COAST PROTECTION.—­Both Great Britain and Germany protected their coasts by laying fields of mines in the sea so placed that they would float just under water and arranged to explode on contact with the hull of a ship.  Through these mine fields carefully hidden channels gave access to the different ports.  So long as ships stayed in port or inside the fields of mines they were safe from attack.

THE BLOCKADE OF GERMAN PORTS.—­In July, 1914, the British navy had a grand review.  When the review was over, the war clouds were so threatening that the vessels were not dismissed to their stations.  At the beginning of the war Great Britain announced a blockade of German ports and assigned to her main fleet the task of carrying out the blockade.

THE BATTLE OF HELGOLAND BIGHT.—­Hel’goland is a small island rising steeply out of the North Sea; it has an area of one fifth of a square mile.  It was ceded to Germany by England about twenty years before the war.  Germany had fortified it and made it a sort of German Gibraltar to protect her chief naval ports.  The Bight of Helgoland is the passage about eighteen miles wide between the island and the German coast.  Here a portion of the British fleet engaged in patrol or scout duty came in contact with a part of the German fleet (August 28, 1914).  The arrival of four fast British battleships decided the contest.  Germany lost three cruisers and two destroyers, while every British vessel returned to port, though some were badly battered.

GERMAN COMMERCE RAIDERS.—­A few days before the outbreak of the war the German fleet in China slipped out of port.  The cruiser “Emden” was detached for work in the Indian Ocean, and the rest of the squadron raided over the Pacific.  November 1, a British squadron met the German ships near the coast of Chile.  In a little over an hour two of the British ships had been sunk and the remainder fled to the south.  Immediately on news of the defeat the British Admiralty sent a squadron of seven powerful ships to find and destroy the German squadron.  The British vessels stopped at the Falkland Islands to coal.  The next day the German ships appeared.  When they saw the strength of the British squadron they vainly attempted to escape.  In the battle that followed, four German vessels were sunk.  Of the two that escaped one was, a few months later, interned in a United States port and about the same time the other was destroyed.

The “Emden,” after separating from the other warships, cruised in the Indian Ocean for three months, and was the most destructive of the German raiders.  She was finally located by an Australian cruiser.  After a fight the German captain drove his vessel on the rocks to escape sinking.  A lieutenant and forty men who had landed to destroy a wireless station, seized a schooner and escaped, landed on the coast of Arabia, and finally made their way back to Germany.