In such a work of restoration, France had everything to create,—ships, armaments, machinery, and sailors even, to replace those who had fallen in the front of battle. To produce capacity of production was her first work,—to establish new ports or replenish old ones, to build docks, to rear workshops, to gather materials. This is what she has been doing. Silently and steadily she has been laying the foundations of maritime greatness. Her ports, in everything which contributes to naval efficiency,—in size, in mechanical appliances, in concentration upon one spot of all the trades and all the resources necessary for the construction and repair of war-ships,—excel all other naval depots in the world.
This is no exaggeration. There is the port of Cherbourg. Originally it was little more than an open bay, hollowed by the waters of the English Channel in the French coast, with a rocky shore exposed to every northern blast. But it was situated just where France needed a harbor, midway on her northern coast, facing England. Across this open bay, as a chord subtends its arc, a gigantic sea-wall has been stretched. Built in deep water more than a mile from the head of the bay, it extends almost from shore to shore. It is nearly three miles long. It is scarcely less than nine hundred feet wide at its base. Rising from the bed of the sea sixty-six feet, it is firm enough to bear up fortresses strong as human engineering can rear. This is the famous digue of Cherbourg. Its construction has been a seventy years' battle with the elements. Many times the waves have destroyed the work of years. Once a furious tempest swept away the whole superstructure, with its forts, armaments, barracks, and even garrison. But failure has only awakened fresh energy, and it stands now complete and rooted in the sea like a reef. At each end of the digue, between it and the main land, are broad ship-channels, affording a free passage at all tides to the largest ships. Thus science has called into existence a safe harbor, protected from the assaults of the sea by its granite barrier,—protected none the less from man's assaults by the concentric fire of more than six hundred guns.
This is but the exterior of Cherbourg. In the bosom of the rocky cliffs of its western shore three basins or docks have been hewn with gigantic toil. The first, finished in 1813, is 950 feet long, 768 feet wide, and 55 feet deep, and will hold securely fifteen ships of the line. The second, of somewhat smaller dimensions, was completed in 1829, and will float a dozen ships. The third, far larger than either, was opened with great ceremony in 1858: it is 1365 feet long, 650 feet wide, and 60 feet deep, and will contain eighteen or twenty ships of the largest size. On the sides of these basins are twelve building-slips and seven docks. And radiating from them, and in close contiguity, are arsenals, storehouses, timber-yards, ropewalks, sail-lofts, bakeries, and machine-shops capable of turning out marine engines, anchors, cables, and indeed every piece of iron-work which enters into the construction of a ship. It is no vain boast that an army of a hundred thousand men can be embarked any fine morning at Cherbourg, and that the fleet necessary for its transport can be built and armed and equipped and protected to the hour of its departure in this fortified haven.
Yet Cherbourg is but one of five ports equally efficient, equally protected, and equally furnished with the products of mechanic and nautical invention. Brest, L'Orient, and Rochefort, on the west, have far greater natural and scarcely less acquired advantages; while the old port of Toulon on the Mediterranean, old only in name, has been so enlarged and strengthened, that it can supply for the southern waters all and more than Cherbourg does for the northern. One fact will show to what an extent this power of naval production has been carried. In these five ports are some eighty building-slips or houses, and twenty-five docks, and, connected with them, all the materials, all the trades, all the labor-saving machines, all the mechanical forces, which the nineteenth century knows. If she wished, France could build at the same time forty ships of the line and forty frigates, while twenty-five more were undergoing repairs. The result of all this activity is, that, in extent, in completeness, in concentration of forces upon the right spot, the naval ports and dockyards of France are absolutely unequalled. And the work goes on. To-day twenty-two thousand men are employed upon naval works. Within six months a wet dock has been completed at Toulon, and another at L'Orient, while at Brest great ranges of workshops are hastening to completion; and it is whispered that at Cherbourg another basin is, like its predecessors, to be chiselled out of the solid rock.
Do we ask now what France has gained, in fleets and armaments, from this immense work of preparation? Everything. Not to dwell upon sailing-ships, which the progress of invention has made of inferior worth, she has a steam-navy second to that of no power in Europe. Her present ruler has fully appreciated the importance of that new element in naval warfare, steam,—an element all the more important to France, that it tends to lower the value of mere seamanship, in which she has always been deficient, and to increase the value of scientific knowledge and training, in which she has ever been with the foremost. For ten years her energy has been tasked to produce steamships of the greatest power and of the finest models. Since 1852 her ships of the line have increased from two to forty, and her frigates from twenty-one to forty-six. A fleet has thus been created which is numerically equal to that of England, and which, so far as these things depend upon the stanchness of the ships and the weight of the armaments, is perhaps in force and efficiency superior.
If we turn our attention to iron-clad ships, we shall see best displayed the sagacity, energy, and secretiveness of Louis Napoleon. In the Crimean War, three floating batteries covered with iron slabs, and each mounting eighteen fifty-pounders, silenced the Russian fort at Kinburn. This was a lesson it would seem that any one might learn. Louis Napoleon did not fail to learn it. If a ship can be made invulnerable, or nearly so, in every part, then of what avail is that strategy which secures choice of position, and which, of old, almost decided the battle? Will not he come off victor who can produce guns from which the heaviest shot may be hurled at the highest velocity, and gunners who shall launch them on their errand of destruction with the greatest accuracy? The French emperor has fairly overreached his island rivals. While they were experimenting, he laid the keels of two iron-clads of six thousand tons burden. In 1859 he ordered the construction of twenty steel-clad frigates and fifty gunboats. Lord Clarence Paget declared in debate last March, that, while England had, finished or constructing, only sixteen iron-clad frigates, France had thirty-one. And even this takes no account of floating-batteries and gunboats, wholly or in part protected, and of which, if we are to trust her papers, France has an almost fabulous number.
But who shall man this fleet? Where are the skilful mariners to make efficient these tremendous elements of naval power? It was Lord Nelson, I think, who exclaimed, when he saw the stanch ships of Spain, "Thank God, Spaniards cannot build men!" The recent changes in naval construction, decreasing perhaps the relative worth of mere seamanship, may have made the exclamation less pertinent than of old. But, after all, on the rude and stormy ocean, proverbially fickle and uncertain, nothing can take the place of sailors,—of brave and skilful men, trained by long struggle with wind and wave, calm in danger, apt in emergencies, finding the narrow path of safety where common eyes see only peril and ruin. France understands tins. She knows how many of her past humiliations can be traced directly to defective seamanship. But where to seek the remedy? How to find or make sailors fit to contend with those who were almost born and bred on the restless surge? By what methods, with a slender commercial marine and a people reluctant to encounter the hardships and dangers of sea-life, to fill up the scanty roll of her able seamen? That is the problem France had to solve; and she has done everything to solve it,—but remove impossibilities.