Navy

A ruler that has but an army has one hand, but he who has a navy has both. ~ Peter the Great

A navy (sometimes called a maritime force) is the branch of a nation's armed forces principally designated for naval warfare and amphibious warfare; namely, lake- or ocean-borne combat operations and related functions. It includes anything conducted by surface ships, amphibious ships, submarines, and seaborne aviation, as well as ancillary support, communications, training, and other fields; recent developments have included space related operations.

Quotes

• Encumbered by the weight of each individual’s gear, neither their physical capability nor emergency supplemental flotations devices, if activated, were sufficient to keep them at the surface
• United States Rear Adm. Michael DeVore according to The drownings of 2 Navy SEALs were preventable, military investigation finds (October 11, 2024)

• A navy is essentially and necessarily aristocratic. True as may be the political principles for which we are now contending they can never be practically applied or even admitted on board ship, out of port, or off soundings. This may seem a hardship, but it is nevertheless the simplest of truths. Whilst the ships sent forth by the Congress may and must fight for the principles of human rights and republican freedom, the ships themselves must be ruled and commanded at sea under a system of absolute despotism.
  • John Paul Jones, letter to the Naval Committee of Congress (14 September 1775).

• A ruler that has but an army has one hand, but he who has a navy has both.
  • Peter the Great, as quoted in Way a River Went: Following the Volga Through the Heart of Russia (2015), by Thom Wheeler, p. 163

• When a crisis confronts the nation, the first question often asked by policymakers is: "What naval forces are available and how fast can they be on station?"
  • Carlisle Trost, as quoted in "U.S. Navy in Desert Storm/Desert Shield" (1998), Naval History & Heritage Command

These hard, powerful, brilliantly resourceful sea masters... found it necessary to surround themselves with super-loyal, muscular but dull-brained illiterates who could not see nor savvy their masters’ stratagems. There was great safety in the mental dullness of these henchmen. The Great Pirates realized that the only people who could possibly contrive to displace them were the truly bright people. For this reason their number-one strategy was secrecy. ~Buckminster Fuller

• Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist. Operating under the patronage of the Duke of Milan he designed the fortified defences and weaponry as well as the tools of peaceful production.. What happened at the time of Leonardo and Galileo was that mathematics was so unproved by the advent of the zero that not only was much more scientific shipbuilding made possible but also much more reliable navigation. Immediately thereafter truly large-scale venturing on the world’s oceans commenced, and the strong sword-leader patrons as designing their new and more powerful world-girdling ships. Next they took their Leonardos to sea with them as their seagoing Merlins to invent ever more powerful tools and strategies on a world-around basis to implement their great campaigns to best all the other great pirates, thereby enabling them to become masters of the world and of all its people and wealth.. The topmost Great Pirates’ Leonardos discovered — both in their careful, long-distance planning and in their anticipatory inventing that the grand strategies of sea power made it experimentally clear that a plurality of ships could usually outmaneuver one ship. So the Great Pirates’ Leonardos invented navies. Then, of course, they had to control various resource-supplying mines, forests, and lands with which and upon which to build the ships and establish the industries essential to building, supplying, and maintaining their navy’s ships... The required and scientifically designed secrecy of the sea operations thus pulled a curtain that hid the Leonardos from public view, popular ken, and recorded history. p. 25
  • Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969)

• Then came the grand strategy which said, “divide and conquer.” You divide up the other man’s ships in battle or you best him when several of his ships are hauled out on the land for repairs. They also had a grand strategy of anticipatory divide and conquer. Anticipatory divide and conquer was much more effective than tardy divide and conquer, since it enabled those who employed it to surprise the other pirate under conditions unfavorable to the latter... The great top pirates of the world, realizing that dull people were innocuous and that the only people who could contrive to displace the supreme pirates were the bright ones, set about to apply their grand strategy of anticipatory divide and conquer to solve that situation comprehensively. The Great Pirate came into each of the various lands where he either acquired or sold goods profitably and picked the strongest man there to be his local head man. The Pirate’s picked man became the Pirate’s general manager of the local realm. If the Great Pirate's local strong man in a given land had not already done so, the Great Pirate told him to proclaim himself king. Despite the local head man’s secret subservience to him, the Great Pirate allowed and counted upon his king-stooge to convince his countrymen that he, the local king, was indeed the head man of all men -the god—ordained ruler. To guarantee that sovereign claim the Pirates gave their stooge-kings secret lines of supplies which provided everything required to enforce the sovereign claim. The more massively bejewelled the king’s gold crown, and the more visible his court and castle, the less visible was his pirate master. p. 29 Ch. II, Origins of specialization
  • Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969)
• While paintings, poems, films and histories memorialise the great naval battles – Salamis, Lepanto, Trafalgar, Midway – when one navy destroyed another, the main strategic purpose of navies is to control the seas, and the highways that criss-cross them, and prevent their enemies from doing so. Even today land communications are vulnerable to disruption, either man-made or natural; how much more so in the past before surfaced roads and railways? Ever since humans began to build floating craft, water has been the most reliable way of moving people and material. Navies exist to protect their nations, their coasts, people and shipping, and to project their power abroad. By landing troops on enemy coasts, acting as floating gun and aircraft platforms in more recent times to bring firepower to bear on land targets, or destroying enemy capacity to wage war, whether by sinking or seizing enemy and sometimes neutral shipping or blockading ports so that needed resources, including soldiers, cannot move in or out, a powerful navy can make it difficult, even impossible, for its enemy to wage war on land or at sea. ‘We destroy the national life afloat,’ said the leading British naval theorist Julian Corbett, who taught generations of officers before the First World War, ‘and therefore check the vitality of that life ashore, as far as one is dependent on the other.’
  • Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020)

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 550.

