Daily Press

The First French Navy.

Away back in the eighth century Charlemagne had organized a sort of coast guard by enrolling all the seaborne population who lived within one and a half miles of the shore, but with the dismemberment of the vast Carolingian empire all dreams of naval greatness were dissipated. Long afterward Charles V. built some military nefs on the Atlantic, and Louis XI.'s galleys chased the Barbary pirates who infested the shores of the Mediterranean, but it was Francis I. apparently who first conceived the idea of a great fleet, purchased and equipped from the royal treasury.

He converted the small fishing village of Havre into a fortified port, which speedily attracted commerce to the mouth of the Seine, and he projected a scheme-which he did not live to realize-for the construction of an oceanic navy under canvas.

"Fleets were massed in the Mediterranean," writes Mr. Norman in his "Corsairs of France," and for the first time in history a French squadron, passing through the strait of Gibraltar, defeated an English fleet off Brest, and then, moving round to the eastward, drove off the blockading squadrons of Henry VIII. from Boulogne."