Flag and Fleet | Page 9

to keep it well supplied, while Prince
Charlie's had nothing but slow and scanty land transport, sometimes
more dead than alive.
The only real fighting the Romans had to do afloat was against the
Norsemen, who sailed out of every harbour from Norway round to
Flanders and swooped down on every vessel or coast settlement they
thought they had a chance of taking. To keep these pirates in check
Carausius was made "Count of the Saxon Shore". It was a case of
setting a thief to catch a thief; for Carausius was a Fleming and a bit of
a pirate himself. He soon became so strong at sea that he not only kept
the other Norsemen off but began to set up as a king on his own
account. He seized Boulogne, harried the Roman shipping on the coasts

of France, and joined forces with those Franks whom the Romans had
sent into the Black Sea to check the Scythians and other wild tribes
from the East. The Franks were themselves Norsemen, who afterwards
settled in Gaul and became the forefathers of the modern French. So
Rome was now threatened by a naval league of hardy Norsemen, from
the Black Sea, through the Mediterranean, and all the way round to that
"Saxon Shore" of eastern Britain which was itself in danger from
Norsemen living on the other side of the North Sea. Once more,
however, the Romans won the day. The Emperor Constantius caught
the Franks before they could join Carausius and smashed their fleet
near Gibraltar. He then went to Gaul and made ready a fleet at the
mouth of the Seine, near Le Havre, which was a British base during the
Great War against the Germans. Meanwhile Carausius was killed by his
second-in-command, Allectus, who sailed from the Isle of Wight to
attack Constantius, who himself sailed for Britain at the very same time.
A dense fog came on. The two fleets never met. Constantius landed.
Allectus then followed him ashore and was beaten and killed in a
purely land battle.
This was a little before the year 300; by which time the Roman Empire
was beginning to rot away, because the Romans were becoming softer
and fewer, and because they were hiring more and more strangers to
fight for them, instead of keeping up their own old breed of first-class
fighting men. By 410 Rome itself was in such danger that they took
their last ships and soldiers away from Celtic Britain, which at once
became the prey of the first good fighting men who came that way;
because the Celts, never united enough to make a proper army or navy
of their own, were now weaker than ever, after having had their country
defended by other people for the last four hundred years.
CHAPTER V
THE HARDY NORSEMAN
(449-1066)
The British Empire leads the whole world both in size and population.

It ended the Great War with the greatest of all the armies, the greatest
of all the navies, and the greatest of all the mercantile marines. Better
still, it not only did most towards keeping its own--which is by far the
oldest--freedom in the world, but it also did most towards helping all its
Allies to be free. There are many reasons why we now enjoy these
blessings. But there are three without which we never could have had a
single one. The first, of course, is sea-power. But this itself depends on
the second reason, which, in its turn, depends upon the third. For we
never could have won the greatest sea-power unless we had bred the
greatest race of seamen. And we never could have bred the greatest
race of seamen unless we ourselves had been mostly bred from those
hardy Norsemen who were both the terror and the glory of the sea.
Many thousands of years ago, when the brown and yellow peoples of
the Far South-East were still groping their way about their steamy
Asian rivers and hot shores, a race of great, strong, fair-haired seamen
was growing in the North. This Nordic race is the one from which most
English-speaking people come, the one whose blood runs in the veins
of most first-class seamen to the present day, and the one whose
descendants have built up more oversea dominions, past and present,
than have been built by all the other races, put together, since the world
began.
To the sturdy Nordic stock belonged all who became famous as
Vikings, Berserkers, and Hardy Norsemen, as well as all the
Anglo-Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans, from whom came most of
the people that made the British Empire and the United States.
"Nordic" and "Norse" are, therefore, much better, because much truer,
words than "Anglo-Saxon", which only names two of the five chief
tribes from