A History of Sea Power Part 1

A History of Sea Power.

by William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott.

PREFACE

This volume has been called into being by the absence of any brief work covering the evolution and influence of sea power from the beginnings to the present time. In a survey at once so comprehensive and so short, only the high points of naval history can be touched.

Yet it is the hope of the authors that they have not, for that reason, slighted the significance of the story. Naval history is more than a sequence of battles. Sea power has always been a vital force in the rise and fall of nations and in the evolution of civilization. It is this significance, this larger, related point of view, which the authors have tried to make clear in recounting the story of the sea. In regard to naval principles, also, this general survey should reveal those unchanging truths of warfare which have been demonstrated from Salamis to Jutland. The tendency of our modern era of mechanical development has been to forget the value of history. It is true that the 16" gun is a great advance over the 32-pounder of Trafalgar, but it is equally true that the naval officer of to-day must still sit at the feet of Nelson.

The authors would acknowledge their indebtedness to Professor F.

Wells Williams of Yale, and to the Cla.s.sical Departments of Harvard and the University of Chicago for valuable aid in bibliography.

Thanks are due also to Commander C. C. Gill, U. S. N., Captain T. G.

Frothingam, U. S. N. R., Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, and to colleagues of the Department of English at the Naval Academy for helpful criticism.

As to the "References" at the conclusion of each chapter, it should be said that they are merely references, not bibliographies. The t.i.tles are recommended to the reader who may wish to study a period in greater detail, and who would prefer a short list to a complete bibliography.

WILLIAM OLIVER STEVENS

ALLAN WESTCOTT

United States Naval Academy, _June_, 1920.

A HISTORY OF SEA POWER

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNINGS OF NAVIES

Civilization and sea power arose from the Mediterranean, and the progress of recent archeological research has shown that civilizations and empires had been reared in the Mediterranean on sea power long before the dawn of history. Since the records of Egypt are far better preserved than those of any other nation of antiquity, and the discovery of the Rosetta stone has made it possible to read them, we know most about the beginnings of civilization in Egypt.

We know, for instance, that an Egyptian king some 2000 years before Christ possessed a fleet of 400 fighting ships. But it appears now that long before this time the island of Crete was a great naval and commercial power, that in the earliest dynasties of Egypt Cretan fleets were carrying on a commerce with the Nile valley.

Indeed, the Cretans may have taught the Egyptians something of the art of building sea-going ships for trade and war.[1] At all events, Crete may be regarded as the first great sea power of history, an island empire like Great Britain to-day, extending its influence from Sicily to Palestine and dominating the eastern Mediterranean for many centuries. From recent excavations of the ancient capital we get an interesting light on the old Greek legends of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth, going back to the time when the island kingdom levied tribute, human as well as monetary, on its subject cities throughout the aegean.

[Footnote 1: It is interesting to note that the earliest empires, a.s.syria and Egypt, were not naval powers, because they arose in rich river valleys abundantly capable of sustaining their inhabitants.

They did not need to command the sea.]

On this sea power Crete reared an astonishingly advanced civilization.

Until recent times, for instance, the Ph?nicians had been credited with the invention of the alphabet. We know now that 1000 years before the Ph?nicians began to write the Cretans had evolved a system of written characters--as yet undeciphered--and a decimal system for numbers. A correspondingly high stage of excellence had been reached in engineering, architecture, and the fine arts, and even in decay Crete left to Greece the tradition of mastery in laws and government.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EGYPTIAN SHIP

From Torr, _Ancient Ships_.]

The power of Crete was already in its decline centuries before the Trojan War, but during a thousand years it had spread its own and Egyptian culture over the sh.o.r.es of the aegean. The destruction of the island empire in about 1400 B.C. apparently was due to some great disaster that destroyed her fleet and left her open to invasion by a conquering race--probably the Greeks--who ravaged her cities by sword and fire. On account of her commanding position in the Mediterranean, Crete might again have risen to sea power but for the endless civil wars that marked her subsequent history.

The successor to Crete as mistress of the sea was Ph?nicia. The Ph?nicians, oddly enough, were a Semitic people, a nomadic race with no traditions of the sea whatever. When, however, they migrated to the coast and settled, they found themselves in a narrow strip of coast between a range of mountains and the sea. The city of Tyre itself was erected on an island. Consequently these descendants of herdsmen were compelled to find their livelihood upon the sea--as were the Venetians and the Dutch in later ages--and for several hundred years they maintained their control of the ocean highways.

The Ph?nicians were not literary, scientific, or artistic; they were commercial. Everything they did was with an eye to business.

