j62	ENGLISH    SAGA
The lovely ships that carried the tribute of the world to the
cliffs of England sailed, since the repeal of the Navigation Act in
1849, under many flags. Yet most of them, including the best,
were owned and built by Britons, for free trade if it took privi-
leges from the merchant marine with one hand gave with an-
other since it stimulated interchange of sea-borne merchandise.
With the absorption of her chief shipping rival, the United
States, in a long and exhausting civil war during the early
'sixties, Britain had things very much her own way at sea for
three halcyon decades. The new iron ships, triumphs of the
marine engineering works of the Clyde and Tyne, of Birkenhead
and Belfast, were beginning to come into their own: the Great
Eastern, the famous iron leviathan, 700 feet in length and 80 in
beam, was launched at Millwall in 1858. Yet two years later not
more than a tenth of the merchant service of the United Kingdom
was steam driven.
In that year the country's sailing tonnage reached its zenith.
These proud masterpieces of timber and canvas, cleaving the
ocean "with mainyards backed and bows of cream and foam"
were the key to Britain's commercial and industrial supremacy.
They were recognised as the elite of the sea in every port of the
earth.^1
This art and skill and the wealth that sprang from it rested
^1Maseficld, who once himself served before the mast, has hymned their vanished
glory:
^a These splendid ships, each with her grace, her glory,
Her memory of old song and comrade's story,
Still in my mind the image of life's need,
Beauty in hardest action, beauty indeed.
* They built great ships and sailed them' sounds most brave,
Whatever arts we have or fail to have;
I touch my country's mind, I come to grips
Yuth half her purpose thinking of these ships,
That art untouched by softness, all that line,
Drawn ringing hard to stand the test of brine;
That nobleness and grandeur, all that beauty,
Born of a manly life and bitter duty;
That splendour of fine bows which yet could stand
The shock of rollers never checked by land.
That art of masts, sail crowded, fit to break,
Yet stayed to strength, and back-stayed into rake,
The life demanded by that art, the keen
Eye-puckered, hard-case seamen, silent, lean,
They are grander things than all the art of towns,
Their tests are tempests and the sea that drowns.
They are my country's line, her great art done,
Bv strong brains labouring on the thought unwon,
They mark our passage as a race of men,
Earth will not see such ships as these agen."
John Masefield, * Ships* (Collected Poems, 386.)