The most serious competitors British shipbuilders have are those of Germany. The industry there is of comparatively modern growth, and it is not more than a few years since all the large steamers required by German owners were built in Great Britain. All the early steamers of the Hamburg-Amerika Linie and also of the Norddeutscher Lloyd were constructed here, but in the early ’seventies, owing to the patriotism of a Secretary of State for the Navy in encouraging the construction of warships in German yards, shipbuilding was taken up in earnest and there are now shipyards in Germany capable of turning out steam-ships in every respect equal to the best that British establishments can produce. At first, German competition was not regarded very seriously by British builders, nor were German owners altogether enamoured of the products of their own yards owing to the lack of uniformity in the quality of the materials employed. The foundation of the Germanischer Lloyd during the ’sixties meant that a new influence was exercised upon German shipbuilding equivalent to that exercised by Lloyd’s upon the British mercantile marine. It was not, however, until 1882 that the Hamburg-Amerika Linie inaugurated the serious competition between German and British builders by entrusting the building of the mail steamer _Rugia_ to the Vulcan Shipbuilding and Engineering works at Stettin, and the _Rhaetia_ to the Reiherstieg Shipbuilding and Engineering Works at Hamburg. Previous to this the German yards had been constructing small steamers, the first of which there is any record being the _Weser_, built about 1816, at the Johann Lange yards. Iron shipbuilding was established at what is now the Stettin Vulcan yard in 1851 and the same year the “Neptun” yard was founded at Rostock. The first German iron steamer was built at the Schichau Works at Elbing in 1855, and from 1859 to 1862 the machinery for wooden gunboats was supplied. Two iron steamers were launched by Klawitter at Dantzic in 1855, in which year also the Godefroy wooden shipbuilding yard, the present Reiherstieg yard, laid the keel of the first iron ocean-going steamer built on the North Sea coast. The Norddeutsche Werft was started in 1865 at the newly created naval harbour of Kiel, and in 1879 was united with the Maschinenbau-Gesellschaft, formerly Egells, whence arose the well-known Germania shipbuilding establishment.