundred-ton guns to emphasize the growth of ordnance. There was a mighty difference betwixt the batteries of the old Duke of Wellington, for example, and those of the ships to which the cannon lately trawled up in the Channel belonged. But it is instructive, and certainly amusing, to go much further back still. In an ancient treatise, called “Speculum Regale,” a description is given of the method of attack and defence as practised in the navy in the twelfth century. Here the mariner is told to provide himself with two spears, which he must be careful not to lose in throwing. One of them is to be long enough to reach out of one vessel into another. In addition to these spears, the sailor was to be furnished with scythes fixed to long poles, axes, boat-hooks, slings fitted to staffs,^[14] barbed darts, stones for heaving, and bows for shooting. How terrible these primitive weapons were in the hands of the early mariners may be read in the old accounts of sea-fights. Describing the great naval battle between the English and French in Edward III.’s reign, Daniel in his “Collection,” p. 227, writes: “Most of the French, rather than endure the arrows and sharp swords of the English or be taken, desperately leap into the sea, whereupon the French king’s jester, set on to give him notice of this overthrow (which being so ill news, none else willingly would impart on the sudden) said, and oftentimes reiterated the same: Cowardly Englishmen, Dastardly Englishmen, Faint-hearted Englishmen. The king at length asked him Why? For that, said he, They durst not leap out of their ships into the sea, as our brave Frenchmen did. By which speech the King apprehended a notion of this overthrow.” There were also contrivances called galtraps, beaks for the vessels like boars’ heads armed with iron tusks, towers for the bowmen to let fly their arrows from, breastplates of linen very thick, and helmets of steel. The old Jacks fought stoutly with these barbarous weapons, but their real qualities had to lie in wait for gunpowder.