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Several hours before, this ocean greyhound one of Great Britain's monster sea-fighters had up-anchored and left her dock where she had been undergoing slight repairs heading eastward down the river. Men lined the rails of the monster ship.
We have already noted Admiral Beatty's action in assigning American battleships to the place of honor in the line of sea-fighters which went forth to meet a reported German attack some time ago. It was a false report, but the honor done our naval fighters stands.
In the meantime had occurred a very pretty incident which is now one of the stock stories in the ward-rooms of British and American sea-fighters in European waters. It seems that not long before the destroyers were due to arrive Captain Edward R. G. R. Evans, C.B., who was second in command of the Scott Antarctic Expedition, came up the Thames on board his battered destroyer, the Broke.
If the war became general, and involving several districts, they formed themselves into a threefold division of highway, bush, and sea-fighters. The fleet might consist of three hundred men, in thirty or forty canoes. The bushrangers and the fleet were principally dreaded, as there was no calculating where they were, or when they might pounce unawares upon some unguarded settlement.
It was at dinner aboard one of the great, grey sea-fighters that we laughed at the yarn of a young middy, in charge of one of the cutters off Gallipoli when the Turks were sending shells like rain. This midshipman ordered his men to take cover. His men included bearded fellows twice his size and age. They obeyed, as they always obey.
So famous were his exploits, and so scanty the actual knowledge of them in his own time, that "he was not dead before his life became a fairy-tale." But history has distinguished fact from legend in the life of this naval hero, whose undisputed achievements have kept his name conspicuous among his country's foremost sea-fighters.
In the early part of this century there lived at Lerwick, in the Shetland Islands, a man called Liot Borson. He was no ignoble man; through sea-fishers and sea-fighters he counted his forefathers in an unbroken line back to the great Norwegian Bor, while his own life was full of perilous labor and he was off to sea every day that a boat could swim.
"But none of us has ever had the Annapolis training." "Not all of the best American sea-fighters have come out of Annapolis, sir," replied Fullerton, soberly. "If a boy gets through Annapolis there's nothing wonderful in his making a fairly good officer.
At the time of his appointment he was fifty years old, and his entire naval career was comprised in the seven or eight remaining years of his life, and yet he so bore himself in those years as to win a reputation that stands second only to that of Nelson among the sea-fighters of the English race.
They were sea-fighters, hundreds of years before they were sea-fishers; and they had been 'at home' on the North Sea, and in all the lands about it, centuries before the like of the Braelands were thought or heard tell of."
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