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the Karun River in Persia for the advantage of all nations, ‘c ’ était là une manière de parler’. To other nations the imperial methods often seemed preposterously high-handed. The British roamed the seas as though they owned them, and treated waters particularly important to their strategy, like the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, more or less as territorial preserves. The Navigation Acts, which reserved British imperial traffic for British ships, had been repealed half a century before: but the Empire still depended upon British command of itsarteries, and phrases about the life-lines and the imperial links occur with such monotony throughout the literature of imperialism that one would expect them to lose their impact by sheer repetition, like soldiers’ swear-words.
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    A favourite map of the time was the kind that showed a small red blob for each British ship at sea—like thousands of corpuscles sprinkled through the veins of the world. It was on the shipping lanes, more than anywhere, that British supremacy showed. At sea at any one moment, we are told, were British ships carrying 200,000 passengers and as many merchant seamen. More than half the merchant shipping of the world flew the Red Ensign—13½ million tons of it, or half as much again as in 1877. A thousand new ships were launched in the years 1896 and 1897, and of every thousand tons of shipping passing through the Suez Canal in the 1890s, 700 tons were British (95 were German, 63 were French, 43 were Dutch, 19 were Italian: 2 were American). The British had originally enjoyed a monopoly of the steamship trade, and they were still vastly more experienced than any of their competitors.
    The three biggest shipping lines, Peninsular and Oriental, Elder Dempster and British India, had all based their fortunes on the Empire trade, and scores of lesser companies lived by it, from exslavers of Liverpool to raffish schooner partnerships of the South Seas, their captains cheerfully drinking and whoring their way from one cargo to another. The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company had direct imperial origins—it was chartered in 1839 because the Government thought a steam service to the West Indies an imperial necessity, and still sent its ships to Barbados once a fortnight. The New Zealand Shipping Company prospered by feeding Britain with frozen mutton from the Antipodes. The ‘Blue Funnel’ Line—the Ocean Steamship Company—based many of its ships on Singapore, never bringing them home at all. The Shaw Savile ships on the New Zealand run went out by the Cape of Good Hope and came back by the Horn, circumnavigating the globe every three months.Four big shipping lines ran from England to Canada; two went from Liverpool to West Africa, following the slavers’ route; there was a weekly service to South Africa. Britain had a greater share of ocean traffic than ever before in her history, and much of it was on the imperial routes. In every imperial port the London shipping agents were the mainstays of commerce, and in smaller places the arrival of the boat from England was a great event. High on Signal Hill at St John’s, Newfoundland, above the narrow entrance to the harbour, the house flags were hoisted on a yard-arm—James Murray, Shea and Co, Campbell and Smith, Rothwell and Bowring, James Baird: and beneath that fluttering welcome, announcing their arrival to the city far below, the weathered ships would beat in from the Atlantic, into the deep cold harbour behind the bluffs, while the Newfoundlanders hastened down their hilly streets to greet them at the quays.
    On the Far East route the service had become almost institutional, so long and so regularly had the steamships been carrying Anglo-Indians to and from their dominions, the brisk young cadets so fresh, pink and assured, the brown stoop-shouldered veterans sickly from a thousand fevers. P. and O. and British India ran the service in partnership, each a company of profound and crotchety character.