Word: navale
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Take a single sentence. Take a sentence of Manchester's, on Churchill's funeral: "When his flag-draped coffin moved across the old capital, drawn by naval ratings, and bareheaded Londoners stood trembling in the cold, they mourned not only him and all he had meant, but all they had been, and no longer were, and would never be again." Most likely, Manchester had only the scantiest notion where that sentence would wind up when he began it. Once he caught up with it, he got it, but then there was another sentence running on ahead. Until recently, there...
Vice-Admiral Yevgeni Chernov knows the pain and anguish of losing a nuclear submarine. Once, as commander of the 1st Nuclear Submarine Flotilla of the Soviet Union's Northern Fleet, Chernov kept his flag on the Komsomolets. In April 1989, when Chernov was a professor at the Naval College, his former flagship sank in the Norwegian Sea. For the last nine years, the 71-year-old Hero of the Soviet Union who spent 33 years in nuclear submarines has been heading the Charity Foundation in Memory of the Komsomolets (echernov@online.ru). But Chernov today is focused on the fate...
...ocean route. And the tax burden of maintaining a big fleet was severe. But the decision to scuttle the great ships was in large part political. With the death of Yongle, the Emperor who sent Zheng He on his voyages, the conservatives began their ascendancy. China suspended naval expeditions. By century's end, construction of any ship with more than two masts was deemed a capital offense. Oceangoing vessels were destroyed. Eventually, even records of Zheng He's journey were torched. China's heroic age was over; its open door had slammed shut. "The expeditions wasted tens of myriads...
...back and forth between openness and insularity, between the spirit embodied in Zheng He and that of, say, Yang Rong, the Confucian tutor to the Emperor who argued for rolling back the power of eunuch adventurers like Zheng He. The Confucians won; China wouldn't emerge again as a naval force until the past decade or so, as it began to build up a sizable fleet, probe disputed islands like the Spratlys and project a presence in Asia's sea-lanes...
...open seas. With Tianfei's blessing, Zheng He and his men spent two years at sea, landing at present-day Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and, eventually, India. Over the next 28 years, Zheng He's flotilla embarked on six other grand voyages. It was an unprecedented massing of naval power. The ships, described collectively as "swimming dragons," boasted as many as nine masts apiece; and the largest could hold 1,000 people. Dotted with dragons' eyes to help them "see," they carried soldiers, doctors, cooks, interpreters, astrologers, traders and holy men. The senior captains were eunuchs. The expeditions covered...