National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 1/One Hundred British Seaports

One Hundred British Seaports

With a deadline of 1,600 nautical miles to guard, measured from headland to headland, 20 miles offshore; with 119 ports, large and small, to seal up, 80 of which, even at low tide, are open to vessels that can navigate 14 feet of water; with a larger number of bays and other navigable indentations to watch than are to be found anywhere else in the world in the same length of straightaway shorelines, Germany's plan to blockade the British Isles seems as near a proposal to accomplish the impossible as anything to which any nation hitherto has committed itself.

Indeed, undertaking to combat at once the sinuosities of a shoreline lending itself better to defense against blockade than any other of equal length in the world and the greatest navy civilization has ever seen, it is difficult to imagine how success could even be hoped for by those putting the plan into execution.

Something of the extraordinary indentations of the shoreline of the United Kingdom may be gathered from the map on page 85.

England is so deeply indented that no part is more than 75 miles from the sea, while Scotland has the most rambling coastline of any country in the world.

Ireland is not as deeply indented as England and Scotland; but with all that it has shores that make the way of the blockader difficult.

The vast proportions of the British shipping industry which the German submarine blockade is attempting to destroy defies our comprehension. In normal years an average of 214 ships arrive at United Kingdom ports from foreign waters every day in the year. In addition to that, there are 780 arrivals from home ports every day in the year of ships in the coastwise trade.

British merchant ships have a greater aggregate tonnage than those of all the other countries of the world together. The merchant marine of that nation includes nearly 12,000 ships of all kinds. Of these, about 2,800 are sailing ships and 5,300 steam vessels employed in the home trade. There are approximately 4,000 ships engaged in sailing between British and foreign ports. These latter have an average capacity of more than 2,500 net register tons.

How rapidly Great Britain has been replacing the losses sustained by her shipping as a result of Germany's submarine attacks is disclosed by the fact that at the end of 1916 there were 465 steam vessels under construction in British shipyards, more than half of them being ships of more than 5,000 tons burden. The aggregate capacity of these ships is 1,788,000 tons, so that both in tonnage and in number the new craft are replacing those sunk by the enemy.

Few countries in the world are so dependent on the importation of foodstuffs as the United Kingdom, and for her not to possess the strongest navy in the world would be to leave her of all nations perhaps the most vulnerable. Probably 90 per cent of all the food her 45,000,000 people consume is brought in by ships engaged in foreign trade.

On the other hand, the splendid coal deposits and the abundant supplies of iron make British industries largely free from blockade dangers. Producing one-fourth of the world's coal, the United Kingdom has little to fear from a coal shortage, no matter what the character of a blockade around her.

The port of London handles approximately one-third of all the exports and imports of the United Kingdom. The ships of the whole world visit it in normal times, and there is scarcely a merchant flag that civilization knows that is missing in the Thames in other than war times.

Liverpool has some of the most modern docks in the world. Flanking the Mersey River for a distance of seven miles, the 60 docks, having 26 miles of quay and covering 428 acres of ground, are equipped with every aid known to industry for the rapid handling of the immense quantities of merchandise.

Cardiff is far down the list in the number of ships arriving, but ranks third in the total tonnage—this being due to the very heavy coal business from that port. Cowes has 24,000 ships a year; Newcastle, 13,000; Portsmouth, 15,000, and Glasgow and Belfast 11,000 each.

With the opening of the Clyde, Glasgow has been brought into direct communication with oversea lands. Dover, with its great Admiralty harbor; Chatham, with its vast Royal Dockyard, where 7,000 workmen are employed even in normal times; Middlesborough, with its great shipbuilding industry; Manchester, with its splendid canal opening up an inland city to world trade; Belfast, with its famous shipbuilders; Portsmouth and Plymouth, on the south coast, with their extensive port works; Grimsby, Hull, and Aberdeen, with the largest fishing fleets in existence; Newlyn and Brixham, homes of the mackerel fisheries, and Milford and Fleetwood, the ports the hake has made famous, are all places full of enterprise, which have been even more active since the war began than they ever were before a “submarine peril” was dreamed of.

As has been said, the British Isles contain no less than 119 ports available for commerce, and practically all of them have been developed for effective use.

Even if the Germans have 500 submarines constructed for the purposes of this blockade, as is claimed, the total makes an average of only about four submarines available for blockading each port.

Submarines, with even the largest radius which any of these boats possess, are dependent upon a convenient base or upon the service rendered by a “mother ship.” They generally can carry a most limited number of torpedoes, without which they are ineffective, and in addition they are severely handicapped by the very nature of their operations.

The ordinary blockade is not subject to these limitations. A blockade established upon the surface of the ocean can maintain a constant lookout over a wide expanse of the sea. By use of searchlights, it can be carried on at night as well as by day. Cruisers may be coaled at sea and provided with ammunition openly. The submarine may not. Without a base or a hovering fleet of “mother ships,” the submarine cannot do continuous duty on blockade or otherwise.

If it is planned to operate the submarine blockade of the British Isles in relays, the number of ships on duty at a given port will be thereby halved, to the detriment of the blockade's effectiveness. Two submarines to a port could hardly maintain a blockade in the condition which the ordinary interpretaion of international law has required to give it recognition amoung neutrals.

British domination of the sea has not come about by chance. England's geographic limitations have compelled her to keep the avenues of ocean traffic open through constant readiness to render naval protection to her carrying trade; and it is the result of her insular position that her activities have developed on sea and land.

What Nature has always done for the children of the wild by rendering them adaptable, through habit and through equipment, to the environment in which they are placed, the English people have done for themselves. Cribbed, cabined, and confined upon a group of islands limited in area and capable of inadequate productiveness, even with the most intensive of cultivation, they were forced, first, to command the avenues of supply for themselves and, in order to meet the increasing expense of such necessity, second, to develop their manufacturing resources to the highest degree.

To this they owe the great number of ports which they now possess and which, by their very numbers, render a blockade, however attempted, a herculean task. A clearer example of how nations are limited or advanced by their geographic environment could hardly be found.

Source: — (January 1917), “One Hundred British Seaports”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(1): 84–93.