BRITISH CRUISERS WEAVING STRANDS.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 February 1916, Page 6

BRITISH CRUISERS WEAVING STRANDS.

TEACHING YANKEES MEANING OP "BRITANNIA RULES THE WAVES." Mr. Gilbert Hersch, tlx; speoial 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 the British Fleet. He was a passenger by the Oscar 11. on a recent voyage from New York to Copenhagen, when that steamer was stopped fev an auxiliary cruiser and taken to Kirlavall. Alter describing the arrival of the Oscar 11. at the Scottish port, lie writes: Through the window, to tiie commanders' left-, a dozen of the Govern- ' ment's small harbor boats were to be seen, moored to the quay, and beyond them, dotting the harbor, more than a score of neutral merchant vessels. Some of these, like the Oscar 11.. on 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 Hies caught in the great web spun by the British across the. northern trade route. Beyond the harbor's mouth, in the waters about these Orkney Isles, about the bleak Shetland Islands to the north, and the Hebrides to the south-west, along the eastern coast of Scotland, and out across the North Sea towards the Norwegian shore, converted cruisers on patrol duty aro for ever weaving their criss-cross courses, with Dreadnoughts waiting within easy call. More tenuous, but more far-reacbing, are the strands woven by the wireless. They stretch three-quarters across the Atlantic, and far acrosß the European mainland, and are extended by the telegraph service of neutral and allied countries. I pictured a similar web centring at Dover, in which all the Channel shipping becomes enmeshed; a third at Gibraltar, which controls, even more effectively, traffic between America and the Mediterranean ports. And I got a vivid idea of the completeness with which England dominates trans-Atlantic intercourse; I understood for the fust time what Englishmen mean when they declare that "Britannia rules the waves."