In the war with France the German fleet played no rôle whatever, there being but five ironclads in all, two of them small coast defenders, to oppose to France’s fifty-five. There were but one or two insignificant encounters between small single ships—one between the _Grille_ and the _Hirondelle_ in the Baltic, and one between the _Meteor_, whose whole crew numbered sixty-three, and the French despatch-boat _Bouvet_, with eighty-three. The two had come upon each other in the harbor of Havana and then tried conclusions on the high seas. But the German victories on land had been so quick and decisive that the fleet as a whole never came into action. Even the successful outcome of the war did not spur Germany on to build up a strong navy. A general, not a seaman, was made chief of the admiralty and, although Von Stosch brought in a building plan according to which the navy, by 1882, would have had fourteen large ironclads, seven monitors, twenty cruisers and twenty-eight torpedo-boats, it was carried out only in part. Stosch deserves credit, however, for insisting that Germany should build all her own ships. The sinking of the _Grosse Kurfürst_ in 1879, which was run into by one of her own sister ships, was a great calamity for the navy, and the loss of her two hundred sixty-five officers and men caused wide-spread grief. Caprivi, the later chancellor, followed Von Stosch in 1883 as head of the admiralty. He was conscientious, but, it would seem, altogether without fruitful ideas. He placed all his hopes in the torpedo-boat, and from 1883 to 1887 not a single battle-ship was built. It was not so much to be credited to Caprivi, but to a young officer, Von Tirpitz, now grand admiral and state secretary for the navy office, that the German torpedo-boat fleet became the best in the world. Tirpitz made a new weapon of it, one that could be used not merely for coast-defense, but also for fighting on the high seas. But the fact remains that the torpedo-boat under Caprivi’s régime was greatly overestimated and that its usefulness has more and more been checked by new inventions—search-lights, Gatling guns, torpedo-boat-destroyers and the like. Toward the end of his term indeed Caprivi began to see the importance of a strong fleet and the idea gained ground that “a navy which has its center of gravity on or near shore is not worthy of the name.” In 1887 was begun the Kaiser Wilhelm canal between the Baltic and the North Sea, which enables the one fleet to operate in both waters without fear of being intercepted. Meanwhile Germany had started on her career as a colonial power, having acquired by purchase and by treaty tracts in Africa and islands in the Pacific Ocean more than twice the size of her possessions in Europe. Some of her little cruisers and cannon boats had even seen service against unruly natives. The Reichstag, however, showed little interest in the government’s colonial policy and was not to be won for the building of large war-ships.