Excerpt from The Successors of DrakeMainly the work is concerned with naval history, but not so exclusively as the two previous volumes. Military affairs begin to intrude themselves. Indeed it is doubtful whether the naval and the military history of England should ever be written apart. The real importance of maritime power is its in¿uence on military Operations. This is the thesis which lies at the bottom Of all the teach ing with which Captain Mahan's name is pre-eminently associated. TO forget it is the chief danger Of the heresy which Elizabethan soldiers vainly derided as the 'idolatry Of Neptune.' The direction of a great war can only be followed out in the mutual reaction of the two forces, and how closely they are inter-dependent nothing shows more emphatically than the last years Of the Elizabethan war. It is impossible to deal adequately with the naval operations without understanding what the soldiers were doing. To treat, for instance, of the action of the ¿eet during the Spanish descent on Ireland in 1601 without following the strategy ashore might be naval chronicling. It would not be history.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.