84 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



widely advertised their natural beauties 

 in a way to attract the tourist, so that for 

 years American travelers have spent 

 abroad millions of dollars that might have 

 yielded them no less pleasure if they had 

 spent it in seeing America first. The 

 good roads, well-equipped hotels, and 

 beautiful mountains of the Swiss and 

 Italian Alps attract the traveler like a 

 magnet. Even our nearer neighbor on 

 the north, by judicious advertising and 

 careful attention to the comfort of the 

 traveler, attracts great numbers of our 

 people to her western mountains. 



If the> United States wishes to share 

 in« the profits of the tourist business it 

 may readily do so, for any well-chosen 

 expenditure made in building good roads 

 and hotels in our national parks will 

 return large dividends not only in dol- 

 lars and cents, but in the health, enjoy- 

 ment, and education of our people. And 

 the traveling public will soon learn that 

 one of the grandest of our parks, one 

 of those most worth visiting, is that 

 which, let us hope, is soon to be es- 

 tablished in the Mount McKinley re- 

 s-ion. 



ONE HUNDRED BRITISH SEAPORTS 



WITH a deadline of 1,600 nau- 

 tical miles to guard, measured 

 from headland to headland, 20 

 miles offshore; with 119 ports, large and 

 small, to seal up, 80 of which, even at low 

 tide, are open to vessels that can navigate 

 14 feet of water ; with a larger number 

 of bays and other navigable indentations 

 to watch than are to be found anywhere 

 else in the world in the same length of 

 straightaway shorelines, Germany's plan 

 to blockade the British Isles seems as 

 near a proposal to accomplish the impos- 

 sible as anything to which any nation 

 hitherto has committed itself. 



Indeed, undertaking to combat at once 

 the sinuosities of a shoreline lending it- 

 self better to defense against blockade 

 than any other of equal length in the 

 world and the greatest navy civilization 

 has ever seen, it is difficult to imagine 

 how success could even be hoped for by 

 those putting the plan into execution. 



Something of the extraordinary inden- 

 tations of the shoreline of the United 

 Kingdom may be gathered from the map 

 on page 85. 



England is so deeply indented that no 

 part is more than 75 miles from the sea, 

 while Scotland has the most rambling 

 coastline of any country in the world. 



Ireland is not as deeply indented as 

 England and Scotland ; but with all that 

 it has shores that make the way of the 

 blockader difficult. 



The vast proportions of the British 



shipping industry which the German sub- 

 marine blockade is attempting to destroy 

 defies our comprehension. In normal 

 years an average of 214 ships arrive at 

 United Kingdom ports from foreign 

 waters every day in the year. In addi- 

 tion to that, there are 780 arrivals from 

 home ports every day in the year of ships 

 in the coastwise trade. 



British merchant ships have a greater 

 aggregate tonnage than those of all the 

 other countries of the world together. 

 The merchant marine of that nation in- 

 cludes nearly 12,000 ships of all kinds. 

 Of these, about 2,800 are sailing ships 

 and 5,300 steam vessels employed in the 

 home trade. There are approximately 

 4,000 ships engaged in sailing between 

 British and foreign ports. These latter 

 have an average capacity of more than 

 2,500 net register tons. 



How rapidly Great Britain has been 

 replacing the losses sustained by her 

 shipping as a result of Germany's sub- 

 marine attacks is disclosed by the fact 

 that at the end of 1916 there were 465 

 steam vessels under construction in Brit- 

 ish shipyards, more than half of them 

 being ships of more than 5,000 tons bur- 

 den. The aggregate capacity of these 

 ships is 1,788,000 tons, so that both in 

 tonnage and in number the new craft are 

 replacing those sunk by the enemy. 



Few countries in the world are so de- 

 pendent on the importation of foodstuffs 

 as the United Kingdom, and for her not 



