by Barkilphedro—­the floating receptacles containing messages and declarations awakened particularly the attention of the Admiralty.  Shipwrecks are one of England’s gravest cares.  Navigation being her life, shipwreck is her anxiety.  England is kept in perpetual care by the sea.  The little glass bottle thrown to the waves by the doomed ship, contains final intelligence, precious from every point of view.  Intelligence concerning the ship, intelligence concerning the crew, intelligence concerning the place, the time, the manner of loss, intelligence concerning the winds which have broken up the vessel, intelligence concerning the currents which bore the floating flask ashore.  The situation filled by Barkilphedro has been abolished more than a century, but it had its real utility.  The last holder was William Hussey, of Doddington, in Lincolnshire.  The man who held it was a sort of guardian of the things of the sea.  All the closed and sealed-up vessels, bottles, flasks, jars, thrown upon the English coast by the tide were brought to him.  He alone had the right to open them; he was first in the secrets of their contents; he put them in order, and ticketed them with his signature.  The expression “loger un papier au greffe,” still used in the Channel Islands, is thence derived.  However, one precaution was certainly taken.  Not one of these bottles could be unsealed except in the presence of two jurors of the Admiralty sworn to secrecy, who signed, conjointly with the holder of the jetsam office, the official report of the opening.  But these jurors being held to secrecy, there resulted for Barkilphedro a certain discretionary latitude; it depended upon him, to a certain extent, to suppress a fact or bring it to light.

These fragile floating messages were far from being what Barkilphedro had told Josiana, rare and insignificant.  Some times they reached land with little delay; at others, after many years.  That depended on the winds and the currents.  The fashion of casting bottles on the surface of the sea has somewhat passed away, like that of vowing offerings, but in those religious times, those who were about to die were glad thus to send their last thought to God and to men, and at times these messages from the sea were plentiful at the Admiralty.  A parchment preserved in the hall at Audlyene (ancient spelling), with notes by the Earl of Suffolk, Grand Treasurer of England under James I., bears witness that in the one year, 1615, fifty-two flasks, bladders, and tarred vessels, containing mention of sinking ships, were brought and registered in the records of the Lord High Admiral.