• Britain's best bulwarks are her wooden walls.
  • T. Augustine Arne, Britain's Best Bulwarks.

• Our ships were British oak,
  And hearts of oak our men.
  • S. J. Arnold, Death of Nelson.

• Cooped in their winged sea-girt citadel.
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto II (1812), Stanza 28.

• Right—that will do for the marines.
  • Lord Byron, The Island. II. XXI.

• The wooden walls are the best walls of this kingdom.
  • Lord Keeper Coventry, speech to the Judges, June 17, 1635, reported in Gardiner, History of England. Vol. III. P. 79.

• Hearts of oak are our ships,
  Gallant tars are our men.
  • Garrick, Hearts of Oak.

• Hearts of oak are our ships,
  Hearts of oak are our men.
  • Garrick, Other version of Hearts of Oak.

• All in the Downs the fleet was moor'd.
  • John Gay, Sweet William's Farewell to Black-Eyed Susan.

• Now landsmen all, whoever you may be,
  If you want to rise to the top of the tree,
  If your soul isn't fettered to an office stool,
  Be careful to be guided by this golden rule—
  Stick close to your desks and never go to sea,
  And you all may be Rulers of the Queen's Navee.
  • W. S. Gilbert, H. M. S. Pinafore.

• Scarce one tall frigate walks the sea
  Or skirts the safer shores
  Of all that bore to victory
  Our stout old Commodores.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., at a dinner given to Admiral Farragut (July 6, 1865).

• The credite of the Realme, by defending the same with Wodden Walles, as Themistocles called the Ship of Athens.
  • Linschoten, London. Preface to English Trans.

• Lysander when handing over the command of the fleet to Callicratidas, the Spartan, said to him, "I deliver you a fleet that is mistress of the seas."
  • Lysander. See Plutarch, Life of Lysander.

• There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.
  • Macaulay, History of England, Volume I, Chapter III, Part XXXII.

• Now the sunset breezes shiver,
  And she's fading down the river,
  But in England's song forever
  She's the Fighting Téméraire.
  • Henry Newboldt, The Fighting Téméraire.

• Tell that to the Marines—the sailors won't believe it.
  • Old saying quoted by Scott, Redgauntlet, Chapter XIII; reported in Trollope, Small House at Allington.

The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904)

Quotes reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 180-181.

• The legislature have anxiously provided for those most useful and deserving body of men, the seamen and marines of this country.
  • Lord Kenyon, C.J., Turtle v. Hartwell (1795), 6 T. R. 429.

• Surely the navy must be the navy royal.
  • Holt, C.J., Tutchin's Case (1704), 14 How. St. Tr. 1122.

• The naval dominion of England is of great consequence and use; for it is called dotem regni. If therefore the kingdom of England consists of land and sea, I hope we shall not stand at half defence, to defend the land and leave the sea.
  • Rot. Parl., 2 Rich. II., M. 25.

• The condition of the British Navy is, no doubt, a matter of national importance and public interest.
  • Grove, J., Henwood v. Harrison (1872), L. R. 7 C. P. Cas. 613.

• The salvation of this country depends upon the discipline of the fleet; without discipline they would be a rabble, dangerous only to their friends, and harmless to the enemy.
  • Per Cur., Johnstone v. Sutton (1786), 1 T. R. 549.

• The navy is the most important defence of the country, in which every subject of the Queen has an interest of the deepest character.
  • Willes, J., Henwood v. Harrison (1872), L. R. 7 C. P. Cas. 627.

• War itself is a great evil, but it is chosen to avoid a greater. The practice of pressing is one of the mischiefs war bringeth with it. But it is a maxim in law, and good policy too, that all private mischiefs must be borne with patience for preventing a national calamity. And as no greater calamity can befall us than to be weak and defenceless at sea in a time of war, so I do not know that the wisdom of the nation hath hitherto found out any method of manning our navy, less inconvenient than pressing; and at the same time, equally sure and effectual.
  • Foster, J., Case of Pressing Mariners (1743), 18 How. St. Tr. 1330.

• It may not be fit, in point of discipline, that a subordinate officer should dispute the commands of his superior, if he were ordered to go to the mast head: but if the superior were to order him thither, knowing that, for some bodily infirmity, it was impossible he should execute the order, and that he must infallibly break his neck in the attempt, and it were so to happen, the discipline of the navy would not protect that superior from being guilty of the crime of murder.
  • Eyre, B., Sutton v. Johnstone (1786), 1 T. R. 503.

Peabody Museum of Salem

• Our Mountains are cover'd with Imperial Oak
  Whose Roots, like our liberties, ages have nourished
  But long e're our Nation submits to the Yoke
  Not a Tree shall be left on the Field where it Flourished
  Should Invasion impend, every Tree would defend
  From the Hill tops they shaded, our Shores to defend
  For ne'er shall the Sons of Columbia be Slaves
  While the Earth bears a Plant, or the Sea rolls its Waves.
  • Caption from a bowl made in Liverpool, for export to the US

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Navy on Wikipedia
• The dictionary definition of navy on Wiktionary