The Last Fight of the Revenge Book Reviews

The Last Fight of the Revenge by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh Book Summary

Which is the greatest name upon the roll of English ships? Which is the most sure of a lasting and effectual renown? There was a day when all England would have given but one answer. If you ask the Elizabethan of 1580, you will find him very positive upon the point, and not a little exalted. Drawn round the world by the Divine Hand, under the Northern and Southern Pole stars, victor over a hundred enemies, ballasted with royal treasure, & steered by the captured charts of Spanish Admirals, the little ship that sailed as the Pelican, comes home again as the Golden Hind. She brings her fabulous booty and her still more fabulous romance from Plymouth Sound to Deptford, and then and there the great names of the past—the Christophers, theGreat Harrys, the Dragons and the Swans—are all finally eclipsed. Drake, kneeling upon her deck, receives his knighthood from the hand of Gloriana, and the Golden Hind herself, bidding farewell for ever to wind and wave, is laid up as a national monument—“consecrated to perpetuall Memory.”  She is remembered still, but it is hardly for her own sake; her story is a part of Drake’s, and not the greatest part. Question your Elizabethan again some ten years later, and hers is no longer the name that he will give you; he will speak of things that are even nearer to his heart, and to ours; for though an Englishman will always, I suppose, lick his lips over a tale of treasure, it is the fighting and not the plunder that he is really fitted to enjoy, and in his imagination even the jewels of the Golden Hind will shine with a less bright and steady glow than the battle-lanterns of the Revenge.
The Revenge is a part of no man; she saw many captains and more triumphs than one. She had a personality, as great ships always have; she had a career, a life of her own. She has a life after death; not only a posterity but a true survival. She may be said, in no merely figurative sense, to be on active service still. If the day ever comes when she no longer helps to keep the sea for us, it can only be when Time shall have paid off the British Navy.
The last of her successes is more freshly remembered by our friends than by ourselves. A neighbouring potentate, whom pride in his English descent had exhilarated to a pitch of splendid audacity worthy of an Elizabethan, challenged us by a telegram encouraging a vassal State to throw off the suzerainty of the Queen. If the message meant anything, it was a promise of armed support; but the promise had none of the Elizabethan hardihood to back it, and proved bankrupt as soon as the Flying Squadron put to sea. It was not that this force was unknown, or suddenly created; the ships had long been on the Navy List, their names, guns, tonnage and complement all as familiar to the German Kaiser as to the rest of the world. But there was a sense abroad of something more than brute strength: a memory of great traditions, of inherited skill, of undaunted and indomitable tenacity. When on that January 15, 1896, the English Admiral hoisted his flag in the Revenge, and Her Majesty’s Marines marched on board under the command of Captain Drake, the enemy disappeared from the seas, and we made haste to forget another naval victory.
The lesson, we may hope, remains; this was not a triumph of physical force. The challenger’s nerve, and not his ships, failed him; he feared his own destruction more than he desired ours. In an age even more materially minded, if possible, than those which went before it, we are increasingly diligent to measure our armour and our guns, to reckon up our horse-power and the number of our hits at target practice. It is not for any man to blame us; we should be wrong if we neglected these things, but we should be still more wrong if we forgot for a moment that there were years in our history when it was not we but our enemies who had the advantage of armament, and that whether by combination or otherwise, such a time may come upon us again. Build as we will, we cannot secure ourselves against it for ever; but we can forestall it by facing it with the remembrance of the past. It was by moral superiority that the Elizabethans came through their trial. The Spaniards were contending to maintain their hold upon the wealth of the world, and they fought as men will fight in such a cause—courageously, but not desperately; the English fought as, at sea, they must always be fighting, for national existence, and they took care—it was a great part of their strength—to leave their enemies in no doubt that they meant in every engagement to make the affair fatal to one side or the other. This is a policy which we did not follow in the latest of our wars; we may have been justified, we had our reasons, and we paid the full price; but on the day when we abandon it upon the sea, we shall have thrown away our only sure defence and our deadliest weapon. Men and nations are never so nearly invincible and never half so terrible as when they are armed with contempt of death; and that such an ardent temper can defy, discourage and destroy mere bulk or numbers, “even beyond credit and to the Height of some Heroicall Fable”—this is the meaning of the last fight of theRevenge.

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