The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  The United States had been a major exporter of kerosene, which was known as case oil because it was usually shipped in five-gallon cans carried two to a case. This was costly and inefficient, but carrying oil in bulk was problematic. Wooden barrels weighed too much, and explosive fumes gathered in the spaces between the barrels. One solution was to pump oil directly into a ship’s hull, an approach pioneered by Caspian Sea oilman Ludwig Nobel, brother of Alfred Nobel of prize fame. In 1878, Nobel built the tanker Zoroaster to carry oil from Baku to Astrakhan and up the Volga River for distribution into Europe. (Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, was the prophet of the ancient Persian religion whose cult was associated with fire altars built around natural petroleum seeps.) In 1885 Wilhelm A. Riedemann contracted the British firm of Armstrong, Mitchell & Co. to build the Glückauf, a hundred-meter auxiliary barkentine whose hull was divided into eight tanks separated by bulkheads. On her maiden voyage she carried “910,221 gallons petroleum in bulk,” or 21,672 barrels, a measure held over from the whaling trade. Resistance to the new tankers came mostly from longshoremen concerned for their safety—German dockworkers nicknamed the Glückauf (good luck), the Fliegauf (blow up)—and worried that the less labor-intensive method of loading the ships threatened their livelihood. Nonetheless the design was technically sound and enormously profitable and by 1906, 99 percent of the world’s oil was carried in tankers.

  As a fuel, oil had enormous advantages over coal: it burned more efficiently and therefore took up less space, and it was easier and cleaner to handle. In 1912, newly appointed First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill ordered the construction of five oil-fueled Queen Elizabeth–class battleships. To ensure that the navy not be caught short during the pending conflict with Germany, in June 1914 Churchill negotiated for the Admiralty a 51 percent share in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (the forerunner of BP), which had begun exporting oil through Abadan three years before. Many questioned the wisdom of abandoning one of Britain’s great industrial advantages, namely its native coal, the best in the world for powering marine engines, but the switch to oil was based entirely on military considerations and during World War I oil-burning British ships had significantly better operational endurance than their coal-fired counterparts in the German fleet. But there was no shortage of British coal, which accounted for three-quarters of the eighty million tons of marine coal consumed annually—the bulk of it by British ships—and by the end of World War I, Britain maintained 181 overseas coaling stations.

  The availability of petroleum-based fuels also facilitated the adoption of diesel engines for ships, which began in the early 1900s. Although diesel-powered motorships developed in the 1920s had better fuel economy, smaller propulsion plants, greater carrying capacity, and smaller crews than steamships, the only countries to really embrace the new technology were Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. From Great Britain and Germany to Japan, most shippers preferred to pay the lower initial cost of steamships rather than order more expensive, but in the long run more economical, diesel engines, and in 1935 more than 80 percent of the world fleet was still powered by coal-or oil-fired steam engines. What no one could foresee at the time is that while Churchill’s decision would shape the course and conduct of international relations into the twenty-first century, in the same period the British merchant marine and Royal Navy would all but vanish from the world stage.

  Built for transpacific service between Seattle and Shanghai, the Great Northern Steamship Company’s passenger freighter Minnesota was driven by a pair of triple-expansion steam engines whose insatiable demand for coal made for unrelenting toil by the ship’s stokers. This photograph was taken while the ship was under charter to the U.S. Navy as the troopship USS Troy (there was already a battleship USS Minnesota) during World War I. But the conditions in the inferno belowdecks in steamships remained the same regardless of the ship’s mission. Courtesy of the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington, D.C.

