THE WAR AND OCEAN GEOGRAPHY 



By the Editor 



SO FAR-REACHING have been the 

 effects of the great world effort to 

 throttle autocracy before autoc- 

 racy could throttle the liberty of the hu- 

 man race that one might catalogue the 

 entire range of human activities with- 

 out writing down a single interest of 

 mankind that has not been affected in 

 greater or less degree. Yet it is difficult 

 to find one interest, except the larger 

 one of human freedom, more radically 

 touched than that of the seas. 



Twenty-odd million tons of shipping 

 lie at the bottom of the ocean or float 

 around as helpless derelicts which multi- 

 ply the dangers of the deep. And with 

 these ships has gone to Davy Jones's 

 locker such an array of merchandise and 

 munitions as no one ever dreamed would 

 be his — beef and flour that might have 

 saved millions from the threshold of 

 starvation ; railroad engines that might 

 have moved the trains of a nation; mu- 

 nitions that might have sufficed the cause 

 of victory in most of the wars of history. 



Some day the war will be over, a peace 

 that will make the whole world a parlia- 

 ment of man will be signed, and the race 

 will be permitted, unshackled from its 

 fear of the hydra-headed Hun, to settle 

 back into the pursuits that make for its 

 well-being. 



THE CAEE FOR GREATER KNOWLEDGE OE 

 THE SEA 



When that day comes the ocean will 

 have new interest; for commerce, unfet- 

 tered and free, will move up and down 

 its lanes as never before. The world will 

 be a family of nations taught by the sacri- 

 fices of many a trying hour to think more, 

 in terms of world welfare and less in 

 terms of local advantage. 



In that day there will be urgent de- 

 mand for every ship that we are now 

 calling into being for the world purpose 

 of the moment — the annihilation of au- 

 tocracy. Not only so, but there will be a 

 demand for every ship that the shipyards 



of the nations can build in the years that 

 lie ahead. 



If world peace engenders international 

 trade and international trade demands 

 expanded shipping, expanded shipping in 

 its turn will call for a closer knowledge 

 of the sea. It may be true that the 

 principal ship lanes of the ocean are 

 almost as definitely traveled and marked 

 as a Lincoln Highway or a Long Island 

 boulevard, but withal, our knowledge of 

 the bounding main is only fragmentary. 



To begin with, the area of the sea is 

 about three times as large as that of the 

 land, and although as long ago as 1904 

 the governments of the civilized world 

 had gotten together as many as twenty- 

 five million observations of every kind 

 and sort from the logs of merchantmen, 

 warships, and government vessels, and al- 

 though the results of a single expedition 

 have filled over fifty massive quarto vol- 

 umes, what we know about the sea is but 

 the primer of the things it has to reveal. 



our fragmentary sources oe 

 information 



Imagine men in airships cruising over 

 a strange country, flying above miles of 

 clouds, and once in a while dropping a 

 sounding line down to earth and now and 

 again letting down a dredge or a trawl ; 

 and suppose that country were the war 

 zone in Europe. Do you think that under 

 such conditions they would learn much 

 about what was happening down below? 



They might happen to sink their sound- 

 ing tube into blood-sodden earth, or their 

 dredge might chance to dig up a piece of 

 shrapnel or a dead rat, while their trawl 

 might catch a butterfly or capture a 

 bumblebee ; but certainly the specimens 

 would not give a picture of the geology 

 of the land, nor the things brought up 

 by dredge and trawl afford an insight 

 into what is going on at the bottom of 

 the ocean of air, or of what inhabits the 

 floor of that ocean. 



Little wonder, then, that we marvel at 



230 



