INFLUENCE OF BRITISH SEA POWER

Evening Star, Issue 15072, 2 January 1913, Page 8

INFLUENCE OF BRITISH SEA POWER

■* 1 .• . i t FROM THE ACCESSION OF . 8 VICTORIA. The folloVng essay secured the Fen- I ■wick Shi<!«* and the highest number of < marks in the recent Navy League examina- « tions. It was written by Miss Ethel " of St. Andrew's Collegiate s School:— ... if In comparison with the part it had played, in the preceding lOC years or so, < Britisn sea power does not at first seem j, to have played a very important part in - the - affair of the nation since the acces- £ eion of lijueen Victoria, up till, the present 1 day. But when the history of the period : is carefully examined it will- be ■ seen that our fleets, or naval brigades from our fleets have participated in every war , in which we have been engaged, and that. ( time and again, only the known strength ] of our sea power has prevented serious wars with other nations. Moreover, we j have, used our sea power -to advance thy cause of liberty-and justice everywhere, ' and to keep open the various trade routes for the benefit of the world at large. ■ In the period which is about to be dealt with great changes have come over the Navy itself, for sail power has been super- ! seded by steam and oil-fuel power, wooden vessels have given place to vessels constructed of iron and steel (and these heavily ■ armored, whereas the ships heretofore had been totally unprotected), and the methods ; of manning the Navy have been changed, while the introduction of the torpedo, the . submarine, and wireless telegraphy has practically revolutionised modern naval warfare. To quote Lord Brassey: "In the Navy of the present it may truly be said nothing remains of the glorious "past •xcept the high professional skill, and the courage, devotion, and patriotism for which British seamen have always been famous " —Forgotten Naval Campaigns.— Strange as it may now- seem, the first place that called for naval attention was Canada, where in 1837, a few months after Queen Victoria's accession, a mild rebellion against British rule had broken out. To Canada, accordingly, a squadron of war vessels was sent, and the force landed from these assisted in restoring ■>rdor in this now so loyai Dominion of the British Empire. Our next naval campaign was that of the Levant, in 1840, when w'e were engaged in a series of operations assisting the Sultan of Turkey to conquer his rebel vassal,; the Pasha of" Egypt. These operations included the attack upon and brilliant capture, by Admirals Stopford and Napier, of the town of Acre, a place so difficult of attack that it was deemed almost impregnable. The result of this campaign was that the Province of Syria was wrested from the Pasha and restored to its rightful owner—the Sultan. The third naval campaign is one little known to the general public, although it was an important one, in which our fleets performed some notable feats. In 1845, owing to the unsettled state of affairs on the eastern coast of South America. Eng-" land, France, and Russia determined ?o intervene. The English and French fleets destroyed the fleet of small war vessels with which-the insurgents had been blockading Montevideo, and then pushed up the Puo Plata to convoy down the merchant ships which had been shut off from the sea. The heavy batteries at Obligado and Cornentes having been stormed and captured in two brilliant engagements, the war operations were at an end : vet these two_ victories, and "the superb" skill in navigation shown throughout the campaign, added one more leaf to the laurel wreath of the British Navv.:'—(Swinburne.) The fourth naval campaign—that of the Crimea—was important in many respects, j for, as well as having the desired effect j of checking Russia's encroachment on! Turkish territory, it led directly to the adoption of armor plating for warships On the 24th March, 18S4, England and France, who considered that their Eastern interests were endangered by Russia's ambitions, which aimed at making her mistress of the Eastern Passage, declared war on Russia, and commenced offensive operations by bombarding and destroying Odessa. The Russians, having destroved their own fleet in Sebastopol Harbor, there was no actual naval work for our fleets to do in the Crimea, but naval brigades were landed, and fought in all the land engagements, including the siege of Sebastopol, which was terminated when our fleets had succeeded in cutting off th° Russian food supplies. Simultaneously with the Crimea campaign, another English fleet was busv in the Baltic, where Russia had a stron-r fleet and her great arsenals. By the time Sveaborg had been bombarded, and Bomarsund, a strongly -fortified town in the Aland Islands, had been captured, peace negotiations were in progress: but both in the Crimea and in the Baltic our fleets had done good work, and had contributed largely to the success of the whole war. —Campaigns in China.