Eight years after the war the French Revo lution broke out. Its leaders attempted to sow the seeds of the revolution all over Europe and especially against England in India and Ireland. France declared war on 1 Feb. 1793. In de fense of the Royalists, Admiral Lord Hood took possession of Toulon harbor, but not having enough troops he had to retreat before the young Captain Napoleon Bonaparte. On 1 June Lord Howe engaged a French fleet. In a few hours the English had lost 1,200 men and 11 ships crippled; the French lost 12 ships and 7,000 men. The English captured nearly all the French West Indies, and Nelson took Cor sica. Then Holland also joined France, and England took Cape Colony, which had been Dutch for 143 years. The next year Spain also came in on the side of France, and Eng land again had to fight for her life in all foreign dockyards preparations were being made to crush England. A French expedition sailed to Ireland, reached Bantry Bay, and then went home again. In 1797 England stood alone, expecting an invasion of her shores. Sir John Jervis and Commodore Nelson smashed the Spanish fleet at Saint Vincent; Admiral Duncan crushed the Dutch fleet off Camperdown and Nelson annihilated Napoleon's fleet in Aboukir Bay. Encouraged by England's brilliant naval victories. Russia, Turkey, Italy and Germany renewed their struggles to free themselves from Napoleon's domination. England supplied them with money. In the Mediterranean, Nelson drove the French out of Naples and the Roman states; in fact, the English flag floated for a time over the Capitol at Rome. Europe was ablaze from end to end; cannon thundered in the Atlantic, Pacific and the Mediterranean; Turks and Britons struggled with the French in Syria and Egypt. After Napoleon's vic tories at Marengo and Hohenlinden, Austria made peace with France and Great Britain was left as Napoleon's sole antagonist. At the be ginning of 1801 England was at war with France, Spain, Holland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark. The most important naval action of the war was Nelson's battle of Copenhagen. After the murder of the Tsar Paul I in 1801 the Armed Neutrality broke up and all were anxious for-peace, which was made at Amiens in 1802. England restored all she had taken from France, but kept Trinidad and Ceylon, captured from the Dutch, to whom the Cape Colony was restored.
For three years there was peace, which time Napoleon employed in making gigantic prepara tions for the overthrow of England. In May 1805 he declared war, and the final contest be gan. Five months later came the crushing de feat off Trafalgar, where Nelson, England's greatest admiral, purchased naval supremacy with his life. The closing scene of the drama was played when the curtain fell at Waterloo in 1815. Only 21 years before France, Spain and Holland all possessed powerful navies; in 1815 these had practically ceased to exist, and those of Spain and Holland have never been restored. From that time the British navy has virtually been the water police of the world; it has exterminated piracy and African slave traffic and maintained what is called the
changes wrought in the construction of fighting ships. Though naval architecture had under gone improvements and vessels had increased in size, there had been no great alterations in warship design between Armada days and the introduction of iron shipbuilding. The first ironclad, the Warrior (1860), fired a shot only two pounds heavier than those of the biggest guns against the Armada. The Sovereign of the Seas (1637) was a three-decker of 126• guns; Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar (162 years later) was a three-decker of 100 guns. Nelson's entire fleet of 27 vessels cost about $7,500,000; none sof the present British battleships costs less than $11,250,000. Steam power was first intro duced into the British navy in 1822, when the Comet, a wooden paddle steamer of 238 tons was built at Deptford. Government officials of those days were strongly opposed to both the paddle and the screw, although in 1849 there were 30 screw ships and 70 paddle vessels in the navy. The first battleship built and designed with screw propeller was the 80-gun Agamem non (1852). The introduction of armor-plating brought an immediate revolution in naval ord nance. By 1865 rifled guns had been substi tuted for the old smooth-bores throughout the fleet. From this period dates the ever-rising competition between stronger armor and more powerful guns. The heavy breech-loading gem was introduced in 1881. During the following 25 years naval construction underwent still further changes. At enormous cost the Ad miralty experimented with new types of shins and guns. But the most extraordinary innova lions adopted by the British navy date from the appointment in 1904 of Admiral Sir John (now Lord) Fisher to the post of First Sea Lord. He began with a vigorous reorganization of his great department, changed the time-honored strategic disposition of the fleet, and scrapped some 150 ships which he considered useless or obsolete. His most notable achievement, how ever, was the introduction of the first °all-big gun') warship, the Dreadnaught, launched on 10 Feb. 1906. For centuries it had been the custom of naval architects to equip each battleship with guns of different types and calibre. In 1903 an Italian naval engineer, the late General Cuni berti, published an article in Jane's (Fighting Ships' in which he referred to *an ideal British battleship" carrying only big guns. Fisher seized on the idea, and the Dreadnought, built in record time, was the result. The conse quences were of tremendous importance in Brit ish naval history. The appearance of that ship at one stroke made the greatest battleship of any country entirely obsolete; and, further more, it rendered the Kid Canal useless to Ger many even if that country also built vessels of that type. It is stated on execellent authority that Fisher long foresaw the coming struggle and that he also prognosticated the year 1914 as the year when Germany would be prepared to challenge Great Britain's navy. He calcu lated it would take Germany till then to widen the canal, an undertaking that was actually com pleted in 1914, shortly before the war broke out, at a cost of $55,000,000. There could be no an swer to the Dreadnought except a vessel of sim ilar type, and the creator of the German navy, Admiral von Tirpitz, had to begin his work over again.