Flag and Fleet | Page 4

make either better canoes or lighter ones, or to make any kind that
would do as well as or better than the dug-out. Thus the ancient Britons
had coracles, which were simply very open basket-work covered with
skins. Their Celtic descendants still use canvas coracles in parts of
Wales and Ireland, just as the Eskimos still use skin-covered kayaks
and oomiaks. The oomiak is for a family with all their baggage. The
kayak--sharp as a needle and light as a feather--is for a well-armed man.
The oomiak is a cargo carrier. The kayak is a man-of-war.
When once men had found out how to make and use canoes they had

also found out the third and final principle of sea-power, which is, that
if you live beside the water and do not learn how to fight on it you will
certainly be driven off it by some enemy who has learnt how to fight
there. For sea-power in time of war simply means the power to use the
sea yourself while stopping the enemy from using it. So the first duty of
any navy is to keep the seaways open for friends and closed to enemies.
And this is even more the duty of the British Navy than of any other
navy. For the sea lies between all the different parts of the British
Empire; and so the life-or-death question we have to answer in every
great war is this: does the sea unite us by being under British control, or
does it divide us by being under enemy control? United we stand:
divided we fall.
At first sight you would never believe that sea-power could be lost or
won as well by birchbarks as by battleships. But if both sides have the
same sort of craft, or one side has none at all, then it does not matter
what the sort is. When the Iroquois paddled their birch-bark canoes past
Quebec in 1660, and defied the French Governor to stop them, they
"commanded" the St. Lawrence just as well as the British Grand Fleet
commanded the North Sea in the Great War; and for the same reason,
because their enemy was not strong enough to stop them. Whichever
army can drive its enemy off the roads must win the war, because it can
get what it wants from its base, (that is, from the places where its
supplies of men and arms and food and every other need are kept);
while its enemy will have to go without, being unable to get anything
like enough, by bad and roundabout ways, to keep up the fight against
men who can use the good straight roads. So it is with navies. The navy
that can beat its enemy from all the shortest ways across the sea must
win the war, because the merchant ships of its own country, like its
men-of-war, can use the best routes from the bases to the front and
back again; while the merchant ships of its enemy must either lose time
by roundabout voyages or, what is sure to happen as the war goes on,
be driven off the high seas altogether.
The savages of long ago often took to the water when they found the
land too hot for them. If they were shepherds, a tyrant might seize their
flocks. If they were farmers, he might take their land away from them.

But it was not so easy to bully fishermen and hunters who could paddle
off and leave no trace behind them, or who could build forts on islands
that could only be taken after fights in which men who lived mostly on
the water would have a much better chance than men who lived mostly
on the land. In this way the water has often been more the home of
freedom than the land: liberty and sea-power have often gone together;
and a free people like ourselves have nearly always won and kept
freedom, both for themselves and others, by keeping up a navy of their
own or by forming part of such an Empire as the British, where the
Mother Country keeps up by far the greatest navy the world has ever
seen.
The canoe navies, like other navies, did very well so long as no enemy
came with something better. But when boats began to gain ground,
canoes began to lose it. We do not know who made the first boat any
more than we know who made the first raft or canoe. But the man who
laid the first keel was a genius, and no mistake about it; for the keel is
still the principal part of every rowboat, sailing ship, and steamer in the
world. There is the same sort of difference between any craft that has a
keel and one