of Ralegh’s and brother to Sir Arthur Gorges, who was Ralegh’s captain in the Azores expedition of 1597, and who in Ralegh’s interest wrote the account of the campaign which Purchas printed.  Though William, the son, freely quotes the experiences of the Armada campaign of 1588, he is not known to have ever held a naval command, and he calls himself ‘unexperienced.’  We may take it therefore that his treatise was mainly inspired by Ralegh, to whom indeed a large part of it is sometimes attributed.  This question, however, is of small importance.  The gist of the matter is a set of fleet orders which he has appended as a precedent at the end of his treatise, and it is on these orders that Ralegh’s are clearly based.  They commence with fourteen articles, consisting mainly of sailing instructions, similar to those which occur later in Ralegh’s set.  The fifteenth deals with fighting and bloodshed among the crews, and the sixteenth enjoins morning and evening prayer, with a psalm at setting the watch, and further provides that any man absenting himself from divine service without good cause shall suffer the ‘bilboes,’ with bread and water for twelve hours.  The whole of this drastic provision for improving the seamen’s morals has been struck out by a hurried and less clerkly hand, and in the margin is substituted another article practically word for word the same as that which Ralegh adopted as his first article.  The same hand has also erased the whole numbering of the articles up to No. 16, and has noted that the new article on prayers is to come first.[5] The articles which follow correspond closely both in order and expression to Ralegh’s, ending with No. 36, where Ralegh’s special articles relating to landing in Guiana begin.  Ralegh’s important twenty-ninth article dealing with the method of attack is practically identical with that of Gorges.  Ralegh, however, has several articles which are not in Gorges’s set, and wherever the two sets are not word for word the same, Ralegh’s is the fuller, having been to all appearances expanded from Gorges’s precedent.  This, coupled with the fact that other corrections beside those of the prayer article are embodied in Ralegh’s articles, leaves practically no doubt that Gorges’s set was the earlier and the precedent upon which Ralegh’s was based.

An apparent difficulty in the date of Gorges’s treatise need not detain us.  It was dedicated on March 16, 1618-9, to Buckingham, the new lord high admiral, but it bears indication of having been written earlier, and in any case the date of the dedication is no guide to the date of the orders in the Appendix.