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Armed men are not proofs; and granting that hot blood and mortal infirmity of judgment have caused Tostig to err against you and the right, think still of his qualities to reign over men whose lands, and whose rivers, lie ever exposed to the dread Northern sea-kings. Where will ye find a chief with arm as strong, and heart as dauntless? By his mother's side he is allied to your own lineage.
Lord Cochrane, who was afterwards described as the last of the English sea-kings, rushed over to Greece to give his genius and his daring to the help of the Greeks in their struggle against overwhelming odds.
He looked as strong and well as when, on the Irish cliffs, he had longed for the free, wild life of the sea-kings, but he did not look so youthful; yet the touch of sadness that now rested at times on his countenance gave him a far more regal air, though he knew it not, than he ever possessed before. He was dressed in a simple suit of dark grey.
Four strokes, and the bow man receives as nearly as possible half a pint of water on his jersey! Steady! No shirking, my sons of the sea-kings. Twenty strokes more the peril is past; and the Seadog bounds on to the deck of his stout vessel. He is saved. A basket with a turbot is in the stern-sheets; that turbot will form part of the Seadog's humble evening meal.
Each of the Minoas which appear so numerously on the coasts of the Mediterranean, from Sicily on the west to Gaza on the east, marks a spot where the King or Kings who bore the name of Minos once held a garrison or a trading-station, and their number shows how wide-reaching was the power of the Cretan sea-Kings.
He lay bound in my ship; he reviled and he taunted me in the hour of my gloom; and when the blood of the sea-kings flowed in fire through my veins. And I lifted my axe in ire; and my men lifted theirs, and so, and so! Again I say Deadly was my sin! Think not that I seek now to make less my guilt, as I sought when I deemed that life was yet long, and power was yet sweet.
The Minoan Empire, like our own, rested upon sea-power; its great Kings were the Sea-Kings of the ancient world the first Sea-Kings known to history, over-lords of the Ægean long before 'the grave Tyrian trader' had learned 'the way of a ship in the sea, or the land-loving Egyptian had ventured his timid squadrons at the command of a great Queen so far as Punt.
Our most constant companions were the Mollies; for which bird the North Sea men have as great an affection and veneration as sailors round the Cape of Good Hope have for Mother Carey's chickens or the superb albatross: They have an idea that the spirits of the brave old Greenland skippers, the successors of the fierce sea-kings, have, when quitting their mortal frames, entered these fleet denizens of the air, still desirous to wander over the scenes of their former exploits.
It was time to return the visit of the Armada. Some of the sea-kings were gone. Those magnificent freebooters, Drake and Hawkins, had just died in the West Indies, and doughty Sir Roger Williams had left the world in which he had bustled so effectively, bequeathing to posterity a classic memorial of near a half century of hard fighting, written, one might almost imagine, in his demi-pique saddle.
They fled, by throngs, to church and monastery, and were happy, by enslaving themselves, to escape the more terrible bondage of the sea-kings. During the brief dominion of the Norman Godfrey, every free Frisian was forced to wear a halter around his neck. The lot of a Church-slave was freedom in comparison. To kill him was punishable by a heavy fine.
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