That represented but a small proportion of the continual military movement that was going on from end to end of our scattered empire; and it was only one aspect of the tremendous problem that faced our navy in the outer seas. What this amounted to can best be comprehended, perhaps, by a brief consideration of what was actually accomplished. After the first week of August, the mercantile marine activities of the Central Empires ceased to operate. Six and a half million tons of shipping in all the seas of the world were thus almost instantly immobilized. Further, every German colony, but for its wireless, was isolated from its centre and prepared for capture; while of the two million men of enemy origin who might otherwise have returned home to join the armies, scarcely a handful—such was the navy's mastery—was, in fact, able to do so. Lastly, not a single Dominion, Colony, or Dependency of Great Britain or her Allies was invaded or seriously molested by an enemy naval force.
Now to have achieved all this, while at the same time containing the German High Seas Fleet in the North Sea—and so containing it that not even a single squadron was able to break through on to our lines of commerce—is the best witness to the fundamental rightness of our initial naval strategy; although the test of war immediately emphasized what was then our chief need—an even larger number, such were our manifold requirements, of fast battle-cruisers. It was our shortness in this respect that, in the last analysis, led to the disaster of Coronel, arguable as the wisdom of certain of our oversea dispositions may not unjustly now seem to have been. And, while in our treatment of both the Goeben and Breslau, as regarded the Mediterranean, and the command of von Spee in the Far East and subsequently in the South Pacific, there are many points to be reasonably debated before the bar of naval judgment, neither problem can be fairly considered apart from the whole situation. In the present and following chapters we are concerned only with von Spee and the five vessels under his command.
To consider the vessels first, these consisted of two armoured cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, and three light cruisers, the Nürnberg, the Dresden, and the Leipzig. Both the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau were most efficient units, each with a speed of over 22 knots, each with a displacement of over 11,000 tons, a belt of 6-inch armour amidships, and each carrying eight 8.2-inch guns, six 6-inch guns, eighteen 24-pounders, and four torpedo-tubes. The three light cruisers were each capable of a speed of about twenty-five knots, carried ten 4.1-inch, eight 5-pounder, and four machine-guns, with two submerged torpedo-tubes, and displaced between 3,000 and 4,000 tons. It will be seen at once, therefore, that they formed a homogeneous and easily manoeuvred squadron, and it may be readily admitted that they were not only gallantly but very skilfully handled; while their concentration—since, at the outbreak of war, they had been scattered over half the world—was a feat of no mean order, however open to criticism may have been the larger policy involved in it.
As for von Spee himself, he seems to have been of a type apparently all too rare in the German naval service, a chivalrous, modest, and efficient seaman, reticent in victory, and brave in defeat. Under his command, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau had attained an extremely high standard of gunnery, and it is probable that in this respect they were second to none flying the German flag.
Leaving Kiao Chao during July, the war had found von Spee and the two larger cruisers many leagues distant among the Western Pacific islands and separated by thousands of miles from the other three cruisers, the Dresden, the Nürnberg, and the Leipzig. Of these the Dresden was in the Atlantic, divided from the other two by the American continent, and narrowly escaped capture at the hand of the British West Atlantic Squadron, of which Admiral Cradock was then in command. She successfully evaded him, however, and, making her way south, entered South American waters off the coast of Brazil, where her only possible antagonist at the time was the British cruiser Glasgow—a light cruiser of the Bristol class, displacing about 4,800 tons, capable of a speed of 25 knots, and carrying two 6-inch and ten 4-inch guns.
Meanwhile, on August 11th, with all her lights out, there had crept out of the port of Pernambuco a German steamer, the Baden, carrying 5,000 tons of coal, which met and supplied the Dresden at the Rocas Islands. Three days afterward, the latter sank the Hyades, homeward bound from the River Plate to Holland with a load of grain, and, on August 26th, she sank the British steamer Holmwood, also off the coast of South America. A fortnight later, on her way to the Pacific, the Dresden and her collier were creeping round Tierra del Fuego, and here they met a second collier, the Santa Isabel, which had left Buenos Aires on the 6th of August, nominally bound for Togo.
That was in the middle of September, and, about a fortnight later, with her name effaced, her masts altered, and her funnels repainted, the Santa Isabel entered Valparaiso, remaining there until the end of the month, when she cleared, nominally for Hamburg, but in reality to join von Spee. In the meantime the Dresden had announced her arrival in the Pacific by attacking the liner Ortega near the western entrance of the Magellan Straits; and it was only by the resource and seamanship of the latter's captain that the British ship succeeded in escaping.
Bound for Valparaiso with 300 French reservists on board, she had a normal speed of no more than 14 knots, while the Dresden, as we have seen, was at least half as fast again. But the Master of the Ortega was not to be beaten. Calling for volunteers to assist the stokers, he succeeded in working his old liner up to 18 knots an hour, and at the same time headed for Nelson's Strait—a perilous and uncharted passage. Chased by the Dresden, and with her shells plunging on each side of him, he made the dangerous channel in safety. The Dresden turned on her heel, afraid to follow him; and he successfully navigated, probably for the first time in history, an 8,000-ton liner through Nelson's Strait.
With the Dresden in the Pacific, all von Spee's future squadron was now at least in the same ocean, and both the Nürnberg and Leipzig, by stealthy degrees, were approaching the German admiral—the former, during September, having cut the cable between Bamfield in British Columbia and the Fanning Islands, and the latter having sunk the British steamer Bankfield off Peru, while en route to England with 6,000 tons of sugar; the oil tank Elsinore; and the steamer Vine Branch, outward bound from England to Guayaquil.