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All the crucial naval battles in the history of Europe except two—the crushing of the Spanish Armada, and Jutland—have been fought on one piece of water. It is not even dignified with the name of ocean, not even included among the Seven Seas. Nevertheless the Romans called it the Sea in the Middle of the Land, as if there were no other lands, no other seas: the Mediterranean.
There, for many weeks, a battle has been fought which in number of fighting units involved, in number of men engaged, in the number of its days, in its promise of consequences, may be the greatest battle of them all. Last week this mighty battle was obviously reaching a decisive stage.
Beside this battle, that of Salamis (480 B.C.) seems now a great exercise in fustian: there Xerxes, surrounded by his brilliant court, sitting on a throne on a shoulder of Mt. Aegaleus, watched his hopes of world conquest crushed on the crescent of water below, watched the brazen-beaked Athenian triremes dart in and bite the fat bellies of his own oversized craft, 400 little ships crushing twice as many big ones. One of the Athenian seamen that day was a poetic fellow named Aeschylus.
Beside the Battle of 1941, that of Actium (31 B.C.) in which Antony tried to stave off the one-man dictatorship of Octavian (later Emperor Augustus), seems a pathetic farce. Shakespeare tells how Cleopatra finally withdrew her 60 galleys from the action and fled in her sumptuous royal barge, whereupon She once being loof'd, the noble ruin of her magic, Antony, claps on liis sea-wing, and (like a doting mallard) leaving the fight in heighth, flies after her.
Beside the Battle of 1941, the 16th-century Battle of Lepanto, which finally reasserted the dominance of Christendom over the infidel Turk, seems an uncomplicated affair. In it 208 low Christian galleys and six monstrous galleasses submitted 250 Turkish galleys to a parade of broadsides, sank 80 and captured 130. During the action Cervantes (Don Quixote) received three gunshot wounds, one of which maimed his left hand—"for the greater glory of the right," he said.
Whether or not the battle which was in progress last week would be remembered in history above the great battles of Lord Nelson—the Nile (1798), which broke Napoleon's Oriental ambitions, and Trafalgar'(1805), which limited his ambitions in Europe—remained to be seen. Those affairs exposed the marrow of British power. One summer evening at Abukir Bay, after a maddening two months' search in which his fleet had been without benefit of speedy frigates for scouting, Nelson with his 14 ships of the line came on the fleet of 15 Frenchmen at anchor. Moving down both sides of the badly arranged enemy, the British overcame one vessel at a time> Only two escaped. The French flagship Orient took fire and blew up—and with it died the flag captain's son, Giacomo Casabianca, whose willful refusal to get away with the crew won him a sort of immortality as Felicia Dorothea Hemans' Boy on the Burning Deck.