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The Northern department was concerned with the charge of Russia, Prussia, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Poland, and Saxony; the Southern department looked after France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, and the States along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. So Carteret became one secretary, and the grotesque Duke of Newcastle remained the other.
The circle, therefore, of the Mediterranean world which was enlarged by the discoveries of the sixteenth century, finds its completion to-day in new states across the Atlantic, which are on the whole enormously preponderant on the side of peace, and wish to hold their own in Western civilization by force of wealth and industry, and not by arms.
A nation situated as Great Britain is in India and Egypt scarcely can fail to appreciate our own sensitiveness regarding the Central American isthmus, and the Pacific, on which we have such extensive territory; nor is it a long step from concern about the Mediterranean, and anxious watchfulness over the progressive occupation of its southern shores, to an understanding of our reluctance to see the ambitions and conflicts of another hemisphere approach, even remotely and indirectly, the comparatively peaceful neighborhoods surrounding the Caribbean Sea, bearing a threat of disturbance to the political distribution of power or of territorial occupation now existing.
And, besides, if you should get tired of my company, we might ask Jack Harley and Amy to come to us for a month or so." "I don't think that it will be necessary for us to do that," he laughed. "Starting as we shall in the middle of March, we shan't find it too hot in the Mediterranean before we turn our head homewards; and I think we shall find plenty to amuse us between Gibraltar and Jaffa."
The next morning I awoke feeling perfectly well. I thought a bathe would do me good, and I went to plunge for a few minutes into the waters of this mediterranean sea, for assuredly it better deserved this name than any other sea. I came back to breakfast with a good appetite.
By this time we had arrived at the entrance to the baths, where, on the asphalte promenade, built out into the clear crystal Mediterranean, all smart Leghorn was sitting in chairs, and gossiping beneath the awnings, as Italians love to do. Pancaldi's is essentially Italian.
I rose early next morning, and walked down to the harbour, to have my first sight of the Mediterranean, that renowned sea, on whose shores the classic nations of antiquity dwelt, and art and letters arose, on whose waters the commerce of the ancient world was carried on, and the battles of ancient times fought, whose scenery had often inspired the Greek and Latin poets, and the grandeur of whose storms Inspiration itself had celebrated.
So they embarked with their seafaring followers Vikings, as we still call them often, indeed, with their wives and families, in great open ships, and sailed away, some to the coast of England, others to France, and others even to the Mediterranean, where they took service under the Byzantine emperors.
Another English admiral, Sir Cloudesley Shovel, had been sent in the spring to blockade Brest; but arriving too late, he found his bird flown, and at once kept on to the Mediterranean.
All islands figuring in that Plan, over seventy in number, situated in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Indian Oceans, in the Mediterranean and the North Sea, have, likewise been opened except Nicobar Islands, Chagos Archipelago, Hainan Island, Sakhalin Island, Spitzbergen and Anticosti Island.
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