Rensselaer Democrat, Volume 1, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 June 1898 — ALWAYS WEAK ON THE SEA. [ARTICLE]

ALWAYS WEAK ON THE SEA.

Spain Has Never Shown Much Capacity in the Arts of Naval Warfare. Spain Is not and never was a seafigbting power. She has won no naval victory since the battle of Lepanto three centuries and a quarter ago, and that was won largely by Venetian crews. Even whep her power and wealth seemed irresistible, when her military reputation was at Its height, when the world was strewn with her territories and the ocean laden with her argosies and fleets, her real naval power was utterly incommensurate with the astonishing pretensions which it made. As soon as England and Holland laid a finger on it her maritime empire crumbled Into dust. The armada only revealed a fact which English sailors had long suspected, and the consciousness of which explains Drake’s sublime contempt for the menaces of Spain—the fact that, even at the zenith of their fame, the Spaniards had no mastery of the arts by which the sea is held, says the Minneapolis Times. Since Lepanto Spain has on the ocean fought England, Holland, Italy, some of the various combinations of the German states and nearly every other cimntry of Europe, small and great, and most of the nations of Central and South America, but she has won no battle which has had the faintest effect toward bettering her own fortunes, or which has altered in the slightest degree the general current of history. For more than 300 years Spain’s conduct In its naval wars has been below contempt. In the battle of Trafalgar In 1805, the last of the more important battles In which Spain has participated, Nelson made short work of the Spanish fleet, the only serious resistance offered to him in the battle being by Spain’s French allies. To-day her gunners and engineers are confessedly the worst in Europe. It would be little short of a miracle if It should turn out that within the last two decades Spain had bred a race of seamen capable of reversing the unvarying misfortunes of the past.