  The transatlantic crossings of the Sirius and Great Western represent a watershed in the history of human transportation and communication. But as events would show, underlying the developments that brought about increased speed and reliability at sea was an even more dramatic acceleration in the pace of change itself. As a result, the steam age at sea lasted barely a century before a raft of new technologies swept it aside, and the decades since the 1950s have been in some respects even more revolutionary than the preceding century and a half. In the meantime, where commercial interests led, navies followed. Despite a drastic fall in naval budgets through the 1850s, naval planners followed developments in marine engineering and readily adopted them when they seemed suitable for military applications and fiscal prudence allowed. Yet these and other advances upset the global balance of power and ushered in a half century of warfare whose naval tactics and weaponry were unprecedentedly lethal.

  a Distances for inland waterways in the United States are conventionally given in statute rather than nautical miles.

  b A station bill is a posted document indicating the duties of the crew and where passengers should gather in an emergency.

  c A chest of Malwa (western Indian) opium weighed sixty kilograms, a chest of Patna (Bengal) opium seventy-three kilograms.

  d As of 2010, the canal had been lengthened to 193 kilometers and it is now 24 meters deep, with a width on the bottom of 123 meters and 313 meters at the surface.

  e A simple reciprocating engine has a single cylinder in which the piston is moved by steam. A compound steam engine adds a second lower-pressure cylinder, which recycles steam from the first cylinder to do additional work.

  f From the late 1800s, ships setting record speeds on the transatlantic run were said to have won the blue riband (ribbon), although there was no tangible prize of any kind until 1935, when Robert K. Hales, MP, ordered a silver trophy to be awarded the shipping company with the current record.

  Chapter 19

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  Naval Power in Steam and Steel

  Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the technology of naval ships and weapons, the analysis of naval doctrine and strategic thought, and the tactical application of naval power underwent more extensive and profound change than in the previous twentyfive hundred years. Transformed from the “wooden walls” of Themistocles to what Winston Churchill called “castles of steel,” the navies of the world grew to unprecedented size in numbers of ships and personnel. Their guns were capable of hitting moving targets at distances of up to twenty miles and they operated in three dimensions: on the surface, beneath the surface, and in the air. While improvements in hygiene, food preservation, and the fleet train made sailors less likely to die of disease, infection, or malnutrition, the leading causes of death in the age of sail, naval combat grew increasingly deadly. In the course of ten major wars fought between 1652 and 1815, the Royal Navy lost 1,452 ships. Only 204 (14 percent) were lost in action; more than half the losses were the result of accidents, mainly shipwreck and foundering; and captures accounted for a third. Of the 1,694 surface warships lost by all combatants in World War II, 81 percent sank as the result of enemy action, 9 percent were scuttled, 5 percent were lost in accidents, and 5 percent were captured. Navies’ embrace of technological change to improve their ability to attack and to defend themselves required, in turn, a growing dependence on industrial output to ensure the reliable flow of replacement vessels.

  As technology changed so, too, did the rationale for and doctrines of naval warfare. By the end of the nineteenth century, European maritime powers had embarked on their last burst of overseas expansion, an effort driven in part by mercantilist ambition to acquire raw materials and open new markets for domestic industry. Inextricably related to this was the need to acquire overseas coaling stations and bases for the navies required to protect outposts of empire and the sea routes to them. Increasingly complex ship and weapons technology, together with more intricate approaches to diplomacy and statecraft, gave rise to more scientific approaches to the appli
cation of naval power. Training became an academic discipline and prospective naval officers received their education in naval academies while national staff and war colleges became incubators of naval doctrine. By the 1950s, the age of the battleship was over, and the world was on the cusp of yet another metamorphosis in sea power that would see the rise of nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered navies, as well as sporadic efforts by nonstate actors to engage in asymmetric warfare.

  Navies Enter the Machine Age

  For the first half of the nineteenth century, the initiative for adopting steam, iron, and steel remained squarely with merchant shippers. Although institutional lethargy can be blamed for some naval officials’ resistance, there were practical reasons to proceed cautiously and not jettison several thousand years of experience in sail-powered, wooden fighting ships. Steam technology was so unreliable that even commercial steamships intended for high-seas service carried auxiliary sailing rigs until late in the century. Before the invention of the high-pressure compound engine, the notion of leading fleets of ships dependent on fuel-hungry engines of questionable reliability back and forth across the Atlantic as Villeneuve and Nelson had done under sail was out of the question. Nor were the economics of steam technology any more favorable to navies than to merchants. According to an 1852 study, a ninety-gun screw steamship with a five-hundred-horsepower engine cost 40 percent more than an otherwise identical sail-powered ship, and until 1861 the British and French were more inclined to retrofit sailing ships with engines than to build new steam warships.

