The important question is, how much earlier than Ralegh’s are these orders of Gorges’s treatise?  Can we approximately fix their date?  Certainly not with any degree of precision, but nevertheless we are not quite without light.  To begin with there is the harsh punishment for not attending prayers, which is thoroughly characteristic of Tudor times.  Then there is an article, which Ralegh omits, relating to the use of ‘musket-arrows.’  Gorges’s article runs:  ’If musket-arrows be used, to have great regard that they use not but half the ordinary charge of powder, otherwise more powder will make the arrow fly double.’  Now these arrows we know to have been in high favour for their power of penetrating musket-proof defences about the time of the Armada.  They were a purely English device, and were taken by Richard Hawkins upon his voyage to the South Sea in 1593.  He highly commends them, but nevertheless they appear to have fallen out of fashion, and no trace of their use in Jacobean times has been found.[6]

A still more suggestive indication exists in the heading which is prefixed to Gorges’s Appendix.  It runs as follows:—­’A form of orders and directions to be given by an admiral in conducting a fleet through the Narrow Seas for the better keeping together or relieving one another upon any occasion of distress or separation by weather or by giving chase.  For the understanding whereof suppose that a fleet of his majesty’s consisting of twenty or thirty sail were bound for serving on the west part of Ireland, as Kinsale haven for example.’  The words ‘his majesty’ show the Appendix was penned under James I; but why did Gorges select this curious example for explaining his orders?  We can only remember that it was exactly upon such an occasion that he had served with his father in 1578.  There is therefore at least a possibility that the orders in question may be a copy or an adaptation of some which Sir William Gorges had issued ten years before the Armada.  Certainly no situation had arisen since Elizabeth’s death to put such an idea into the writer’s head, and the points of rendezvous mentioned in Gorges’s first article are exactly those which Sir William would naturally have given.

On evidence so inconclusive no certainty can be attained.  All we can say is that Gorges’s Appendix points to a possibility that Ralegh’s remarkable twenty-ninth article may have been as old as the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, and that the reason why it has not survived in the writings of any of the great Elizabethan admirals is either that the tactics it enjoins were regarded as a secret of the seamen’s ‘mystery’ or were too trite or commonplace to need enunciation.  At any rate in the face of the Gorges precedent it cannot be said, without reservation, that this rudimentary form of line ahead or attack in succession was invented by Ralegh, or that it was not known to the men who fought the Armada.