It has been observed that if a sailor had climbed into a time machine in the year 1850, and was randomly transported through time, he would have found himself more at home as a foremast jack in the Spanish Armada, which had sailed against England in 1588, than in one of the big steel battleships of 1900. In those latter fifty years of the nineteenth century, a period brief enough to span one man’s career, the Industrial Revolution had utterly demolished and recreated the hardware and technology of naval warfare.
