WHEN Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, announced the dispatch of five warships to rescue British citizens in Sierra Leone on May 8th, he was listened to by barely two dozen MPs.
"The push into aerospace coincides with growing worries in the West and across Asia about China's increasingly assertive territorial claims, including the dispatch of Chinese warships to waters long patrolled by Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam".
Japan, which had been watching developments in Korea, dispatched a squadron of warships and pressured Korea to sign a treaty of commerce and friendship.
The threat of Nikephoros II Orsini, who was gaining ground in Thessaly and Epirus, forced John to request the dispatch of a Venetian warship and an administrator from Venice to take control of his domain, to which the republic obliged.
Lincoln dispatched a small fleet of warships, troops, and transports from the navy yard in New York to resupply and re-enforce Fort Pickens and Fort Sumter, although he told Davis they would not fire unless fired upon.
China's naval high command now openly talks of dispatching warships to the waters between the Malacca Strait and the Persian Gulf, principally to safeguard the sea lanes used to carry oil to the People's Republic of China.
While a fierce battle was raging for Chenchow in the north, Hongkong dispatches said, the Japanese have concentrated a large number of warships and transports at Formosa preliminary to an invasion of Canton and southern China.
Two days later, a dispatch from Seattle said, "We are securing intelligences concerning the concentration of warships within the Bremerton Naval Yard"; Japanese residents were relocated from that area in 1942.
The same is true of warships.
