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lesson of the Black Sea campaign is clear enough—namely, that constant weeding out is necessary, especially in the piping times of peace, in order that when war assails us we may not be as unprepared as we were in 1854.

After the war Mends served on in the Mediterranean till 1857, when he accepted an appointment which took him away from active service afloat, but still gave him scope for his powers of organisation in connection with the Naval Reserve and Coastguard. The most unsatisfactory system, or want of system, in manning our ships, of picking up men from anywhere, was swept away after the Crimean war; and whilst on the one hand seamen were entered for continuous service instead of for three years only, a Reserve was also formed to supplement the continuous-service men. This Reserve consisted partly of naval seamen, who after a period afloat had been drafted to the the Coast guard, and partly of merchant seamen. Both these classes were to receive a certain amount of training annually in ships stationed at the various ports round the coasts, and Mends took command of the first line-of- battle ship stationed at Liverpool for this purpose.

Some of the most important work that Mends performed during his career was carried out during his last twenty years of employment, during the whole of which time he was at the Admiralty in charge of

the Transport Department. In the good old days there was no service which stood in greater need of reform than the Transport service. Soldiers were packed into ships entirely unfit for their reception, the food was bad, and the sanitary arrangements worse. Disease and death followed as a matter of course. One of the few special arrangements for the preservation of the health and efficiency of soldiers when afloat was to provide them with an extra allowance of liquor. An instance is recorded in which the supply of liquor ran short, and the chronicler gravely narrates: "The soldiers, through their being forced to drink water in so cold a climate, having their limbs benumbed, so that they were scarcely fit for service, five regiments were reduced to one thousand and thirty-five men." Matters had greatly improved at the time of the Crimean War, but there was still very much requiring reform when Mends took charge of the Transport Department in 1862. One of the first things that was carried out under his guidance was the building and equipment of the five wellknown Indian troopships of the Serapis class. These vessels were a great advance on anything of the kind that had been built previously, and it was soon demonstrated that the rapid conveyance of troops in well-designed, well-manned, and well-disciplined ships not only conduced greatly to their efficiency when landed, but also quite as economical as the shiftless system which it super

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seded. Mends was frequently called upon to provide at very short notice the necessary transport for the conveyance of large bodies of troops and stores to the theatres of our many small The promptitude with which our troops were conveyed to Abyssinia, Ashantee, South Africa, and Egypt, and their excellent condition on landing, was in great measure due to his care and forethought. In fact, in recent years everything has always gone smoothly in the transport of troops afloat that it was never supposed by the casual onlooker that it might have been quite otherwise. The Egyptian campaign of 1882 was carried on under the eyes of our somewhat jealous neighbours across the Channel. The conduct of the transport service filled them, if not with admiration, at any rate with a considerable amount of envy. And when the other day the French expedition to Madagascar took place, it was perfectly evident that with even the great organising powers that our neighbours possess it was quite possible to make many most serious blunders, entailing much unnecessary hardship on the troops, such as our own men have not had to put up with within the last generation. Mends's services were considered of such value that he continued in harness up to the age of seventy-one, when he received the much-coveted Grand Cross of the Bath, and retired from the public service.

Even in his old days he delighted in the improvements

and development of our ships consequent on the march of invention, and kept himself in a remarkable way most fully abreast of the times. Attached to his old friends, and loving the service as he had known it sixty years before, he was full of sympathy with younger men who were occupied in developing the many novelties which distinguish the ship of the present day from her predecessors. He was essentially a lover of home, and very bright was the evening of his days, till the sudden death of his dearly loved wife gave him a blow from which he never recovered. But, as had been the case all through his life, his trust in God was his mainstay and strength, and he kept his cheerfulness to the last. On June 26, 1897, the day of the review in honour of her Majesty's Jubilee of the most powerful fleet that this country has ever assembled, as evening fell on the crowded waters and the lights shone out, his spirit passed peacefully away.

Mr Mends has not only faithfully carried out the pious duty of compiling a memoir of his father's life and services, but for the naval student in particular he has preserved a record which is of great utility in illustrating the history of the navy during the reigns of William IV. and Queen Victoria. Nor will the general reader find the book uninteresting: it is full of incident and adventure. Simply written, as a seaman's life should be, it gives a vivid picture of a life well lived in the service of the country.

A FORGOTTEN PURITAN COLONY.

ON the coast of Honduras, as near as may be thirteen degrees of latitude to the north of the equator, and somewhat less than eighty-two degrees of longitude west of Greenwich, there lie two little islands-a small, which is the southerly; a yet smaller, which is the northerly. A narrow channel divides them. Together they stretch for some four and a half miles of total length. Two miles is the measurement of their extreme breadth. But they are not without a certain dignity in height; for in the larger there is what, if we look to the proportion its stature bears to the whole superficies of the country, may claim to be called a mountain, towering 1190 feet above the sea-level, and visible, as the West India Pilot' assures us, "in clear weather from a distance of forty miles." It is a useful landmark for seafaring men when they are sailing amid "the outlying banks and islands on the coast of Mosquito." The islands are otherwise valuable, for water of good quality can be obtained on the larger, and wood can be cut on the smaller "with the consent of the proprietor." Spurs run out from the central mountain, and drop abruptly into the sea as peaked hills of from 300 to 700 feet high. Volcanic action made those hills, and therefore they are split into rocky chasms, one of which is described by our friend the 'West India Pilot'

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a most remarkable and useful object." Between the two islands "a bay is formed three quarters of a mile wide, and the same deep, which is so protected by shallow ledges to the westward as to make secure harbour for a few vessels of 15 feet draught." You are guided to that anchorage by "a most remarkable black rock 40 feet high" on the west side of the smaller island. The rock bears a strong resemblance to a human face, and British seamen have given to it the name of Morgan-as it is believed, and as is nowise improbable, in memory, if not in honour, of that Sir Henry Morgan, privateer, buccaneer, pirate (so said the Spaniards), brother of the coast, also deputy-governor of Jamaica for his Majesty King Charles II., and judge in the Admiralty Court of that island. Men knew him by various names, and in different functions; but he is chiefly memorable because he did what Drake broke his heart and died in failing to do--namely, march across the isthmus and sack Panama. The lesser island has a name of its own-to wit, Santa Catalina; but the two are generally indicated on maps and spoken of by the title of the larger only, which is Old Providence.

