naval power as the dominant factor in conflict. However, the book made the most impact in Germany. The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, had been much impressed by the Royal Navy, when he visited his grandmother, Queen Victoria. His mother said that "Wilhelm's one idea is to have a Navy which shall be larger and stronger than the British navy". In 1898 came the first German Fleet Act, two years later a second doubled the number of ships to be built, to 19 battleships and 23 cruisers in the next 20 years. In another decade, Germany would go from a naval ranking lower than Austria to having the second largest battle fleet in the world. For the first time since Trafalgar, Britain had an aggressive and truly dangerous rival to worry about. Mahan wrote in his book that not only world peace or the empire, but Britain's very survival depended on the Royal Navy ruling the waves. The Cambridge 1895 Latin essay prize was called "Britannici maris", or "British Sea Power". So when the great naval review of June 1897 for the Queen's diamond jubilee took place, it was in an atmosphere of unease and uncertainty. The question everyone wanted to know the answer to was how Britain was going to stay ahead. But Mahan could not give any answers. The man who thought he could was Jackie Fisher, commander in chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. He believed there were "Five strategic keys to the empire and world economic system: Gibraltar, Alexandria and Suez, Singapore, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Straits of Dover." His job was to keep hold of all of them. Fisher's reforms When he became First Sea Lord, Fisher began drawing up plans for a naval war against Germany. "Germany keeps her whole fleet always concentrated within a few hours of England," he wrote to the Prince of Wales in 1906. "We must therefore keep a fleet twice as powerful within a few hours of Germany." He therefore concentrated the bulk of the fleet in home waters, with a secondary concentration in the Mediterranean Fleet. He also had dozens of obsolete warships scrapped or hulked. The resources thus saved were directed to new designs of submarines, destroyers, light cruisers, battlecruisers and dreadnoughts. Fisher proclaimed, "We shall have ten Dreadnoughts at sea before a single foreign Dreadnought is launched, and we have thirty percent more cruisers than