rio, down to and beyond the peace
with the United States sixty years later, there was what soon became a
'Provincial Marine,' which did good service against the Americans in
1776, when it was largely manned from the Royal Navy, and less good
service in 1812, when it was a great deal more local in every way. Two
vestiges of those days linger on to the present time, the first in the
Canadian Militia Act, which provides for a naval as well as a military
militia, permanent forces included, and the second in one of the
governor-general's official titles--'Vice-Admiral' of Canada.

The Canadian privateers are even less known than the Provincial Marine.
Yet they did a good deal of preying on the enemy at different times, and
they amounted altogether to a total {182} which will probably surprise
most students of Canadian history. At Halifax alone eighteen Nova
Scotian privateers took out letters of marque against the French between
1756 and 1760, twelve more against the French between 1800 and 1805, and
no less than forty-four against the Americans during the War of 1812.

The century of peace which followed this war gradually came to be taken
so much as a matter of course that Canadians forgot the lessons of the
past and ignored the portents of the future. The very supremacy of a
navy which protected them for nothing made them forget that without its
guardian ships they could not have reached their Canadian nationality at
all. Occasionally a threatened crisis would bring home to them some more
intimate appreciation of British sea-power. But, for the rest, they took
the Navy like the rising and the setting of the sun.

The twentieth century opened on a rapidly changing naval world. British
supremacy was no longer to go unchallenged, at least so far as
preparation went. The German Emperor followed up his pronouncement, 'Our
future is on the sea,' by vigorous action. For the first time in history
a German navy became a powerful force, fit to lead, rather than to {183}
follow, its Austrian and Italian allies. Also for the first time in
history the New World developed a sea-power of first-class importance in
the navy of the United States. And, again for the first time in history,
the immemorial East produced a navy which annihilated the fleet of a
European world-power when Japan beat Russia at Tsu-shima in the
centennial year of Nelson at Trafalgar.

These portentous changes finally roused the oversea dominions of the