By this time (1840) steam had begun to be used in British men-of-war. But the first steamer in the world that ever fired a shot in action, and the first to cross any ocean under steam the whole way, was built at Quebec in 1831. This was the famous _Royal William_, which steamed from Pictou (in Nova Scotia) to London in 1833, and which, on the 5th of May, 1836, in the Bay of San Sebastian, fired the first shot ever fired in battle from a warship under steam. She had been sold to the Spanish Government for use against the Carlists, who were the same sort of curse to Spain that the Stuarts were to Britain, and was then leading the British Auxiliary Steam Squadron under Commodore Henry. (The American _Savannah_ is often said to have crossed the Atlantic under steam in 1819. But her log (ship's diary) proves that she steamed only eighty hours during her voyage of a month.) [Illustration: THE _ROYAL WILLIAM_. Canadian built; the first boat to cross any ocean steaming the whole way (1833), the first steamer in the world to fire a shot in action (May 5, 1836).] In 1854 French and British were again allied, this time against Russia, which wanted to cut Europe off from Asia by taking Constantinople. The Allies took Sebastopol in the Crimea because it was the Russian naval base in the Black Sea. The Czar never thought that "bleeding his big toe" could beat him. But it did. He had to supply his army by land, while the Allies supplied theirs by sea; and though theirs fought thousands of miles from their bases at home, while his fought in Russia itself, within a few hundred miles of its bases inland, yet their sea-power wore out his land-power in less than two years. Russia was at that time a great world-power, stretching without a break from the Baltic to Alaska, which she owned. What, then, kept Canada free from the slightest touch of war? The only answer is, the Royal Navy, that Navy which, supported by the Mother Country alone, enabled all the oversea Dominions to grow in perfect peace and safety for this whole hundred years of British wars. Moreover, Canada was then, and long remained, one of the greatest shipping countries in the world, dependent on her own and the Mother Country's shipping for her very life. What made her shipping safe on every sea? The Royal Navy. But, more than even this, the Mother Country spent twenty-five hundred millions of her own money on keeping Canada Canadian and British by land and sea. And here, again, nothing could have been done without the Navy.