the Thames to Gravesend, forced the boom which protected the Medway, and captured sixteen British vessels, including the famous Royal Charles, the pick of the English Fleet, and towed her to Holland.[1]
Holland owed her temporary triumph entirely to Great Britain's blunders, her final and permanent discomfiture to the latter country's natural strategic superiority; nothing therefore but a repetition of the same blunders on a magnified scale, under conditions which render them practically unthinkable, can assure to Germany so much as the chance of emerging victorious from a struggle with this country, for is not her strategical position worse than Holland's, her coast-line shorter, her harbourage more limited, her communications with the outer world longer and more open
- ↑ The Story of the British Navy, by E, Keble Chatterton, pp. 213, 214.
