sailer than the others, this ship was soon a long way ahead; and William had a mariner sent to the top of the mainmast to see if the fleet were following.  “I see nought but sea and sky,” said the mariner.  William had the ship brought to; and, the second time, the mariner said, “I see four ships.”  Before long he cried, “I see a forest of masts and sails.”  On the 29th of September, St. Michael’s day, the expedition arrived off the coast of England, at Pevensey, near Hastings, and “when the tide had ebbed, and the ships remained aground on the strand,” says the chronicles the landing was effected without obstacle; not a Saxon soldier appeared on the coast.  William was the last to leave his ship; and on setting foot on the sand he made a false step and fell.  “Bad sign!” was muttered around him; “God have us in His keeping!” “What say you, lords?” cried William:  “by the glory of God, I have grasped this land with my hands; all that there is of it is ours.”

[Illustration:  Normans landing on English Coast——­353]

With what forces William undertook the conquest of England, how many ships composed his fleet, and how many men were aboard the ships, are questions impossible to be decided with any precision, as we have frequently before had occasion to remark, amidst the exaggerations and disagreements of chroniclers.  Robert Wace reports, in his Romance of Rou, that he had heard from his father, one of William’s servants on this expedition, that the fleet numbered six hundred and ninety-six vessels, but he had found in divers writings that there were more than three thousand.  M. Augustin Thierry, after his learned researches, says, in his history of the Conquest of England by the Normans, that “four hundred vessels of four sails, and more than a thousand transport ships, moved out into the open sea, to the sound of trumpets and of a great cry of joy raised by sixty thousand throats.”  It is probable that the estimate of the fleet is pretty accurate, and that of the army exaggerated.  We saw in 1830 what efforts and pains it required, amidst the power and intelligent ability of modern civilization, to transport from France to Algeria thirty-seven thousand men aboard three squadrons, comprising six hundred and seventy-five ships of all sorts.  Granted that in the eleventh century there was more haphazard than in the nineteenth, and that there was less care for human life on the eve of a war; still, without a doubt, the armament of Normandy in 1066 was not to be compared with that of France in 1830, and yet William’s intention was to conquer England, whereas Charles X. thought only of chastising the dey of Algiers.