This book has evolved from another which I had for years been urged to
write by personal friends. I had chatted occasionally about my own
voyages, related incidents concerning them and the countries and
places I had visited, the ships I had sailed in, the men I had sailed
with, and the sailors of that period. It is one thing to tell
sea-tales in a cosy room and to enjoy living again for a brief time in
the days that are gone; but it is another matter when one is asked to
put the stories into book form. Needless to say for a long time I
shrank from undertaking the task, but was ultimately prevailed upon to
do so. The book was commenced and was well advanced, and, as I could
not depict the sailors of my own period without dealing--as I thought
at the time--briefly with the race of men called buccaneers who were
really the creators of the British mercantile marine and Navy, who
lived centuries before my generation, I was obliged to deal with some
of them, such as Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher, Daimper, Alexander Selkirk
of Robinson Crusoe fame, and others who combined piracy with commerce
and sailorism. After I had written all I thought necessary about the
three former, I instinctively slipped on to Nelson as the greatest
sea personality of the beginning of the last century. I found the
subject so engrossing that I could not centre my thoughts on any
other, so determined to continue my narrative, which is not, and never
was intended to be a life of Nelson. Perhaps it may be properly termed
fragmentary thoughts and jottings concerning the life of an
extraordinary human force, written at intervals when I had leisure
from an otherwise busy life.
Even if I had thought it desirable, it was hardly possible to write
about Nelson without also dealing with Britain's great adversary and
Nelson's distracted opinion of him.
It would be futile to attempt to draw a comparison between the two
men. The one was a colossal human genius, and the other, extraordinary
in the art of his profession, was entirely without the faculty of
understanding or appreciating the distinguished man he flippantly
raged at from his quarterdeck.
But be that as it may, Nelson's terrific aversion to and explosions
against the French and Napoleon, in whose history I had been absorbed
for many years, seem to me to be the deliberate outpouring of a mind
governed by feeling rather than by knowledge as to the real cause of
the wars and of how we came to be involved and continue in them. Nor
does he ever show that he had any clear conception of the history of
Napoleon's advent as the Ruler of the People with whom we were at war.
I have given this book the title of "Drake, Nelson and Napoleon"
because it seemed to me necessary to bring in Drake, the prototype,
and Napoleon, the antagonist of Nelson.
Drake's influence bore fruit in what is known as the Fleet Tradition,
which culminated in the "Nelson touch." No excuse is needed,
therefore, for writing a chapter which shows how little the seaman's
character has changed in essentials since that time. To-day, our
sailors have the same simple direct force which characterized the
Elizabethan seamen and those of Nelsonian times.
Of Napoleon I have written fully in my book "The Tragedy of St.
Helena," and have contented myself here with pointing out how the
crass stupidity and blind prejudice of his opponents have helped
largely to bring about the world-war of our own times. I have also
endeavoured to contrast the statesmanlike attitude of Napoleon with
the short-sighted policy of England's politicians and their allies at
that time.
Having planned the book on such lines, it inevitably follows that
Nelson must occupy a larger space in it than either Drake or Napoleon,
but for that I offer no apology.