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A Century of War
propulsion, the oil-fired ship required one-third the engine weight, and almost one-quarter the daily tonnage of fuel, a critical factor for a fleet, whether commercial or military. The radius of action of an oilpowered fleet was up to four times as great as that of the comparable coal ship.1 But at the time, Fisher was regarded by his English peers as an eccentric dreamer. Meantime, a German engineer, Gottlieb Daimler, had by 1885 developed the world’s first workable petroleum motor to drive a road vehicle. Although automobiles were regarded as playthings of the ultra-rich until the turn of the century, the economic potentials of the petroleum era were beginning to be more broadly realized by many beyond Admiral Fisher and his circle. D’ARCY CAPTURES THE SECRET OF THE BURNING ROCKS By 1905, the British secret services and the British government had finally realized the strategic importance of the new fuel. Britain’s problem was that it had no known oil of its own. It must rely on America, Russia or Mexico to supply it, an unacceptable condition in time of peace, impossible in the event of a major war. A year before, in 1904, Captain Fisher had been promoted to the rank of Britain’s First Sea Lord, the supreme commander of British naval affairs. Fisher promptly established a committee to ‘consider and make recommendations as to how the British navy shall secure its oil supplies.’ Britain’s presence in Persia and the Arabian Gulf—the latter still part of the Ottoman Empire—was at this time quite limited. Persia was not part of the formal British Empire. For some years, Britain had maintained consulates at Bushire and Bandar Abbas, and kept British naval ships in the Gulf to deter other powers from entertaining designs on strategic waters so close to Britain’s most vital colonial source of looting, India. In 1892, Lord Curzon, later viceroy of India, writing on Persia, stated, ‘I should regard the concession of a port upon the Persian Gulf to Russia, by any power, as a deliberate insult to Great Britain and as a wanton rupture of the status quo, and as an international provocation to war.’2 But in 1905, His Majesty’s Government, through the agency of the notorious British ‘ace of spies,’ Sidney Reilly, secured an extraordinarily significant exclusive right over what were then believed to be vast untapped petroleum deposits in the Middle East. In early 1905, the British secret services sent Reilly (born Sigmund Georgjevich
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