Merchantmen-at-Arms

furniture of the merchants, carrying on in the historic traditional manner of a fight when there was fighting to be done, a return to trade and enterprise when the great sea-roads were cleared to commerce. Stout old Sir John Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake, Davis, Amadas, and Barlow were merchant masters, shrewd at a venture, in intervals of, and combination with, their deeds of arms. Only a small proportion of State ships were in issue with the merchants' men to scourge the great Armada from our shores. Perhaps the existence of such a vast reserve in ships and men delayed the progress of purely naval construction. Only with the coming of steam was the line drawn sharply and definitely--the branch outgrowing the interlock of the parent stem.