Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [85]
In the United States the building of navies with more than coastal defence capacity was traditionally regarded as a sacrilege against the original idea of America as a nation which could live without aggression and demonstrate a new future to the world. In Europe the nations who had exercised power upon the seas for centuries were suddenly made aware by Mahan of what they had. A commentator signed “Nauticus” remarked that sea power, like oxygen, had influenced the world through the ages, but just as the nature and power of oxygen remained unrealized until Priestley, “so might sea power but for Mahan.”
Ordered to command the flagship of the European Station in 1893 (much against his will, for he would have preferred to stay at home and continue writing), Mahan was received in England with unprecedented honors. He was invited by the Queen to a state dinner at Osborne, dined with the Prince of Wales and was the first foreigner ever to be entertained by the Royal Yacht Club, which gave a dinner in his honor with a hundred guests, all admirals and captains. In London, John Hay, who was visiting there, wrote to him that “all the people of intelligence are waiting to welcome you.” Lord Rosebery, then Prime Minister, invited him to a private dinner with just himself and John Morley at which they talked until midnight. He met Balfour and Asquith, visited Lord Salisbury at Hatfield, and dined again with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Wearing a red academic robe over his dress uniform and sword, he received a D.C.L. from Oxford and an LL.D. from Cambridge, said to be the only man ever to receive degrees from both universities in the same week.
After a temporary escape to the Continent, where, equipped with guidebook, umbrella and binoculars, he traced Hannibal’s marches, he was seized upon by his most enthusiastic disciple, Wilhelm II, who invited him to dinner aboard his yacht, the Hohenzollern, during Cowes Week. With effect that was to be epochal on world history, The Influence of Sea Power on History had planted in the Kaiser the idea that Germany’s future was on the sea. By his order, a copy of Mahan’s book was placed on every ship in the. German Navy and the Kaiser’s personal copies in English and German were heavily underlined and bristling with marginal comments and exclamation marks. “I am just now not reading but devouring Captain Mahan’s book and am trying to learn it by heart,” he informed a friend by telegram in 1894, when Mahan was in Europe. “It is a first class book and classical in all points. It is on board all my ships and constantly quoted by my Captains and officers.” The Japanese were no less interested. The Influence of Sea Power on History was adopted as a text in Japanese military and naval colleges and all Mahan’s subsequent books were translated into Japanese.
The obvious corollary of Mahan’s thesis was the peremptory need to develop the American Navy, at that time moribund from neglect. As Cleveland’s Secretary of the Navy, William C. White, said in 1887, it did not have the strength to fight nor the speed to run away, and in Mahan’s judgment it was not a match for Chile’s Navy, much less Spain’s. In 1880, when serious discussion began of an Isthmian Canal, which in the absence of adequate naval power would constitute more of a danger than an asset, he had written, “We must without delay begin to build a navy which will at least equal that of England when the Canal shall have become a fact. That this will be done I don’t for a moment hope but unless it is we may as well shut up about the Monroe Doctrine at once.”
From then on he continually