Читать книгу Champions of the Fleet. Captains and men-of-war and days that helped to make the empire онлайн

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By the time that all is over the ship has been warped back alongside the shore again, and the company adjourn thereupon to wind up the day’s proceedings with a good old English dinner, given to the Master Shipwright and the officials of the yard at the Lord High Admiral’s expense.

Such is a passing glimpse of the memorable scene—as far as one may venture to reconstruct it—on “Dreadnought Day” at Deptford Royal Dockyard, that Tuesday afternoon, in Tudor times, three hundred and thirty-three years ago. It is hard to fancy such doings, at Deptford of all places, now. Oxen and sheep for the London meat market nowadays stand penned in lairs on the site of the filled-in dock whence the Dreadnought was floated out—the same dock whence the Armada Victory had preceded her, whence Grenville’s Revenge followed her. Master Shipwright Baker’s lodging is nowadays a cattle drovers’ drinking bar. The old-time navy buildings—their origin even now easily recognisable, at any rate externally—serve as slaughterhouses, and so forth, among which rough butcher lads, reeking of the shambles, jostle daily to and fro. On every side is bustle and clatter and hustling, the rumbling of Smithfield meat vans over the old-time cobble stones, the jargon of Yankee bullock-men, the bleating of sheep under sentence of death. Strange and hard is the fate that in these material times of ours has overtaken what was once the premier Royal Dockyard of England, this former temple, so to speak, of the guardian deity of our sea-girt realm: