The Changing Order THE RAIDS OF THE "ALABAMA" CAME EXACTLY MIDWAY BETWEEN the strangling blockade of 1814 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Ships and cargoes changed infinitely more during the latter half century than during the former. By 1914, steam and steel had generally supplanted canvas and wood in merchantmen as well as warships. By 1939 and World War II, the airplane was making itself significantly all-important to the functions of each. Open sea lanes, moreover, had become more vital than ever to the nations of Europe and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to our own prosperity. Supplies of oil, rubber, copper, and scores of other commodities were required by the spread of the Industrial Revolution and its effects upon developments in warfare. Some nations, like England, even had to look beyond the seas for foodstuffs for their increasing industrial populations. Synthetic rubber and other ersatz products had begun to point to a future when nations might achieve more self-sufficient destinies, but that time had not come in 1914, nor was it completely here in 1939. During those fifty years before World War I, the United States had withdrawn from the high seas. For a while after the Civil War, its navy as well as its merchant marine fell off in alarming fashion. Eventually the navy revived, but the return of the American merchantman to the seas was longer delayed. Most of the nation's flourishing foreign commerce continued to be carried. under alien flags to the profit of alien shipowners. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the cargoes were being transported in tramp steamers rather than in square-riggers. The smudges of black smoke belching from the funnels of the stubby little freighters lacked the romantic appeal of the billow ing clouds of white canvas of the old ships and barks; but the tramps were more economical and infinitely more dependable. Those sturdy steam freighters concern us more here than the great luxury liners that sped past them on the high seas. Forming the rank and file of the world's merchant marine, they transported most of the cargoes that kept the Allies going in World War I and were the most common submarine fodder. Along with some of their more streamlined successors, they enacted a similar role, to meet a similar fate, in the second world conflict. The introduction of these steam freighters was an important factor in the shifting of the carrying trade from American to English vessels. Lack of adequate timber at home had hampered England in the building of the old sailing vessels in competition with the Americans. Now these conditions no longer mattered, for England had ample iron, plenty of coal, and a well-developed steel industry. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 stimulated the demand for steamers, for they could plod steadily through the Red Sea where the fickle breezes, or utter lack of breezes, baffled the efforts of the square-riggers. The volume of freight to be carried to and from India and the Far East by the new short cut was tremendous. England could send the freighters out with a profitable maiden cargo of coal, which was always in demand at hundreds of scattered ports throughout the world. By the eighties, the yards of the Clyde and the Tyne were turning them out in such quantity that it was jokingly said they "built them by the mile and cut them off and closed the end with a few rivets to suit the customer." By 1883, steam tonnage had caught up with sail in the British merchant marine; thirty years later, its sailing vessels had all but disappeared. Almost anyone who has visited a seaport knows how those old freighters looked. The upper lines of the sturdy black hull, often streaked with rust, rose at the bow and stern as well as amidships. Here the bridge and officers' quarters were surmounted by lifeboats, ventilators, and a single funnel painted with the owners' colors. From the wells between those "three islands" rose two substantial masts, no longer designed to carry sails on |