They explored the Mediterranean and beyond for the sake of tapping new sources of wealth, they planted colonies for the sake of having trading posts on their routes, and they developed fighting ships for the sake of preserving their trade monopolies. Moreover, Ph?nicia lay at the end of the Asiatic caravan routes. Hence Ph?nician ships received the wealth of the Nile valley and Mesopotamia and distributed it along the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean. Ph?nician ships also uncovered the wealth of Spain and the North African coast, and, venturing into the Atlantic, drew metals from the British Isles.

According to Herodotus, a Ph?nician squadron circ.u.mnavigated Africa at the beginning of the seventh century before Christ, completing the voyage in three years. We should know far more now of the extent of the explorations made by these master mariners of antiquity were it not for the fact that they kept their trade routes secret as far as possible in order to preserve their trade monopoly.

In developing and organizing these trade routes the Ph?nicians planted colonies on the islands of the Mediterranean,--Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Malta. They held both sh.o.r.es of the Straits of Gibraltar, and on the Atlantic sh.o.r.es of Spain established posts at Cadiz and Tarshish, the latter commonly supposed to have been situated just north of Cadiz at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River.

Cadiz was their distributing point for the metals of northern Spain and the British Isles. The most famous colony was Carthage, situated near the present city of Tunis. Carthage was founded during the first half of the ninth century before Christ, and on the decay of the parent state became in turn mistress of the western Mediterranean, holding sway until crushed by Rome in the Punic Wars.

Of the methods of the Ph?nicians and their colonists in establishing trade with primitive peoples, we get an interesting picture from Herodotus,[1] who describes how the Carthaginians conducted business with barbarous tribes on the northern coast of Africa.

[Footnote 1: HISTORY, translated by Geo. Rawlinson, vol. III, p.

144.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SCENE OF ANCIENT SEA POWER]

"When they (the Carthaginian traders) arrive, forthwith they unload their wares, and having disposed them in orderly fashion on the beach, leave them, and returning aboard their ships, raise a great smoke. The natives, when they see the smoke, came dawn to the sh.o.r.e, and laying out to view so much gold as they think the wares to be worth, withdraw to a distance. The Carthaginians upon this come ash.o.r.e and look. If they think the gold enough, they take it up and go their way; but if it does not seem sufficient they go aboard their ships once more and wait patiently. Then the others approach and add to the gold till the Carthaginians are satisfied. Neither party deals unfairly with the other; for the Carthaginians never touch the gold till it comes up to the estimated value of their goods, nor do the natives ever carry off the goads till the gold has been taken away."

In addition to the enormous profits of the carrying trade the Ph?nicians had a practical monopoly of the famous "Tyrian dyes," which were in great demand throughout the known world. These dyes were obtained from two kinds of sh.e.l.lfish together with an alkali prepared from seaweed. Ph?nicians were also pioneers in the art of making gla.s.s.

It is not hard to understand, therefore, how Ph?nicia grew so extraordinarily rich as to rouse the envy of neighboring rulers, and to maintain themselves the traders of Tyre and Sidon had to develop fighting fleets as well as trading fleets.

Early in Egyptian history the distinction was made between the "round" ships of commerce and the "long" ships of war. The round ship, as the name suggests, was built for cargo capacity rather than for speed. It depended on sail, with the oars as auxiliaries.

The long ship was designed for speed, depending on oars and using sail only as auxiliary. And while the round ship was of deep draft and rode to anchor, the shallow flat-bottomed long ships were drawn up on sh.o.r.e. The Ph?nicians took the Egyptian and Cretan models and improved them. They lowered the bows of the fighting ships, added to the blunt ram a beak near the water's edge, and strung the shields of the fighting men along the bulwarks to protect the rowers. To increase the driving force and the speed, they added a second and then a third bank of oars, thus producing the "bireme" and the "trireme." These were the types they handed down to the Greeks, and in fact there was little advance made beyond the Ph?nician war galley during all the subsequent centuries of the Age of the Oar.

About the beginning of the seventh century before Christ the Ph?nicians had reached the summit of their power on the seas. Their extraordinary wealth tempted the king of a.s.syria, in 725 B.C., to cross the mountain barrier with a great army. He had no difficulty in overrunning the country, but the inhabitants fled to their colonies. The great city of Tyre, being on an island, defied the invader, and finally the a.s.syrian king gave up and withdrew to his own country. Having realized at great cost that he could not subdue the Ph?nicians without a navy, he set about finding one. By means of bribes and threats he managed to seduce three Ph?nician cities to his side.

