The Honour of the Flag

Excerpt

Manifold are the historic interests of the river Thames.  There is scarcely a foot of its mud from London Bridge to Gravesend Reach that is not as “consecrated” as that famous bit of soil which Dr. Samuel Johnson and Mr. Richard Savage knelt and kissed on stepping ashore at Greenwich.  One of the historic interests, however, threatens to perish out of the annals.  It does not indeed rise to such heroic proportions as you find in the story of the Dutch invasion of the river, or in old Hackluyt’s solemn narrative of the sailing of the expedition organised by Bristol’s noble worthy, Sebastian Cabot; but it is altogether too good and stirring to merit erasure from the Thames’s history books by the neglect or ignorance of the historian.