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Updated: May 31, 2025
The British sea-power, notwithstanding the first year of the war of 1812, had come out of the great European conflict unshaken and indeed more preeminent than ever. The words used, half a century before by a writer in the great French 'Encyclopédie, seemed more exact than when first written.
On 29 October a horde of Bedouins invaded the Sinai Peninsula while Turkish torpedo boats raided Odessa, and on 1 November the British ambassador departed from Constantinople. The two Central Empires had enlisted their first ally, and the war had taken another stride towards Armageddon. Helena in 1815; and sea-power was once more revealed to a somewhat purblind world.
Our sea-power was so ubiquitous and all-pervading that, like the atmosphere, we rarely thought of it and rarely remembered its necessity or its existence. It was not till recently that the greater part of the nation for there were many, and still are some exceptions perceived that it was the medium apart from which the British Empire could no more live than it could have grown up.
You had to balance a few English and American babies against the millions of German babies which the British government intended to starve. It was British sea-power maintaining itself and of course controlling most of the channels of publicity. It appealed to what it called "law" that is to say, the customs it had found convenient in the past.
We have been the earth's spoiled children, thanks to the salt seas between us and other powerful military nations. Before any other Power could reach the United States it must overwhelm the British navy, and then it must overwhelm ours and bring its forces in transports. Sea-power, you say.
In a later and more often-quoted struggle between East and West that which was decided at Actium sea-power was again seen to 'have the casting vote. When the whole of the Mediterranean coasts became part of a single state the importance of the navy was naturally diminished; but in the struggles within the declining empire it rose again at times.
It was, however, not the navy, but the army, which finally frustrated the Chinese efforts at defence, and really terminated the war. What the navy did was what, in accordance with the limitations of sea-power, may be expected of a navy.
'The main artery had been cut when the Portuguese took up the challenge of the Mohammedan merchants of Calicut, and swept their ships from the ocean. The sea-power of Portugal wisely employed had exercised a great, though unperceived, influence. Though enfeebled and diminishing, the Turkish navy was still able to act with some effect in the seventeenth century.
Seddon should have yielded, in the first instance, to the influence of the sea-power, exciting apprehensions of sudden attack along the whole seaboard of the Confederacy, may be forgiven him. Important lines of communication were certainly exposed.
This stirring up of the Dutch, which lasts year on year, and almost beats Lord Stair, Lord Carteret, and our chief Artists, is itself a thing like few! One of his Britannic Majesty's great difficulties; insuperable he never could admit it to be. "Surely you are a Sea-Power, ye valiant Dutch; the OTHER Sea-Power?
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