The year 1897 saw many celebrations of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, but none so grand as the naval review that took place on June 26. It was a humid, breezeless day, and flags hung limply on their staffs. Precisely at 2 p.m., the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, bearing an entourage headed by the Prince of Wales as surrogate for his frail, ailing mother, cast off from Portsmouth quay and steamed toward the flotilla. It was an awesome sight: 165 British ships of the line, plus vessels from 14 other nations including the U.S. and Japan. At a signal, seamen scurried to attention on decks and yardarms, and the warships boomed out cannon salutes as the yacht passed by. For three hours that evening, in a dazzling display of modern technology, every ship was outlined against the somber sky by hundreds of electric lights. It was, wrote a stunned British reporter, "a fairy fleet festooned with chains of gold."
As Robert K. Massie notes in Dreadnought (Random House; 1,007 pages; $35), the Portsmouth review marked "the high-water mark of British naval supremacy," which had gone virtually unchallenged since Admiral Horatio Nelson's victory over a French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. During the latter years of the 19th century, however, France and Russia had constructed seemingly formidable armadas. More worrisome, Germany, under the prodding of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, was rapidly building a war fleet to protect its commercial interests and colonial empire. The naval rivalry between Britain and Germany led to an arms race that in its consequence was deadlier than the postwar nuclear buildup of the U.S. and Soviet Union. For as Massie persuasively argues, that oceanic competition was a key factor in plunging Europe into the bloody morass still known as the Great War.
Without warships, Britain was perilously vulnerable to blockade or invasion. But Britannia's capacity to rule the waves, as Massie also points out, was somewhat illusory; the Royal Navy during much of Victoria's reign was largely unfit for combat. Weighed down by moribund traditions that Winston Churchill acidly defined as "rum, sodomy, and the lash," British tars were ill fed and worse led. While their social-climbing officers fopped and preened, sailors spent long days at sea scrubbing decks and polishing brightwork, or wielding cutlasses in boarding drills as if they were still in the age of sail. Meanwhile, gunnery practice was cursory even though naval bombardments were ludicrously inaccurate. In 1881, for example, eight British battleships fired 3,000 rounds at forts guarding the Egyptian city of Alexandria and scored precisely 10 hits.