WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 180, 24 April 1924, Page 6

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM '

(By

T.D.H.)

Mr. Howard Carter has begun E lawsuit against the Empire Exhibition for making a representation of King Tutankhamen’s tomb. —If a cat may look at a king, that was only in the days before Mr. Carter started digging them up.

Although it has been British seat power that has kept secure the 1~-thousand-mile ocean road to New Zealand. it is a little curious to think that it is only to-day that, this country, lor the first time in its history, sees a first-class vessel of the Royal Navy. Warships of the lesser sort have found their ways into these waters freely enough ever since the days when the humble little H.M.S. Endeavour, taken from the Whitby coal trade for Captain Cook’s expedition, arrived in New Zealand waters a century and a half ago. As was recalled in this column a day or two back. Captain Cook was accompanied on his second visit by Captain Alexander Hood, R.N., a cousin of the famous seaman after whom H.M.S. Hood, is named, and anyone who turns over the pages of a history book of the Maori Wars will find the names of many naval officers who m later years made their names famous in the fleet. The Navy in those days of brigs, slcops, and frigates did a lot of hard work in this quarter of the world, even if it never received any particular credit for it from the powers that were in Whitehall.

It was July, 1846, that Wellington saw a steam-driven naval vessel for the first time in H.M.S. Driver. The old Driver, Mr. Cowan tells us in his history, was a wonderful craft to many a colonist, and amazing to the Maoris, who congregated to watch the strange pakeha ship driven by fires in her inside, and moving easily against wind and tide. The late Mr. S. Percy Smith records in one of his books that many, many years before the Driver ai rived the Maoris had a belief that the white man who had come and gone away would one day come back in a ship driven by fire. H.M.S. Driver, which was considered such a startling revelation of modern efficiency in tha Wellington of seventy-eight years ago, vzas a modest little paddle steamer of 1085 tons, with engines of 2SO horsepower. was rigged as a brig, and had an amazing figure-head representing a coach-driver with his many-caped coat and whip. Before she reached New Zealand she had been engaged in suppressing piracy in the East Indies, and perhaps the world has not moved forward so rapidly after all, for we still hear to-day of pirates m the China Seas-

H.M.S. Hood, which we are to see to-day, is a very different proposition from the wonder ship that amazed Wellington seventy-eight years back, and if the next seventy-eight years is to see as great an advance it staggers the imagination to picture the warships Wellington may expect to see then. The Hood herself is the outcome of a development that has gone on without break from the days of Alfred the Great over a thousand years ago. King Alfred was the dreadnoughtbuilder of his day, for he built warships twice as long as those of the Danes who harried his coasts, and with sixty oars. They were built too to a special design of his own. ■ The Crusades stirred up great interest in Britain in seafaring matters, and the building of Richard Coeur de Lion’s fleet of 230 vessels was England’s biggest naval effort up to that time. Gallant King Henry V was a great builder of large vessels for his fleet, “great ships, cogs, carracks, ships, barges, and ballingers,” some of them running up 1000 tons, but most of them from 420 to 520 tons. Henry VII, with his “Sovereign” and Henry VIII with his “Royal Harry,” each in turn went one better than anything beforq known in the fleet. Tho defeat of the Spanish Armada gave the Navy another big lift, and Janies I. and Charles I. made another advance by building the Prince Royal and the Sovereign of the Seas, which were the earliest types of the modern wooden battleship. The ill-fated Royal George of 1756. which capsised at Spithead. was the last word in her clay, and displaced 2000 tons and carried a ciew of 750 men. Finally, the great three-deckers before steam power came in ran up to over 3000 tons. In the Crimean War period the Navy’s best was the. Duke of Wellington, which was 240 feet long, displaced 5830 tons, had an indicated horse-power of 1999, and speed of just under ten knots. She carried 131 guns. In 1859 came the armour-plated Warrior of 8830 tons and 14 knots, and from this point a gradual process of evolution until twenty years back the world was startled by the building of the first all big gun ship. H.M.S. Dreadnought with her 17.900 tons displacement, 23.000 horse-power, ten twelve-inch guns, and speed of twentv-one knots-To-dav the world has almost forgotten the old naval jargon of Dreadnoughts and super-Dreadnoughts, and in the Hood we have a vessel with well over twice the tonnage of the Dreadnought, with over six times her and with fifty per cent, more speed. The professional humorists of the United States are busier than ever, and a favourite side-line —“pars” attributed, to some small journal in a small towni —is being steadily developed. Here, for example, are a few Swampbog news items:—(l) Oscar Jones was wearing gravel in his shoes the other day so he could forget his toothache. (2) The Turtle Creek editor says his town i« healthier than Swampbog. As a matter of fact. Turtle Creek is so unhealthy that every family there owns its private hearse. (3) Our Turtle Creek correspondent writes:—“A. brick fell off Joe Thomas’s chimney yesterday. If anything else ever happens down here I’ll let you know.” (4) The editor was called out yesterday by Jim Todd to see a freak animal—a twoheaded jack. He pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket and r-howed us —the lack of spades. He would have been thirty years old next Thursday. THE KING’S HIGHWAY. AVhen moonlight flecks the cruiser’s decks And engines rumble slow, When Drake's own star is bright a bo vo And Time has gone below. They may hear who list the far-off sound Of a long-dead never-dead mirth. In the mid-watch still they may hear who will The song of the Larboard Berth. In a dandy frigate or a well-found brifi. x r 111 a sloop or a seventy-1 our, In a great First-rate with an Admiral’s flag, And a hundred guns or more. In a fair light air, in a dead foul wind, At midnight or midday, Till the good ship sink her mids shall drink To the King and the King’s Highway 1 The mids they hear —no fear, no fear! They know their own ship’s ghost: Their voting blood beats to the same old song And roars to the same old toast. So long as the sea-wind b!ows unbound And the sea-wave breaks in spray. For the Island’s sons the world still runs “The King and the King’s Highway!” —Sir Henry Newbolt,