These furnished him sixty ships officered by Ph?nicians, but manned by a.s.syrian crews.

With this fleet an attack was made on Tyre, but such was the contempt felt by the Tyrians for their enemy that they held only twelve ships for defense. These twelve went out against the sixty, utterly routed them, and took 500 prisoners. For five years longer the a.s.syrian king maintained a siege of Tyre from the mainland, attempting to keep the city from its source of fresh water, but as the Tyrians had free command of the sea, they had no difficulty in getting supplies of all kinds from their colonies. At the end of five years the a.s.syrians again returned home, defeated by the Ph?nician control of the sea. When, twenty years later, Ph?nicia was subjugated by a.s.syria, it was due to the lack of union among the scattered cities and colonies of the great sea empire. Widely separated, governed by their own princes, the individual colonies had too little sense of loyalty for the mother country. Each had its own fleets and its own interests; in consequence an a.s.syrian fleet was able to destroy the Ph?nician fleets in detail. From this point till the rise of Athens as a sea power, the fleets of Ph?nicia still controlled the sea, but they served the plans of conquest of alien rulers.

As a dependency of Persia, Ph?nicia enabled Cambyses to conquer Egypt. However, when the Ph?nician fleet was ordered to subjugate Carthage, already a strong power in the west, the Ph?nicians refused on the ground of the kinship between Carthage and Ph?nicia. And the help of Ph?nicia was so essential to the Persian monarch that he countermanded the order. Indeed the relation of Ph?nicia to Persia amounted to something more nearly like that of an ally than a conquered province, for it was to the interests of Persia to keep the Ph?nicians happy and loyal.

When, in 498 B.C., the Greeks of Asia and the neighboring islands revolted, it was due chiefly to the loyalty of the Ph?nicians that the Persian empire was saved. Thereafter, the Persian yoke was fastened on the Asiatic Greeks, and any prospect of a Greek civilization developing on the eastern sh.o.r.e of the aegean was destroyed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GREEK WAR GALLEY

From Torr, _Ancient Ships_.]

But on the western sh.o.r.e lay flourishing Greek cities still independent of Persian rule. Moreover, the coastal towns like Corinth and Athens were developing considerable power on the sea, and it was evident that unless European Greece were subdued it would stand as a barrier between Persia and the western Mediterranean. Darius perceived the situation and prepared to destroy these Greek states before they should become too formidable. The story of this effort, ending at Salamis and Platea, and breaking for all time the power of Persia, belongs in the subsequent chapter that narrates the rise and fall of Athens as a sea power.

At this point, it is worth pausing to consider in detail the war galley which the Ph?nicians had developed and which they handed down to the Greeks at this turning point in the world's history.

The bireme and the trireme were adopted by the Greeks, apparently without alteration, save that at Salamis the Greek galleys were said to have been more strongly built and to have presented a lower freeboard than those of the Ph?nicians. A hundred years later, about 330 B.C., the Greeks developed the four-banked ship, and Alexander of Macedon is said to have maintained on the Euphrates a squadron of seven-banked ships. In the following century the Macedonians had ships of sixteen banks of oars, and this was probably the limit for sea-going ships in antiquity. These multiple banked ships must have been most unhandy, for a reversal of policy set in till about the beginning of the Christian era the Romans had gone back to two-banked ships. In medieval times war galleys reverted to a single row of oars on each side, but required four or five men to every oar.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GREEK MERCHANT SHIP

From Torr, _Ancient Ships_.]

At the time of the Persian war the trireme was the standard type of warship, as it had been for the hundred years before, and continued to be during the hundred years that followed. In fact, the name trireme was used loosely for all ships of war whether they had two banks of oars or three. But the fleets that fought in the Persian war and in the Peloponnesian war were composed of three-banked ships, and fortunately we have in the records of the Athenian dockyards accurate information as to structural detail.

The Athenian trireme was about 150 feet in length with a beam of 20 feet. The beam was therefore only 2/15 of the length. (A merchant ship of the same period was about 180 feet long with a beam of 1/4 its length.) The trireme was fitted with one mast and square sail, the latter being used only when the wind was fair, as auxiliary to the oars, especially when it needed to retire from battle. In fact, the phrase "hoist the sail" came to be used colloquially like our "turn tail" as a term for running away.

The triremes carried two sails, usually made of linen, a larger one used in cruising and a smaller one for emergency in battle.

Before action it was customary to stow the larger sail on sh.o.r.e, and the mast itself was lowered to prevent its snapping under the shock of ramming.