The Mercantile Marine and Navy have always been so closely knit that it is often difficult to separate their histories. The Mercantile Marine was in reality, as has been said, the parent of the latter. As the State grew, and civilisation became more complex, a process of separation between the ships of commerce and the ships of war was inevitable, and the Navy became more and more a distinct Royal Service. The increasing difficulties of the problems of defence, armament, and so on, led to a process of specialisation, and could only be adequately studied and the Empire’s growing needs supplied by a State Department. On the other hand, the Mercantile Marine remained, and still remains, individualistic, each merchant ship-owner, or company of ship-owners, building the sort of vessel best adapted to the particular enterprise in hand. Thus we have sailing from our ports, ships of all descriptions, ocean-going liners carrying passengers, cargoes and mails, as well as tramps, colliers, cold-storage vessels, and an infinity of other types. But while this process of separation, or specialisation, has been both inevitable and fruitful, the Mercantile Marine has, in every war, been called upon by the Navy to provide transports, auxiliary cruisers, hospital and munition ships, and, in the recent Great War, minesweepers, submarine chasers, ‘Q’ ships, and many other equally vital subsidiaries. Similarly, in the personnel of the Mercantile Marine, the Navy has always had a powerful reserve, not only of experienced sailors, but of actual navally-trained officers and men. Without these, it is safe to say that the Navy could never have undertaken, or accomplished, those vast and world-wide, and many of them unforeseeable, tasks, so magnificently and successfully carried out; and it is equally true that but for the Mercantile Marine, the armies of the whole Alliance would have been paralysed. In no history, however long and laboriously compiled, would it be possible to do full justice to the war-work of the British Mercantile Marine, but the present volume supplies, at any rate, an index to the scope and value of what it performed. In the re-action of one unit, of one old, honourable, and successful merchant shipping Company to the demands of the world war, it is perhaps possible to realise more clearly than by making a wider sweep of research, the amazing accomplishments of the whole; and where all rose, with magnificent unity, to heights of service never surpassed in our annals, none excelled either in the prescience or organizing ability of its directors, in the courage and resource of its captains and crews, or in the loyalty and ingenuity of its skilled and unskilled employees, the record of the Cunard Steamship Company. A MERCHANT FLEET AT WAR CHAPTER I Mobilisation