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of Windsor" - was nearing the end of her illustrious 64-year reign, the longest in English history. Except for the ill-fated Crimean war and minor affrays and rebellions on remote frontiers the "Pax Brittanica" had kept the World at peace for forty years, and the British Empire, on which "the sun never set", was at its greatest extent and power. The Royal Navy was being maintained at the so-called "two-power" standard, i.e. equal in size to the two next biggest navies.
But I was barely a year old when Japan made an unprovoked and undeclared war on that "sleeping giant" China, and the Boer war in South Africa and the Russo-Japanese war in Manchuria, as well as several small conflicts, were to follow in quick succession. The exciting age of discovery and colonization was nearly over, though no man had stood at either of the Poles, and most of the interiors of Africa and South America were still unexplored, unmapped, and unexploited.
Long distance travel within the developed, and developing, countries was being facilitated by big extensions of their first small railway systems, and movement of people, mails, and goods was being speeded up by the new steamships, rapidly replacing the famous sailing clippers which had, in keen competition with each other, been making fantastic record runs between Britain and Australia or the Far East, bringing home full cargoes of wool from Australia, or of tea and spices from the Chinese treaty ports. The "Cutty Sark" was the most famous of these ships and is now permanently berthed in dry dock at Greenwich, where I boarded and inspected her in August 1966. The steamers though, still retained modified masts, yards, and sails for use in emerency and to assist engines when the winds were favourable.
But the opening of the Suez canal for traffic late in 1869, and the increase in steam navigation, was relentlessly abolishing the old clipper route to Australia and the East via the Cape of Good Hope. As a small boy, in 1903, I saw big ships in billowing white sails off Bondi beach on several occasions, and what an inspiring