The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (103 page)

This whale’s tooth incised with the picture of a ship of the line is typical of the sailor’s art of scrimshaw—engravings, scrollwork, and carvings in bone or ivory. In the nineteenth century, when an anonymous Dutch or German sailor carved this, European whalers frequently concentrated their efforts in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans and their tributary seas like the Davis Strait and the Barents Sea. Courtesy of the Zuiderzeemuseum, Enkhuizen, The Netherlands.

The mass production of kerosene had begun with the discovery of oil in
Pennsylvania in 1859, and until the end of the century it was the most important product refined from oil. In addition to lighting, it was used in early internal combustion engines, although the preferred
fuel was gasoline, a by-product of kerosene cracking. The birth of the oil age can be dated to 1885, when
Karl Benz registered a patent for his Motorwagen. Within decades, the automobile had changed human society beyond all recognition, with enormous implications for the history of maritime trade, naval warfare, and geopolitics. Given the great distances between industrialized Europe and North America and the world’s major petroleum reserves—at the time found only in the
Caspian Sea and the continental United States—the personal car could hardly have succeeded without the development of the oceangoing oil
tanker, the prototype of which, the
Glückauf
, was coincidentally launched the year Benz received his patent.

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.

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 twenty-five 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 application 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.

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.