Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/128

110 places, and from which the great accumulations are routed to their destinations. Such places are Pittsburg, Buffalo, St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, San Francisco to mention only a few. Shipping destined for the belligerent nations was similarly assembled, in the years 1917 and 1918, at six or eight great ocean "gateways," and there formed into convoys for "through routing" to the British Isles, France, and the Mediterranean. Only a few of the ships that were exceptionally fast speed in itself being a particularly efficacious protection against submarines were permitted to ignore this routing system, and dash unprotected through the infested area. This was a somewhat dangerous procedure even for such ships, however, and they were escorted whenever destroyers were available. All other vessels, from whatever parts of the world they might come, were required to sail first for one of these great assembling points, or "gateways"; and at these places they were added to one of the constantly forming convoys. Thus all shipping which normally sailed to Europe around the Cape of Good Hope proceeded up the west coast of Africa until it reached the port of Dakar or Sierra Leone, where it joined the convoy. Shipping from the east coast of South America—ports like Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo instead of sailing directly to Europe, joined the convoy at this same African town. Vessels which came to Britain and France by way of Suez and Mediterranean ports found their great stopping place at Gibraltar a headquarters of traffic which, in the huge amount of freight which it " created," became almost the Pittsburg of this mammoth transportation system. The four " gateways " for North America and the west coast of South America were Sydney (Cape Breton), Halifax, New York, and Hampton Roads. The grain-laden merchantmen from the St. Lawrence valley rendezvoused at Sydney and Halifax. Vessels from Portland, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other Atlantic points found their assembling headquarters at New York, while ships from Baltimore, Norfolk, the Gulf of Mexico, and the west coast of South America proceeded to the great convoy centre which had been established at Hampton Roads.

In the convoy room of the Admiralty these aggregations of ships were always referred to as the "Dakar convoy,