These two little patches of rocky land in the Caribbean Sea, now forgotten and neglected, mere dependencies of a squalid Central American

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Republic, were yet once the scene of a very curious English colonial adventure. It began in the mists of the years before 1630, and ran its course till the Spaniards cut it short in 1641. The story was long forgotten. That the buccaneers, whose flourishing time was 1660 and 1680, or thereabouts, had used the anchorage in their savage wars with the Spaniards was known, and to them was attributed the fort of which the remains are still visible at the north end of the larger island. But the colony fell so completely out of memory that the vague notices of its destruction, which floated along among other memories of early West Indian days, were held to belong to the history of the island of Providence in the Bahamas-a later, a more permanent, and a wholly different settlement. The confusion was cleared up by Mr Sainsbury, editor of the Colonial Papers in the Rolls Series. The evidence for what was hoped, schemed for, attempted, done, and suffered, between 1630 and 1641 in Old Providence, lay in two entrybooks now visible in the Record Office, but long hidden in the uncalendered archives, and a few scattered Spanish notices as obscure as themselves. These entry-books contain minutes of proceedings in the directing council of the Providence Company in London, and copies of letters written to the colony. The letters written from it have long vanished. But what remains is enough to tell the tale of an enterprise which, if not a venture of mistaken chivalry,

was a venture of mistaken piety. It is also an interesting, sometimes an amusing story, which affords some contributory evidence as to our other colonial activities, and shows us men of great note at work.

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To understand the company for the plantation of the islands of Providence, Henrietta, and the adjacent islands, it is necessary to look back for one brief moment on its preliminaries. When James I. made peace with Spain there neither was, nor was there meant to be, a cessation of English enterprises in the Indies. The king-lover of peace as he was, and earnestly as he desired an alliance with Spain, as the best of all means for making an end of the religious feuds of Europe (in itself neither foolish nor a dishonourable aim) -never recognised the claim of the King of Castile and Leon to hold all the lands "beyond the line." This line was the limit first drawn by Pope Alexander VI., Rodrigo Borgia, from pole to pole between the spheres of influence of Spain and Portugal, and finally fixed by those two states themselves at the conference of Tordesillas. Spain, we held, must show effective possession, and what that was gave rise to many disputes then as now. The diplomatic history of King James is full of colonial questions with Spain. There was much difference of opinion as to how far Kings Philip III. and IV. were masters of Central America and the Southern continent. As regards the islands of the West Indies, the differences were even

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sharper. Spain assuredly had of the thinly inhabited Spanish settled only the Greater Antilles, Cuba, San Domingo, Porto Rico, and Jamaica. The Lesser Antilles lay vacant. Englishmen, Dutchmen, and Frenchmen began to filter into them as the first quarter of the century wore on. Meanwhile there were still men who believed in Raleigh's dream of a kingdom of Guiana. One of his own captains, Roger North, a gentleman of the Guildford family, made several voyages to the Spanish Main. The voyage of Robert Harcourt of Ellenhall, and Stanton Harcourt (a race still vigorous among us), is in print. Both, curiously enough, were recusants, and religion may have had something to do with their interest in the New World, as it had with Lord Baltimore's. What share it had in the settlement of New England is in the knowledge of all men. The Spaniards treated all settlers in the islands as interlopers, all traders who sought their fortune near the ports of the mainland as smugglers and pirates. Whatever may be the case in Europe, said they, "there is no peace beyond the line." Their rule was turned against themselves. All kinds of Europeans in the West Indies showed an increasing disposition to take to privateering. This was the word preferred till "buccaneering" came to replace it, and it was not inaccurate, for these men were not pirates, not enemies of the human race, but only of the Spaniard, and of him only because he would have no peace with them. In the weakness

Home Government at Madrid, these armed intruders soon began to gain the upper hand. During the early days of Philip IV. the decadent monarchy had a brief revival of energy. In 1629 a powerful Spanish fleet swept the West Indies under the command of Don Fadrique (the old Castilian form of Frederick) de Toledo, who expelled the French and English from St Kitts and Nevis. A hundred of them were brought back, "naked and destitute," to Plymouth by one Ire, captain of the David of Lubeck, where the sight of them produced the anger we can imagine. Yet the Spaniards eft no garrisons, made no settlements, and the interlopers soon swarmed back. This, then, was the position. A weak government made vast claims, which it could not enforce. There was by its consent a permanent state of war to the west of a line drawn north and south 360 leagues west of the Azores. There were intruders, not positively strong, but strong in relation to the extreme feebleness of their adversary. Some were men in search of a place to worship God in, in their own way,-and, it may be added, to prevent others from worshipping in another. There were also pure adventurers looking for a freer world and a fresh soil, or seeking profit by trade, by smuggling, and by "privateering." Spain would not recognise any rights of other sovereigns in those seas by asking them to keep their subjects in order. She was too feeble to

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