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still beside the platform he had dressed me a fly with no equipment but the knife and his blunt fingers and broken nails. I filled a basket with it in the course of the day, and it reposes in my fly-book yet, with one other of Tom's dressing.

The termination of the Great War had invested the surviving warriors of the village with a glamour of gallantry which their friends and kinsmen decided to recognise by the public bestowal of commemorative medallions. The ceremony took place in the public hall in the presence of as many of the community as could be pushed, levered, jammed, and wedged within its confines. The blushbaring victims of this intimate and touching, though very embar

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rassing little ceremony, of whom I was one, were assembled in a row on the platform at the end of the hall, and in turn made a brief speech of thanks. My turn came last, and on its conclusion I scrambled hastily from the dais, and plunged into the heated throng making for the door. Here I came face to face with Toom Sarni. He spoke no word, but thrust into my hand, with a mysterious gesture that had something masonic about it, a twist of paper.

I opened it under the flickering glare of the gas-lamp across the black and muddy road, and found lying in my palm, dressed with exquisite craftsmanship, a Coch-y-bondhu fly.

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sound of the river alters to another key. The shrill voices are thin and remote, somehow menacing. . . . Northern Spain no longer, but a shallow river in Labrador, with the mosquitoes humming in a relentless cloud round my head-net. sea-trout, well and truly hooked, makes his last exhausted leap. The smoke of the "smudge to windward drifts across the eyes, blurring all vision. . . .

It clears again to show the river widened to a vast expanse of water-in fact, no river at all, but a steel-blue lake in the Laurentian Hills, fringed with hemlock and holding in the mirror of its surface the reflec

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tion of a single star. The North-American Indian behind me stirs his paddle, and the canoe glides forward half a dozen yards. Will the light hold until the big chap we are stalking rises once more? Another and another star appears; a gaggle of geese pass far off across the afterglow; somewhere ashore a hidden calls harshly out of the forest. The stillness seems to hold suspense imprisoned in iron bands. Have we put him down? Another imperceptible stroke with the paddle. dimple and a series of concentric rings widen suddenly on the surface ahead. A movement of the wrist and elbow, the swish of the silk line through

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IN the year 1735 Dom Bernardo Gomes de Brito, Portuguese man of letters, published a book at Lisbon, and it is a very useful companion to Estudies for any one who hapopens to be looking into the early days of European navigation in Eastern seas. name of it is 'Historia Tragico Maritima.' A translation is I surely not necessary, for everybody knows at once that what Bernardo Gomes de Brito published and dedicated to King John V. is a history of shipwrecks. His three volumes are well printed on good paper, and when bound, as they ought to be, in Spanish calf, do credit to the press of Lisbon, and look well on a shelf. Nor is their merit by any means confined to their outside. Their matter is authentic and adequately worded. Dom Bernardo did not compose the narratives which fill his volumes entirely by himself. He collected the reports of contemporaries and survivors, of whom some were Jesuit missionaries, or he reprinted the accounts published at the time by authority. They are in the main readable, and they are, to the honour of the writers be it said, surprisingly candid.

The authors, and that again is to be noted by way of praise, kept to happenings within their

VOL. CCXVI.—NO. MCCCX.

own experience-to Portuguese shipwrecks. They were in no danger of being gravelled for lack of matter. One out of four, or in the later days of Portugal's importance in the East, one out of three of their carracks and galleons foundered or were stranded on the way out or home. This could not have been the case if there had not been mismanagement and bad seamanship in the navigating, and shocking negligence or corruption in the fitting out of the ships. But there was more against all who sailed the Eastern seas in the fifteenth century and later too.

The rigging was ill-adjusted, the vessels were weakly constructed. Nautical instruments were poor. It was possible to ascertain the latitude, the position of places north and south, when you could land and use your mariner's astrolabe or your backstaff on firm ground. The longitudes, the eastness or westness so to speak, of places could never be fixed with a near approach to accuracy. As for charts, every seaman knew that no faith was to be placed in them. Mapmaking was a learned business in the sixteenth century, and in that age learning had an awful reverence for the authority of the Greeks and Romans. It was impossible for a scholar 2 G 2

to believe that illiterate seafaring men who did not know Greek by sight, or more Latin than the prayers they were taught to repeat by rote, could be better informed than Ptolemy or Strabo. Moreover, the hasty observations of the sailors themselves, taken in thick weather, went down on charts, and stayed there too, far into the eighteenth century. No wonder if experienced mariners. when speaking or writing for the instruction of beginners, dwelt on the untrustworthiness of all charts. They never marked all the dangers, and those they did indicate were commonly put down at the wrong place. Therefore, said the wisdom of age, which had often been bought at a great price, trust only in "God and a good lookout " station men aloft to report, keep a sharp eye on the colour of the water, anchor by night if your lead warns you that you are getting into shallow water, and wait for daylight. It was all true for English and Dutch as well as for Portuguese. If they suffered more than we, or the Hollanders, it was not because they were all ignorant. There were Portuguese seamen who knew whatever could be within the knowledge of their generation. Their wisdom cried aloud in the streets of Goa and of Lisbon, but greed and corruption were deaf, and so no man marked them.

Therefore it was that the Portuguese suffered more than did we or the Netherlanders.

Their wrecks form an essential part of their history in the East. Mr Theal has to record some in his volume on The Portuguese in South Africa.' But the "Merchants of London trading to the East" did not escape such losses. Their captains and factors were not 80 virtuous as to be wholly incapable of misconduct and folly. We hear of a ship engaged in a port to port voyage out there which capsized because her skipper had overloaded and misloaded her in pure greed for his own benefit as he thought. Sir Thomas Dale lost the best vessel in his squadron in 1618 by stranding on the island Engaño off the Straits of Sunda. Three years earlier Sir David Middleton was lost in a storm on the coast of Madagascar. The great Trades Increase, the largest merchant ship so far built in England, launched in the presence of King James I. and Henry, Prince of Wales, perished by fire on the coast of Java. She was the flagship of Sir Henry Middleton, who commanded the Sixth Voyage. He had beached her for repairs, and our version of the story was that envious Portuguese rivals bribed natives to set her alight. her alight. The Javans said that she was burnt by the divinity who ruled on that beach, to punish Sir Henry Middleton for refusing to offer a sacrifice; and apparently it is true that Sir Henry did refuse to homologate a pagan practice. So, in the opinion