What knowledge is useful?
Dean John McArthur on Elizabeth I
Transcript
So if you thought about Elizabeth the First, she sent thousands of little ships down the Thames every year, literally thousands, and thousands never came back. They were lost in the high seas, or they couldn't—they didn't have clocks yet, on ships at least, and so they couldn't figure out where in hell they were, in terms of longitude. And plus, you know, they'd end up on the rocks, or on a coral reef in the southern seas. And there was, as they sailed down the Thames there was no really any very good idea what they — the ones who came back—what they would come back with. . . . .
So that’s what I felt here . . . .
That if we could just get people into their own sailboat, and get them to sail down the Thames, God knows what they would come up with, you know, and how they might develop the younger people individually if they got out of the general management sailing ship, and got into their own.
But the best bet was that, you know, just like with Elizabeth, a bunch of them would make it back, and some of them would have real treasure. And so just like in, you know, and the British, eventually they built up the British Navy, and they dominated the world for a hundred years. And I think it all went back to kind of this entrepreneurial strategy or approach that she and her group had conceived.