Rainbow’s commanding officer, Commander Walter Hose, had been ordered on 1 August to prepare his cruiser for active service, because Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s China Squadron, which included the heavy cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, had departed the Far East for the eastern Pacific. With the RCN’s largest warship alongside at Halifax, the first operational cruise of the war was made on the West Coast. Kingsmill, that “everything has been completed in revised defence scheme except buoying the channel for war,” while the progress in preparing Niobe for sea was reported as “satisfactory.” 1 On August 12, the captain-in-charge of the port informed the director of the naval service, Rear-Admiral Charles E. At Halifax, for instance, the navy’s wartime responsibilities consisted variously of: blocking the eastern passage into the harbour past MacNab Island placing net defences, making minesweeping arrangements, and buoying the war channel establishing an examination service assuming control of the wireless station at Camperdown, and transporting censorship staff and militia detachments to other coastal wireless stations and controlling traffic in the harbour. The navy’s remaining duties were largely supervisory ones at the nation’s various ports, since the civilian crews of government vessels carried out most of the actual work. Under the terms of the Naval Service Act, both cruisers, despite their obsolescence, were placed at the disposal of the British Admiralty “for general service in the Royal Navy” once war was declared. In anticipation of the British declaration of war on 4 August 1914, the RCN’s largest warship, the cruiser Niobe, was in dockyard hands at Halifax being fitted for duty (it would not emerge from drydock to begin its power trials until early September), while the navy’s other warship, Rainbow, based in the Pacific at Esquimalt, had already proceeded to sea. Peter Rindlisbacher, HMCS Niobe at Daybreak, depicting the ship proceeding out to sea.
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