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Updated: May 9, 2025
Still, Russia's advance southwards towards ice-free ports was only checked, not stopped. In 1861 a Russian man-of-war took possession of the Tshushima Isles between Korea and Japan, but withdrew on the protest of the British admiral. Six years later the Muscovites strengthened their grip on Saghalien, and thereafter exercised with Japan joint sovereignty over that island.
They spontaneously taxed themselves for new warships, insisted that a non-recurring war-tax identical with that of Germany should be imposed by the State, and many called for the immediate adhesion of Sweden to the Triple Alliance. One of the fixed points of Russia's policy, the Swedish agitators told their fellow-countrymen, is the acquisition of an ice-free port which can be utilized in winter.
Along the ice-free coast a vessel could sail anywhere and pass out into the Pacific Ocean before the end of summer. Accordingly he made ready for a voyage in which the Vega was to sail round Asia and Europe and carry his name to the ends of the earth. The Vega was a whaler built to encounter drift ice in the northern seas.
But if one glanced to the north, it was altogether different. Here it looked as if it had been worked out with the utmost care and affection. In this direction one saw only beautiful mountains, soft valleys, and winding rivers, all the way to the big Lake Vettern, which lay ice-free and transparently clear, and shone as if it wasn't filled with water but with blue light.
Russia leased from China for ninety -nine years Port Arthur and Talien Wan, and took practical possession of Manchuria, through which a railroad was built connecting with the Trans-Siberian road, while Port Arthur afforded her an ice-free harbor for her Pacific fleet.
The idea of joining Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago with the interior an idea as old as the Indian trails thither still dominated men's minds even in the early part of the railroad epoch. Chicago desired to be connected with Cairo, the ice-free port on the Mississippi; and Cleveland was eager to be joined to Columbus and Cincinnati.
But there is this difference: in the New World the iron horse has been the friend of peace; in the Far East of Asia it has hurried on the advent of war; and for this reason, that Russia, having no ice-free harbour at the end of her great Siberian line, was tempted to grasp at one which the yellow races looked on as altogether theirs. The miscalculation was natural.
The struggle has taken place in the debatable lands north and west of Korea, where Tartars and Chinese formerly warred for supremacy, and where geographical and commercial considerations enhance the value of the most northerly of the ice-free ports of the Continent of Asia.
On August 27 a strong west- south-west wind sprang up and drove all this ice out of the bay, and except for some stranded bergs left a clear ice-free sea through which we finally made our way from Punta Arenas to Elephant Island.
And this war's true mission, disengaged from the economic origins of that contest, from doors open or shut, from the fields of Korea for Russian wheat or Japanese rice, from the ownership of ice-free ports and the command of the waters of the East its true mission was to lay a ghost. It has accomplished it.
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