— In 1857 broke out the terrible Indian Mutiny, and in this, too. our fleet was called upon to play a part. A naval brigade, under Sir William Peel, was landed it Calcutta from H.M.S. Shannon and PLM.S. Pearl, and after garrisoning Allahabad, joined Sir Colin Campbell in time to share in the glory of the relief of Lucknow. This brigade was of the utmost service in quenching the rebellion and in restoring order in India. From 1859 to 1860 we were engaged in a series of wars with China, the primary cause of which was the arrogance with which the Chinese treated our emissaries, but the real cause of which was stated bv Captain Elliott, the British Commissioner, in a- despatch to Lord Palmerston, in 1859 : " The true and more important question to be solved is. whether there shall be honorable and extending trade with the Empire, or whether the coasts shall be delivered over to a. state of things which will pass rapidly from the worst character of illicit trade to plain buccaneering." ,iQ-n« he close of the fa**- China War (1009-41), during which our fleets won victories at Amoy and the Bogue Forts Hongkong was ceded to us for ever, five Treaty ports were thrown open to foreign During the second China War (1856-58) sur fleets, under Admiral Sevmour and bommodore Keppel, won such brilliant victories at Fatshan, Canton, and the laku Forts that China made peace by the Treaty of-Tientsin, which provided for ~ M i e „Pfssage of all British subjects through China. In the third China AVar (1859-60) we • Jought a most, terrible engagement at the laku Forts, which had been rebuilt and vastly strengthened since the Treaty ri lientsin. On this occasion, when-things were going badly with the English and French fleets, under Sir James Hone, Commander Tatnall, of the American man-ol war loeywan, threw neutrality to the «m L, a " d i-T t0 our «d. saving: Blood is thicker than water." " Thic action was a disaster, but the following year (I860) we taught the Chinese, whe had been ignoring the previous treaties, once for all that treaties are not made U be .broken, when the Taku Forts were successfully captured, and an allied force, Pekln Crt Na P ier >-marched intc The only other time China has called foi n/nal intervention was in 1900, at th« time of the Boxer riots. When the. legs, tions at Peking were besieged it was th. fleets of the Powers that came to their aid, **& in aiding them, and eventuallv savins them, we naturally played a principal part, Unce more we stormed and captured th< laku forts, and then an international force pushed onto Peking to relieve the lesa r ticna. ° —The Naval Brigade.— In nearly all the small wars in which we J? v* been engaged in the outlj-ins parts ol ;he l-.ir.rv.re., naval brigades have"been em ployed, with much success.' They playec important roles in the New Zealand (1845 16 and 1860-66) Wars, in the Kaffir AVar oi 1852, in the Abyssinian of 1868, in the . Ashantee of 1873-74, and even in the Boei War of-1881, at the time of Majuba Hill, while it was largely owing to naval interrelation that Lower Burmah was added tc Um Empire in 1852. .Few years, indeed,

lave passed in which ; the British Navy las not been called upon to play some part I. some portua of the >m:-y-chamb'>.-e i' louse of the British Empire. The year 1882 saw the Nayy undertake :he first purely naval work it had done ince the Russian AVar—the bombardment ind destruction of Alexandria, the spongioid of Arabi Pa6ha, who was resolved to irive the foreigner from Egypt, and was sven then threatening the Suez Canal. Fhis action, in which Lord C. Beresford ;o distinguished himself, and the other actions which followed until 1884, all afforded o the Navy opportunities for the display ■A those qualities for which it has ever been famed. In the reconquest of the Soudan (1896-1399) naval brigades fought side by side with the regular troops, and were of great assistance to Lord Kitchener and his army. —The Boer War.