NAVAL.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 8, Issue 25, 31 January 1916, Page 8

NAVAL.

BRITISH CRUISERS WEAVING, STRANDS. Mr. Gilbert Hersch, tlio special commissioner of the New York Post,, writing- from Copenhagen, supplies his journal with an interesting description of the manner in which the sea passage north of Scotland is maintained by th e British Fleet. He was a passenger by t-he Oscar 11. on a recent voyage from New York to Copenhagen when that steamer was stopped by an auxiliary cruiser and taken to Kirkwall. After describing the- arrival of the Oscar 11. at the Scottish port, -be ’writes: — Through the window, to the r mander’s left, a dozen of the Govern ment’s small harbour boats were to be seen, moored to the quay, and beyond them, dotting the harbour, more than a score of neutral merchant v sels. Some of these,, like the Oscar 11., oh .which I had just crossed, were detained only temporarily, for examination of passengers or cargo. Others were prizes, to be held till the end of the war. These were the flies caught in tingreat web spun by- the British across the northern trade route. Beyond the harbour’s mouth, in the waters about these Orkney Isles, about the bleak ; Shetland Islands to the north,- and the j Hebrides to the south-west, along the eastern coast of Scotland, and our across the North Sea towards the Norwegian shore, converted cruisers or patrol duty are forever weaving their criss-cross courses, with Dreadnoughts waiting within easy call. More tenons, but more far-reaching, are the strands woven by the wireless. They stretch 'three-quarters across the Atlantic, and far across the European mainland, and are extended by the telegraph service of neutral and A 1 lied countries. I pictured a similar wdb centring at Dover, in which all the Channel shipping becomes enmeshed; a third af Gibraltar, which controls, even more effectively, traffic between America and the Mediterranean ports. And got a vivid idea of the completeness with which England dominates TransAtlantic intercourse; I understood for the first time what Englishmen mean when they declare that “Britannia riles the waves.”