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Updated: May 31, 2025
A moment's consideration will enable us to see how different the history of the world would have been had a Hellenised city grown and prospered on the Seven Hills. The enterprise of their navigators had built up for the Phoenician cities and their great off-shoot Carthage, a sea-power which enabled them to gain the practical sovereignty of the sea to the west of Sardinia and Sicily.
But even small craft had an enormous advantage over road and rail together when bulky stores were moved. So Northern sea-power could make its controlling influence felt in one continuous line all round the eastern South, except for fifty miles where small craft were concerned and for two hundred miles in the case of larger vessels.
It conveyed a hint and quite consciously to all whom it might concern that the speculations were 'under-written' by the whole sea-power of England. The forces of more than one state had been used to protect its maritime trade from the assaults of enemies in the Mediterranean or in the Narrow Seas.
Not only was the fall of the empire, by a rational reliance on sea-power, postponed for centuries, but also much that had been lost was regained. 'At the close of the tenth century the emperors of Constantinople possessed the best and greatest part' of Southern Italy, part of Sicily, the whole of what is now called the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, with some parts of Syria and Armenia.
It is the youngest navy in the world and an expression of the reviving sea-power of the new German Empire, founded by the late great Emperor, designed for the protection of the Empire's trade and territory, and intended, equally with the German army, for the preservation of peace." One or two other incidents of interest in the Emperor's life may close the record of this year.
His efforts in this direction however, though they never wholly ceased, remained fruitless; but the Protector was resolute to carry out his plans single-handed. The defeat of the Dutch had left England the chief sea-power of the world; and in the first days of 1655, before the dissolution of the Parliament, two fleets put to sea with secret instructions.
Though no one has ever surpassed Themistocles in the faculty of correctly estimating the importance of sea-power, it was understood by Xerxes as clearly as by him that the issue of the war depended upon naval operations. The arrangements made under the Persian monarch's direction, and his very personal movements, show that this was his view.
German sea-power was to be made strong enough to attract allies by its ability to rally all free nations without any curatorship by the Anglo-Saxons. This is what he says his war objectives were. He bitterly complains of the opposition to them and to himself which he met with from such papers as the Frankfurter Zeitung, and from the influence of certain of his colleagues.
England was now fighting with her back to the wall; and her sea-power had to be exerted to its utmost to make head against so many foes. She waged relentless war on merchant ships carrying contraband or suspected contraband, whether enemy or neutral.
All this friendship, however, fell to dust, when it was found that Charles refused to invest the Duc d'Orleans, the second son of Francois, with the duchy of Milan, and when the Emperor's second expedition against the sea-power of the Turks had proved a complete failure, and Charles had returned to Spain with loss of all his fleet and army.
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