War
In the first three years of the Gunboat War, these boats were on several occasions able to capture cargo ships from the convoys and to defeat British naval brigs, though they were not strong enough to overcome larger frigates and ships of the line. The British had control of Danish waters during the whole of the 1807–1814 war, and when the season was suited to navigation they were regularly able to escort large merchant convoys out through the Sound and the Great Belt. Although the discussion below focuses on armed encounters involving an exchange of fire, one must keep in mind that the British also captured numerous Danish privateers without firing a shot, and conducted an economic war, regularly seizing merchant vessels as prizes. Further economic damage was done by raids on the smaller islands, many populated but undefended. British warships landed to replenish firewood and water supplies, and forcibly to buy, commandeer or simply take livestock to augment their provisions.
The war overlapped, in time, the Anglo-Russian War. As a result, the British expanded their trade embargo to Russian waters and the British navy conducted forays northwards into the Barents Sea. The navy conducted raids on Hasvik and Hammerfest and disrupted the Pomor trade, the Norwegian trade with Russia.
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Famous quotes containing the word war:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in war the two Cardinal virtues.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“The truth is, the whole administration under Roosevelt was demoralized by the system of dealing directly with subordinates. It was obviated in the State Department and the War Department under [Secretary of State Elihu] Root and me [Taft was the Secretary of War], because we simply ignored the interference and went on as we chose.... The subordinates gained nothing by his assumption of authority, but it was not so in the other departments.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)