From the French
and Spanish prizes we got many valuable hints in the designing of ships,
and our builders improved upon them with the best workmanship and
materials in the world, so that the warships of Cook's time differed
little from, and in many cases were, the hulks which, until very recent
years, lay in our naval seaports. It ought not to be necessary to remind
readers that Nelson's _Victory_, still afloat in Portsmouth harbour, was
launched in 1765.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN JAMES COOK, R.N. From picture in the National
Portrait Gallery, painted by John Webber, K.A. _To face p._ 48.]
The sailors were for the most part pressed men, but there was a notable
difference between them and the seamen of Dampier's time. They were, and
remained for long after, wild, improvident, overgrown children such as the
nautical novelists who wrote a few years later [Sidenote: 1769]
have pictured them; but the lawless rascals who manned king's ships or
were pirates by turns, as fortune provided, were rapidly dying out, and
veterans of the Spanish main were mostly to be found spending the evening
of their days spinning yarns of treasure islands to the yokels of the
village alehouse.
One of the causes which led to this improvement in the class of seamen was
the disgraceful behaviour of the crew of the _Wager_, a ship of Anson's
squadron, when she was lost off the Horn in 1740.
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