TE AWAMUTU COURIER. Printed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. FRIDAY, 16th AUGUST, 1940. THE NAVAL TRADITION

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 61, Issue 4320, 16 August 1940, Page 4

TE AWAMUTU COURIER. Printed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. FRIDAY, 16th AUGUST, 1940. THE NAVAL TRADITION

IN twenty years, without reconstruction, the finest battleships of the British Navy become obsolete, but the Navy itself has a continuous existence of over a thousand years. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 897 A.D. records: ‘Then King Alfred gave orders for building longships against the esks (Danish galleys), which were full nigh twice as long as the others.” They were not shaped after the Frisian model, but so as he himself thought they might be most serviceable. With the command of the sea, Alfred the Great conquered these marauders, and

except on one or two occasions, caused by internal dissension, the trident that Alfred placed in Britannia’s hand has never been plucked from her fist. In Newbolt's words:

Admirals all, they had their say (The echoes are ringing still), Admirals all, they went their way To the haven under the hill.

But they left US a kingdom none can take, The realms of the circling sea, To be ruled by the rightful sons of Blake And the Rodneys yet to be.

All through English poetry, from Beowulf and Cynewulf to Kipling and Masefield, we can hear the splash of the sea and the drone of the

wind. It is not a mere coincidence that the deteat of the Spanisn Armada and the first glorious outburst of Elizabethan song and

drama were contemporary events. Everybody knows how the sea and ships so fascinated Shakespeare that some will have it that he must himself have stood for a while before the mast. In New’ Zealand, and also in Australia, where nothing is very old, comparatively, we at once recall how closely our origins are bound up with tho tremendous traditions of the Navy. It was a famous naval captain who, to all intents and purposes, discovered these islands ano charted with rare skill and accuracy its coastline. Naval captains, with Captain Hobson at their head, were our first Governors, and the century of our colonial existence as a part of the Empire has been made possible by no other agency than the British. Navy. Not so many years ago Admiral Lord Jellicoe was Gov-ernor-General, after the battle of

Jutland, and he won exceeding popularity. With eternal vigilance over the rim of our horizons, the Navy has policed our seas, has kept or free to develop our nationhood with out submergence by a flood of Japs. Malays, and Chinese from Asia, and has protected the long, vulnerable sea-lanes for our mutual commerce. The pocket-battleship raider, let

loose on the South Atlantic before war was declared lies self-destroyed in the estuary of the River Plate, whilst its auxiliary, bereft of its imprisoned 300 sailors and of the privilege of scuttling itself with them mgloriously lies aground in the re-

cesses of a Norwegian fiord. The names of the great seamen like Drake and Blake and the rest, ,-hort. sharp monosyllables like the orders they used to give on the quarter-deck, are enshrined in English verse. The naval tradition is older than that of the Army, and the spirit of the Navy, like the lawns of Oxford, is the result of the care of centuries, resting on the example of generations of hard-bitten mariners who faced the tempest and never struck their flag. The very names of some of the ships of the King’s Navy are an epitome of British history. The Warspitc, that in 1916 became, through jammed g* *, the target of every German ship w’ithin range, was the imper-

xu »able successor of six previous Warspites, the first, launched in 1596, taking part under the command of Raleigh in the singeing of the King of Spain’s beard at Cadiz. The story of the eight Revenges is no less thrilling, the first of 441 tons, under Grenville, fighting in 1591 as gallant a battle as ship ever fought and the last of 25.750 tons under Captain E. B. Kiddle at Jutland. These are but examples of what holds true throughout the Navy. The guns of its warships send echoes rolling back across the centuries to the seadngs of Elizabeth, who wrested the supremacy of the sea from >*i. That power she has never

Vet the mission of + he great, silent Navy has been chiefly one of peace.

Two hundred years ago it harried the nest of the Barbary corsairs. Sixty years ago its task was to end the African slave trade, fulfilling the dying prayer of Livingstone. The Navy patrolling the seas in time of peace make them safe for those who go on their lawful occasions. And in these days of war it uses its mighty strength to deliver civilisation from those ruthless tyrants who, for lack of any naval tradition, flout the common decencies of the sea. And when, therefore, as yesterday Mr Anthony Eden surveyed the war, traversed its aims, and reviewed its purpose, he pointed not only to the map of Europe but to the map of the world—to the seven seas over which the Navy is supreme.