  The value of the new technologies began to tell during the First Opium War. Although iron hulls and fittings had tremendous advantages over wood, they wrought havoc on magnetic compass readings, a problem solved by Sir George Airey in the 1840s. This was just in time for the East India Company to order the iron-hulled side-wheeler Nemesis, which epitomized Britain’s military and technological advantage over China. In battles at the Bogue Forts, Amoy, and Ningbo, the hull of the Nemesis suffered much less damage from enemy guns than British or Chinese wooden ships. The experience of the Mexican navy’s British-built Guadeloupe in contending with secessionist movements in the Yucatán and Texas was similar, and her British captain was particularly impressed by the fact that when penetrated by enemy fire, the hull did not splinter. At the same time, the effort to discover vulnerabilities in the new technology was relentless. Iron construction was reasonably impervious to shot from smoothbore, muzzle-loading cannon but not to breech-loading guns with rifled barrels and explosive shells. Improved armament also exacerbated the most glaring weakness of the paddle wheel, the machinery of which is above the waterline and vulnerable to enemy fire. First-rate steam-powered warships were not a realistic option until after the development of the screw propeller whose engines could be placed below the waterline.

  Engineering difficulties notwithstanding, the British and French remained locked in a naval arms race and by midcentury they had a hundred steam warships between them; the rest of the world’s navies had a total of eighteen. The rivals set aside their differences to support the Ottoman Empire against encroaching Russian influence in the Caucasus, Persia, and the Near East, the gateways to British India, and to keep Russian warships out of the Mediterranean. Non-Turkish warships had been prohibited from transiting the Bosporus and Dardanelles until 1833, when the Ottomans secretly granted the Russian fleet freedom of passage. Citing the “ancient rule of the Sultan,” which had closed the straits in 1475, the London Straits Convention of 1841 revived the prohibition, thus corralling Russia’s Black Sea fleet. When war began in October 1853, a Russian battleship fleet sailed to Sinop—twice as far from Istanbul as from Sevastopol—and using the new explosive shells developed by France’s Admiral Henri-Joseph Paixhans destroyed an Ottoman frigate squadron. The Ottomans welcomed the British and French fleets into the Black Sea, and while Russian and Turkish armies battled in the Balkans and Caucasus, French and English ships bombarded the forts at Sevastopol, in the Crimea, and Kinburn, in the Dnieper estuary. Although the steamships could enter and withdraw from action at will, their wooden hulls were vulnerable to Russian shell fire, and the French built a collection of floating batteries sheathed in four-inch iron plate that withstood shelling even when well within range of the forts. After the war, the Treaty of Paris opened the Black Sea to the merchant shipping of all nations, but the sea was “perpetually interdicted to the Flag of War, either of Powers possessing its coasts, or of any other power,” a condition that Russia repudiated in 1870 when it began building a new Black Sea fleet.

  Impressed with the destruction of the Ottoman fleet at Sinop by exploding shells and the resilience of the French ironclads in the Crimea, France’s surveyor of the navy, Stanislas Dupuy de Lôme, designed La Gloire, whose wooden hull was clad with iron plate and reinforced with iron fastenings. With a single iron deck, the single-screw, three-masted ship mounted thirty-six 6.4-inch (16.2 cm) muzzle-loading, rifled guns. Far from helping the French achieve naval superiority over the British, however, La Gloire prompted the Royal Navy to develop plans for what became the most powerful and heavily armored ship afloat. Launched in 1860, at 128 meters HMS Warrior was half again as long as the 120-gun first-rate HMS Howe. Warrior’s primary armament consisted of thirty 68-pounder and ten 110-pounder breech-loading guns, twenty-six of which were mounted on the main deck within a central citadel, essentially an armor-protected box. Her superior speed enabled her to outdistance and outmaneuver any battleship then afloat, and although designed to fight under steam, she was rigged as a three-masted ship and her ten-ton, two-bladed propeller could be hoisted free of the water to reduce drag when under sail. Classified as a forty-gun frigate, during her trials she received the accolade that defined her challenge to the existing naval order: “She looks like a black snake among the rabbits”—the rabbits being the stubbier, high-sided ships of the line like the Howe.

