Fleet Quotes

3rd Viscount Palmerston. This historical quotations illustrates the worst of the British Empire. British merchants were making large profits shipping opium to China and selling it there. Drug addiction became a major problem and some local Chinese Authorities passed laws banning the importing and selling of opium. However, the English merchant ship captains paid no attention to these laws claiming their rights as Englishmen to free trade. The Chinese finally seized a number of shipments of opium and burned them. The British then appointed Captain Elliot to lead a squadron of ships to China, arrange for payment in compensation for the value of the seized opium and to open up the opium trade, by force if necessary. The Chinese position was not unreasonable and Captain Elliot was not able to secure the concessions the English government wanted without starting a small war with the loss of many lives. Temple, who was the Foreign Minister at this time, fired Elliot and replaced him with someone who was less concerned about problems of drug addiction and the Chinese. Thus began the First Opium War. Note that the then British view of equity was that if they had to send an expedition of ships and soldiers to force the Chinese to allow the English to sell opium, then part of the terms must be that the Chinese pay the costs for the British ships and soldiers who invaded their country and forced them to keep poisoning their own people. See {621319} for Captain Elliot’s view.

David Bushnell, 1740–1824, was a student at Yale University where he developed the first submarine used in warfare. While at Yale, Bushnell proved that gunpowder could be exploded under water. He also made the first time bomb. He combined these ideas by building the Turtle which was designed to attack ships by attaching a time bomb to their hulls, while using a hand powered drill and ship auger bit to penetrate the hulls. He used the Turtle in attempts to attack British ships which were blockading New York Harbor in the summer of 1776. His efforts failed every time because the Turtle's boring device was unable to penetrate the copper sheeting lining in the ships' hulls which was designed to protect against parasites in their previous station, the Caribbean. (From Wikipedia)

Things were looking bleak for the British & they were dependent on material help from the U.S. to give them a chance. The British navy was one of the largest and most powerful in the world & this cable was a veiled threat that if U.S. military aid did not come, England could not defend the country in the air, Churchill might be kicked out of office & his successors surrender to Germany turning over the British fleet to Hitler giving Germany control of the seas & with their ally Japan a naval force stronger than America’s. Anglophiles would not describe it as a threat, but merely a statement of the reality of the time. Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, a Nazi sympathizer & some American military officers were opposed to aid to Britain seeing it as a lost cause. Roosevelt, however, acting on his own marvelous instinct, his advice from Harry Hopkins, and his back-channel contacts in England, decided that if armed Britain could hold out. He turned out to be right.

China had then a very weak government. Ching Yih was the leader of a flotilla of over 1000 ships with entire crews and families numbering a force of over 70,000 people. They raided ships and towns on the coasts. Instead of single pirate ships, they would attack, even large, well armed, ships with a fleet. Some called them pirates; some thought of them as a floating nation. In 1807 the captains of all the ships met to select a new leader. One of the captains was the widow of Ching Yih, an admiral in her own right. The flotilla under Chin Yih had been divided into 4 fleets named for colors. The White fleet had been commanded by His Kai Ching—the only female captain. However, the White Fleet had been the most powerful and successful of the four. Ching surprised the men, who had expected to elect one of the 3 male admirals as the leader of the flotilla. After, her statement, they elected her. Of the females who have ever lead at sea, she commanded the largest armada and was the leader of a floating nation and an elected leader at that.