In 1848 the German Confederation was at war with Denmark on account of Schleswig-Holstein. The national parliament voted six million thalers for the creation of a fleet; it might as well have voted sixty millions as far as the possibility of collecting it in such disordered circumstances was concerned. But on June fourth, 1849, a squadron of three steamships, the _Barbarossa_, the _Hamburg_ and the _Lübeck_ did set out from the mouth of the Elbe, with decks cleared for action. The admiral was a Saxon, Rudolph Bromme. It was known that a Danish corvette was becalmed in the neighborhood of Helgoland. She was sighted and some shots had already been sent through her rigging, when suddenly from another direction, from Helgoland itself, then a British possession, a shot was fired. It signified that the ships were within the three-mile limit over which then and now a state’s sovereignty extended, and that England was forbidding the fray. The “fleet” complied with the order and Lord Palmerston took occasion to send a diplomatic note to the German Confederation stating that ships had been seen in the North Sea flying a black-red-gold flag and conducting themselves as war-ships; that England would not recognize such ships with a black-red-gold flag as war-ships, but would treat them, if need be, as pirates. England has more or less preserved this attitude to the present day and has been righteously indignant whenever Germany increased her fleet. A first lord of the admiralty once publicly declared that Britain’s rule of the sea was part of the common treasure of mankind and that England could never endure that another power should be able to weaken her political influence by exerting naval pressure. Such a position, he said, would unquestionably lead to war. The attempts to weld Germany into a nation having failed, the fleet was put up at auction and sold in 1852. The state of Prussia, however, which was one of the purchasers, had by this time started her own fleet and soon began to build the harbor in the _Jadebucht_, which is now called _Wilhelmshaven_. One of the royal princes, Adalbert, was made admiral and furthered the cause of the fleet in every way. Himself an intrepid leader, he was wounded in an encounter with Morocco pirates, who fired on one of the small boats of the _Danzig_. In 1863, however, the fleet consisted of but four corvette cruisers, the _Arkona_, _Gazelle_ and _Vineta_, which had each twenty-eight cannon, and the _Nymphe_, which had but seventeen. Add to these twenty-one cannon boats, four of which carried three cannon, the rest but two. In 1867 the Prussian fleet merged in that of the North German Confederation, which in turn, in 1871, merged into that of the new German Empire.