A CENTURY OF MINOR BRITISH WARS
(1815-1914)
During the hundred and nine years between Trafalgar and the Great War against the Germans the Royal Navy had no more fights for life or death. But it never ceased to protect the Empire it had done so much to make. It took part in many wars; it prevented many others; it helped to spread law and justice in the world; and, at the end of all this, it was as ready as ever to meet the foe.
Sometimes it acted alone; but much oftener with the Army in joint expeditions, as it had for centuries. And here let us remind ourselves again that the Navy by itself could no more have made the Empire than the Army could alone. The United Service of both was needed for such work in the past, just as the United Service of these and of the Royal Air Force will be needed to defend the Empire in the future. Nor is this all we must remember; for the fighting Services draw their own strength from the strength of the whole people. So, whenever we talk of how this great empire of the free was won and is to be defended, let us never forget that it needed and it needs the patriotic service of every man and woman, boy and girl, whether in the fighting Services by sea and land and air or among those remaining quietly at home. One for all, and all for one.
The Navy's first work after the peace of 1815 was to destroy the stronghold of the Dey of Algiers, who was a tyrant, enslaver, and pirate in one. This released thousands of Christian slaves and broke up Algerian slavery for ever. A few years later (1827) the French and British fleets, now happily allied, sank the Turkish fleet at Navarino, because the Sultan was threatening to kill off the Greeks. Then the Navy sent the Pasha of Egypt fleeing out of Beirut and Acre in Syria, closed in on Alexandria, and forced him to stop bullying the people of the whole Near East.
By this time (1840) steam had begun to be used in British men-of-war. But the first steamer in the world that ever fired a shot in action, and the first to cross any ocean under steam the whole way, was built at Quebec in 1831. This was the famous Royal William, which steamed from Pictou (in Nova Scotia) to London in 1833, and which, on the 5th of May, 1836, in the Bay of San Sebastian, fired the first shot ever fired in battle from a warship under steam. She had been sold to the Spanish Government for use against the Carlists, who were the same sort of curse to Spain that the Stuarts were to Britain, and was then leading the British Auxiliary Steam Squadron under Commodore Henry. (The American Savannah is often said to have crossed the Atlantic under steam in 1819. But her log (ship's diary) proves that she steamed only eighty hours during her voyage of a month.)
[Illustration: THE ROYAL WILLIAM.
Canadian built; the first boat to cross any ocean steaming
the whole way (1833), the first steamer in the world
to fire a shot in action (May 5, 1836).]
In 1854 French and British were again allied, this time against Russia, which wanted to cut Europe off from Asia by taking Constantinople. The Allies took Sebastopol in the Crimea because it was the Russian naval base in the Black Sea. The Czar never thought that "bleeding his big toe" could beat him. But it did. He had to supply his army by land, while the Allies supplied theirs by sea; and though theirs fought thousands of miles from their bases at home, while his fought in Russia itself, within a few hundred miles of its bases inland, yet their sea-power wore out his land-power in less than two years.
Russia was at that time a great world-power, stretching without a break from the Baltic to Alaska, which she owned. What, then, kept Canada free from the slightest touch of war? The only answer is, the Royal Navy, that Navy which, supported by the Mother Country alone, enabled all the oversea Dominions to grow in perfect peace and safety for this whole hundred years of British wars. Moreover, Canada was then, and long remained, one of the greatest shipping countries in the world, dependent on her own and the Mother Country's shipping for her very life. What made her shipping safe on every sea? The Royal Navy. But, more than even this, the Mother Country spent twenty-five hundred millions of her own money on keeping Canada Canadian and British by land and sea. And here, again, nothing could have been done without the Navy.