If the British Fleet were lost or captured, the Atlantic might be dominated by Germany, a power hostile to our way of life, controlling in that event most of the ships and shipbuilding facilities of Europe.
I think experience has shown that privateers have done more toward distressing the trade of our enemies, and furnishing these States with necessaries, than Continental Ships of the same force.
FDR had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy. They told me, now forgotten, just how many pictures of ships they took out of the White House after he died. But he could choose good men.
I grew up in the suburbs of Sydney, an arid kind of place, but every day I took the ferry across the harbour to get to school. I'd watch the ships coming in and going out.
In the 19th Century people were looking for the Northwest Passage. Ships were lost and brave people were killed, but that doesn't mean we never went back to that part of the world again, and I consider it the same in space exploration.
I'm not the best audience for that because I'm not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that.
The reason given by the President in asking Congress to declare war against Germany is that the German government has declared certain war zones, within which, by the use of submarines, she sinks, without notice, American ships and destroys American lives.
We have nine ships and in the next two years will have ten, eleven and twelve. So things are going very nicely and all because of that program that people thought was mindless and so forth.
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
