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In all this maritime activity, scattered as it was by the hand of fate and periodic forays of the great powers at the limit of their lines of supply, there was little attention to spare for the safety of shipping or the welfare of seamen, save only for the efforts of countless brave and unknown men who faced the sea peril with an equanimity born of long acquaintance. In this, the early bases and primitive settlements were no different from their roots in European society as a whole, which was emerging from the fatalism of an earlier age. Perhaps fatalism was the only practicable attitude to adopt in the eighteenth century, the last phase in which it was even remotely possible to run the world without the aid of the elaborate and dispassionate machines of government necessary today. In relation to ships and seamen, it was the period in which Samuel Johnson, the English sage, remarked to the effect that no man would go to sea who had contrivance enough to get himself into a jail.
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