— The last and most important war in: which our fleet has had to play a part was the Boer War. To quote from Mr Swin- j burne : "AVhen. in 1899. the stress of the greatest war the British Empire has ever had to face came upon us, it is hardly saying too much to state that the ultimate success which awaited us in that mightly conflict was due in no small measure to the' British Navy." It was our sea power, and our sea power alone, that prevented any other nation, even if in sympathy with the Transvaal, from interfering with us; and it was our sea power that for three long years enabled us to pour troops, stores, and the munitions of war required for so vast a war into a hostile country, and that over 7,CCO miles by sea from the home base. The. Beer AVar is still such recent history that it will be sufficient to mention that naval brgiades were almost the first troops to be landed in South Africa, and fought right throughout the war, those brigades under Sir Hedworth Lambton and Commander Grant doing especially good work. A\ 7 hen the British Army was being outclassed for want of heavy guns, it was the Navy that righted this deficiency by landing heavy guns, which were mounted on gun carriages cleverly designed by (now) Admiral Sir Percy Scott. Never before has the übiquitousneas of the Navy been more clearly demonstrated than in this war. nor the utter necessity to us of continued supremacy at sea. —Value of Sea Supremacy.— At the beginning of this- essay, it was mentioned that time and again only our superiority a*, sea had prevented serious wars with other nations. Such occasions were: (1) In 1898, when Lord Kitchener required the French, under Major Marchand, at Fashoda, to evacuate the upper valleys of the Nile : (2) in January, 1900, when British cruisers at Delagoa Bay seized some German vessels on suspicion of carrying arms and ammunition to the Boers:" (5) in 1904, at the time of the Dogser Bank incident, when Europe was almost plunged into universal war by the stupidity of the Russian admiral RozhdesLvensky; and (4) last, but perhaps most important, at the time of the Morocco crisis of last year. AA'riting of this last incident in a 'Manchester newspaper, Mr Arnold AATiite said: " The. British nation as a whole, has not the slightest conception of the narrowness of our escape from war with Germany in the last days of August." This is mentioned only on four occasions, yet, on all of these it was only the : superiority of our sea power that i prevented other nations from declaring war on us. So much for the aggressive work of the Navy. But we have also used our sea power in other work, such as in nautical and scientific exploration (witness the -Challenger expedition to the Pacific in 1872-76) in Arctic and Antarctic, in which our greatest explorers have all been Naval men, and even' in linking up the various continents by cable ; for the first Atlantic cable was laid iu 1858 by a British warship and an American frigate. Then, too, we have used our sea power to police th-s seas, keeping them free from pirates and other enemies to peace and commerce ; tc aid weak and oppressed nations, and tc see justice and peace observed in all those seas in which we are the dominant power. Indirectly, too, ou:- sea power has aided colonial expansion, for our possession of the command of the seas enabled our colonist; to go overseas and colonise the lands mnsl suitable for colonisation at a time whet the other European nations were still fight ing for their very existence. Guarded bj cur sea power, and aided by Na-va brigades in conquering hostile natives, om colonists have had "time and means t< found and develop those colonies wh'd are now ihe chief glory of the Britisl Empire. —The Empire and the Sea. — Such, then, is the part British sea powei has played since Queen A'ictoria's acces sion ; and since it has played so'gieat am noble a part iu the past, it is not un reasonable to suppose that it will play : great part in the future. According ti a recent Naval critic, "it would appea to be conceded generally that the Britisl Navy has two main duties to perform one of which is to prevent invasion whether of the Home islands or of an; other portion of the many chambere* House of the British people, and the othe to keep open those trade routes, whic' are, admittedly, as the arteries of Empir and of national life. The existence of third duty, which at once includes antranscends these, is almost univereall. ignored. That duty is to win victory i international conflict." Our great Empire is the gift of se power. By sea power it has been won by sea power it is now held, and it is hj; dominant sea power alone that it can b held in the future. Let us therefore but keep our sea power so strong that i will be strong enough to play any pai that it is reasonably probable that it wi be called upon to play in the future, an , we shall continue to be the greatest En , pire the world has ever seen.