Flag and Fleet: How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas

CHAPTER I. The Very Beginning Op Sea-Power

THE VERY BEGINNING OP SEA-POWER

(10,000 years and more B.C.)

Thousands and thousands of years ago a naked savage in southern Asia found that he could climb about quite safely on a floating log. One day another savage found that floating down stream on a log was very much easier than working his way through the woods. This taught him the first advantage of sea-power, which is, that you can often go better by water than land. Then a third savage with a turn for trying new things found out what every lumberjack and punter knows, that you need a pole if you want to shove your log along or steer it to the proper place.

By and by some still more clever savage tied two logs together and made the first raft. This soon taught him the second advantage of sea-power, which is, that, as a rule, you can carry goods very much better by water than land. Even now, if you want to move many big and heavy things a thousand miles you can nearly always do it ten times better in a ship than in a train, and ten times better in a train than by carts and horses on the very best of roads. Of course a raft is a poor, slow, clumsy sort of ship; no ship at all, in fact. But when rafts were the only "ships" in the world there certainly were no trains and nothing like one of our good roads. The water has always had the same advantage over the land; for as horses, trails, carts, roads, and trains began to be used on land, so canoes, boats, sailing ships, and steamers began to be used on water. Anybody can prove the truth of the rule for himself by seeing how much easier it is to paddle a hundred pounds ten miles in a canoe than to carry the same weight one mile over a portage.

Presently the smarter men wanted something better than a little log raft nosing its slow way along through dead shallow water when shoved by a pole; so they put a third and longer log between the other two, with its front end sticking out and turning up a little. Then, wanting to cross waters too deep for a pole, they invented the first paddles; and so made the same sort of catamaran that you can still see on the Coromandel Coast in southern India. But savages who knew enough to take catamarans through the pounding surf also knew enough to see that a log with a hollow in the upper side of it could carry a great deal more than a log that was solid; and, seeing this, they presently began making hollows and shaping logs, till at last they had made a regular dug-out canoe. When Christopher Columbus asked the West Indian savages what they called their dug-outs they said canoas; so a boat dug out of a solid log had the first right to the word we now use for a canoe built up out of several different parts.

Dug-outs were sometimes very big. They were the Dreadnought battleships of their own time and place and people. When their ends were sharpened into a sort of ram they could stave in an enemy's canoe if they caught its side full tilt with their own end. Dug-out canoes were common wherever the trees were big and strong enough, as in Southern Asia, Central Africa, and on the Pacific Coast of America. But men have always been trying to invent something better than what their enemies have; and so they soon began putting different pieces together to make either better canoes or lighter ones, or to make any kind that would do as well as or better than the dug-out. Thus the ancient Britons had coracles, which were simply very open basket-work covered with skins. Their Celtic descendants still use canvas coracles in parts of Wales and Ireland, just as the Eskimos still use skin-covered kayaks and oomiaks. The oomiak is for a family with all their baggage. The kayak--sharp as a needle and light as a feather--is for a well-armed man. The oomiak is a cargo carrier. The kayak is a man-of-war.

When once men had found out how to make and use canoes they had also found out the third and final principle of sea-power, which is, that if you live beside the water and do not learn how to fight on it you will certainly be driven off it by some enemy who has learnt how to fight there. For sea-power in time of war simply means the power to use the sea yourself while stopping the enemy from using it. So the first duty of any navy is to keep the seaways open for friends and closed to enemies. And this is even more the duty of the British Navy than of any other navy. For the sea lies between all the different parts of the British Empire; and so the life-or-death question we have to answer in every great war is this: does the sea unite us by being under British control, or does it divide us by being under enemy control? United we stand: divided we fall.

At first sight you would never believe that sea-power could be lost or won as well by birchbarks as by battleships. But if both sides have the same sort of craft, or one side has none at all, then it does not matter what the sort is. When the Iroquois paddled their birch-bark canoes past Quebec in 1660, and defied the French Governor to stop them, they "commanded" the St. Lawrence just as well as the British Grand Fleet commanded the North Sea in the Great War; and for the same reason, because their enemy was not strong enough to stop them. Whichever army can drive its enemy off the roads must win the war, because it can get what it wants from its base, (that is, from the places where its supplies of men and arms and food and every other need are kept); while its enemy will have to go without, being unable to get anything like enough, by bad and roundabout ways, to keep up the fight against men who can use the good straight roads. So it is with navies. The navy that can beat its enemy from all the shortest ways across the sea must win the war, because the merchant ships of its own country, like its men-of-war, can use the best routes from the bases to the front and back again; while the merchant ships of its enemy must either lose time by roundabout voyages or, what is sure to happen as the war goes on, be driven off the high seas altogether.

The savages of long ago often took to the water when they found the land too hot for them. If they were shepherds, a tyrant might seize their flocks. If they were farmers, he might take their land away from them. But it was not so easy to bully fishermen and hunters who could paddle off and leave no trace behind them, or who could build forts on islands that could only be taken after fights in which men who lived mostly on the water would have a much better chance than men who lived mostly on the land. In this way the water has often been more the home of freedom than the land: liberty and sea-power have often gone together; and a free people like ourselves have nearly always won and kept freedom, both for themselves and others, by keeping up a navy of their own or by forming part of such an Empire as the British, where the Mother Country keeps up by far the greatest navy the world has ever seen.

The canoe navies, like other navies, did very well so long as no enemy came with something better. But when boats began to gain ground, canoes began to lose it. We do not know who made the first boat any more than we know who made the first raft or canoe. But the man who laid the first keel was a genius, and no mistake about it; for the keel is still the principal part of every rowboat, sailing ship, and steamer in the world. There is the same sort of difference between any craft that has a keel and one that has not as there is between animals which have backbones and those which have not. By the time boats were first made someone began to find out that by putting a paddle into a notch in the side of the boat and pulling away he could get a stronger stroke than he could with the paddle alone. Then some other genius, thousands of years after the first open boat had been made, thought of making a deck. Once this had been done, the ship, as we know her, had begun her glorious career.

Continue reading Flag and Fleet: How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas free in the Wunder reader →