baggage. The kayak--sharp as a needle and light as a feather--is
for a well-armed man. The oomiak is a cargo carrier. The kayak is a
man-of-war.

When once men had found out how to make and use canoes they had also
found out the third and final principle of sea-power, which is, that if
you live beside the water and do not learn how to fight on it you will
certainly be driven off it by some enemy who has learnt how to fight
there. For sea-power in time of war simply means the power to use the
sea yourself while stopping the enemy from using it. So the first duty
of any navy is to keep the seaways open for friends and closed to
enemies. And this is even more the duty of the British Navy than of
any other navy. For the sea lies between all the different parts of
the British Empire; and so the life-or-death question we have to answer
in every great war is this: does the sea unite us by being under
British control, or does it divide us by being under enemy control?
United we stand: divided we fall.

At first sight you would never believe that sea-power could be lost or
won as well by birchbarks as by battleships. But if both sides have
the same sort of craft, or one side has none at all, then it does not
matter what the sort is. When the Iroquois paddled their birch-bark
canoes past Quebec in 1660, and defied the French Governor to stop
them, they "commanded" the St. Lawrence just as well as the British
Grand Fleet commanded the North Sea in the Great War; and for the same
reason, because their enemy was not strong enough to stop them.
Whichever army can drive its enemy off the roads must win the war,
because it can get what it wants from its base, (that is, from the
places where its supplies of men and arms and food and every other need
are kept); while its enemy will have to go without, being unable to get
anything like enough, by bad and roundabout ways, to keep up the fight
against men who can use the good straight roads. So it is with navies.
The navy that can beat its enemy from all the shortest ways across the
sea must win the war, because the merchant ships of its own country,
like its men-of-war, can use the best routes from the bases to the
front and back again; while the merchant ships of its enemy must either
lose time by roundabout voyages or, what is sure to happen as the war
goes on, be driven off the high seas altogether.

The savages of long ago often took to the water when they found the
land t