  The American Civil War

  By the 1870s, all the world’s major navies had converted to iron-hulled, steam-powered ships armed with exploding-shell guns and armor protection for their vital spaces, including engines, primary batteries, and magazines, a wholesale transformation that resulted from the experience gained in the American Civil War. Commerce raiding and naval warfare on the coasts and rivers of the United States played critical roles in the conflict, but these are regarded as something of an aside because the war’s most obviously decisive battles took place on land and there were no fleet actions to speak of. When hostilities began, the U.S. Navy had about nine thousand men and forty-two ships, a dozen of the Home Squadron, and the rest dispersed among the Mediterranean, Brazilian, Pacific, and East Indies Squadrons to protect American commercial interests, and the African Squadron, which patrolled against slave traders. With fifty-three hundred ships, the United States merchant marine was second only to that of Great Britain, with fifty-eight hundred; together the two nations accounted for 82 percent of the world’s registered ships. Yet with no imminent threats to its commercial or territorial security, the U.S. Navy was under no compulsion to keep pace with the latest developments in the European navies. John Ericsson’s sloop of war USS Princeton (1843) was among the first screw-propelled warships ever built, and the navy adopted ordnance officer John A. Dahlgren’s shell gun in the 1850s, but the navy’s technological innovations were otherwise few. The Civil War changed everything. Whereas the prewar fleet consisted mostly of sail-powered ships with a handful of side-wheelers, about 10 percent of the seven hundred ships commissioned during the war were iron or ironclad vessels, many of them monitors and gunboats without sailing rigs of any kind and most of them propelled by screws rather than paddles. While the Confederacy produced far fewer ships, unrigged armored vessels, including primitive submarines, made up an even higher proportion of the Southern fleet.

  Blockade and Blockade-Running

  The Union and Confederacy approached the naval war from distinct positions. Small though the U.S. Navy was—and about 10 percent of the officer corps res
igned their commissions to serve the South—the North had the shipbuilding expertise, industrial infrastructure, and manpower to expand its fleet with relative ease. The South had no warships and limited shipbuilding capacity because it had traditionally depended on the Northern states for most of its industrial manufactures and foreign trade. That the naval conflict would be an instance of what is now called asymmetric warfare was clear from the outset, when Confederate president Jefferson Davis issued letters of marque to anyone who sought to capture Northern shipping. President Abraham Lincoln responded by warning that “If any person, under the pretended authority of said [Confederate] States … shall molest a vessel of the United States or the persons or cargo on board of her, such person Will be held amenable to the laws of the United States for the prevention and punishment of piracy.” In a word, death.

  British reaction was swift and negative; one parliamentarian declared that “Anybody dealing with a man under those circumstances as a pirate and putting him to death would … be guilty of murder” and another insisted that the Northern states “must not be allowed … so to strain the law as to convert privateering into piracy, and visit it with death.” Five years before, Great Britain had helped draft the Declaration of Paris ending privateering and clarifying the rights of belligerents and neutrals. The four points of the declaration were short and to the point:

  1. Privateering is, and remains abolished.

  2. The neutral flag covers enemy’s goods, with the exception of contraband of war.

  3. Neutral goods, with the exception of contraband of war, are not liable to capture under the enemy’s flag.

  4. Blockades, in order to be binding, must be effective, that is to say, maintained by a force sufficient really to prevent access to the coast of the enemy.