CHAPTER IV
It was during the morning of July 6, 2137, that we entered the mouth of the Thames—to the best of my knowledge the first Western keel to cut those historic waters for two hundred and twenty-one years!
But where were the tugs and the lighters and the barges, the lightships and the buoys, and all those countless attributes which went to make up the myriad life of the ancient Thames?
Gone! All gone! Only silence and desolation reigned where once the commerce of the world had centered.
I could not help but compare this once great water-way with the waters about our New York, or Rio, or San Diego, or Valparaiso. They had become what they are today during the two centuries of the profound peace which we of the navy have been prone to deplore. And what, during this same period, had
