A fleet of sixteen white-hulled warships steam slowly in line-ahead formation. The distinctive livery – white hulls and buff superstructure – identifies it as part of the United States Navy. This image records the departure of Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘Great White Fleet’ from Hampton Roads, Virginia on 16th December 1907, led by the flagship USS Connecticut. Although remembered largely as a goodwill tour, the fourteen-month, 43,000 mile circumnavigation had more serious geo-political and technical aims. In the event, the cruise proved a triumph of passive gunboat diplomacy
In the year’s following its defeat of Spain in 1898, the United States had moved quickly to entrench its position as an imperial power. Its government had launched a massive warship building programme, and constructed naval bases in Cuba, Hawaii and the Philippines. Most importantly, it had assisted Panamanian rebels against the government of Colombia, thereby gaining de facto control of the territory surrounding the Panama Canal, whose construction it took over from France in 1904. However, Japan’s naval defeat of Russia in 1905, in which the latter lost more than a dozen battleships, left the former in a position of unrivalled naval supremacy in the Pacific. The fear in Washington was that Japan’s victory would spur it to move against America’s own possessions in the region, primarily the Philippines. One of the main objectives of the world cruise, therefore, was deterrence.
Roosevelt was keen to demonstrate America’s willingness to defend its newly acquired imperial assets. The Russian Baltic Fleet’s troubled passage to the Far East, and its subsequent annihilation at the Battle of Tsushima had illustrated the logistical difficulties of fighting a naval battle far from home ports. Thus, another objective of the cruise was to test the US Navy’s capabilities in protecting its overseas possessions. In the decades following the Civil War, the US navy was essentially reduced to a ‘brown water’ one, designed to protect its own river systems and coasts. Its first true ocean-going battleship, USS Iowa, had not been commissioned until 1897. Roosevelt fully expected difficulties during the voyage and pointedly ordered that ‘all failures, blunders and shortcomings’ be revealed in time of peace, and not, as had happened with the Russian navy, in time of war.
A third motivation for the cruise was political. Heavy naval expenditure by recent US administrations had not been popular with Congress. Roosevelt, a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and a disciple of naval strategist Alfred T. Mahan, hoped that by raising the profile of the navy at home, he could secure greater public support for its continued expansion. In fact, Roosevelt’s enemies in Congress were opposed on cost grounds to the whole idea of a world cruise, the head of the Naval Appropriations Committee, Senator Eugene Hale, going so far as to threaten to withhold navy funds, a threat that the president disdainfully ignored.
However, there were wider fears about the endeavour. With the Panama Canal still far from complete, the fleet would have to traverse the hazardous Straits of Magellan. Some feared the cruise would leave the nation unprotected. As recently as 1902, the US Navy had almost come to blows with Imperial Germany over its threatened military intervention in a Venezuelan debt crisis. Others worried that the cruise would provoke war with Japan, in a time of strained relations owing to recent anti-Japanese legislation in California and other West Coast states. This offense came on top of lingering Japanese resentment towards the Treaty of Portsmouth, brokered by Roosevelt, which had ended the Russo-Japanese War without significant concessions or reparations being awarded to the victor. Anticipating this domestic hostility to the cruise, Roosevelt kept his plans secret even from members of his own cabinet until the last moment; the fleet being brought together initially to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Jamestown Expedition, which established the continent’s first English settlement. Even when the fleet set out from Hampton Roads, watched by Roosevelt himself aboard his presidential yacht, the destination was initially only given as the West Coast.
During the first leg of the cruise, the Americans were feted in every port they visited. The fleet was escorted into Rio de Janeiro by Brazilian warships and guided through the Straits of Magellan by a Chilean cruiser. The presidents of these countries as well as those of Argentina and Peru received courtesy calls and in some cases reviewed the passing fleet. The foreign minister of Brazil, whose own naval strength had exceeded that of the US only twenty years previously, labelled the Great White Fleet ‘the pride of the continent’.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 