The Royal Canadian Yacht Club, the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, and the Royal Hamilton Yacht Club have the privilege of flying the blue ensign.
Canada, unlike Australia, supplies no contingent towards the Imperial Navy, but she has spent on public works over forty million pounds sterling. By her great trans-continental railway a valuable alternative route to the East is furnished; she provides graving docks at Quebec, Halifax, and Victoria; trains an annual contingent of forty thousand volunteers, supports a military college at Kingston, of whose cadets between eighty and ninety are now officers in the British Army; and in many other ways contributes to the well-being of the Empire, that Greater Britain, which has been not unaptly termed "a World-Venice, with the sea for streets."
The badges of the various Colonies of the Empire, as shown in the official flag-book of the Admiralty, are very diverse in appearance; some pleasing and others less charming, perhaps, than fantastic. It is needless to particularise them all. Some, like those of Mauritius, Jamaica, and of Cape Colony (Fig. 127) are heraldic in character, while others--as Barbadoes, where Britannia rides the waves in a chariot drawn by sea-horses, or South Australia, where Britannia lands on a rocky shore on which a black man is seated--are symbolical. Queensland has the simple and pleasing device we see in Fig. 128, the Maltese Cross, having a crown at its centre. Newfoundland has a crown on a white disc and the { 84} Latinised name _Terra Nova_ beneath, and Fiji (Fig. 137) adopts a like simple device, the crown and the word Fiji, while New Guinea does not get even so far as this, but has the crown, and beneath it the letters N. G. The gnu appears as the device of Natal; the black swan (Fig. 141) as the emblem of West Australia. An elephant and palm-tree on a yellow ground stand for West Africa, and an elephant and temple for Ceylon. British North Borneo (Fig. 132), on a yellow disc has a red lion, and Tasmania (Fig. 133), on a white ground has the same, though it will be noted that the action of the two royal beasts is not quite the same. The Straits Settlements have the curious device seen in Fig. 131. New Zealand (Fig. 136) has a cross of stars on a blue field. Victoria we have already seen in Figs. 134 and 135, while New South Wales has upon the white field the Cross of St. George, having in the centre one of the lions of England, and on each arm a star--an arrangement shown in Fig. 138. British East Africa has the crown, and beneath it the golden sun shooting forth its rays, one of the simplest, most appropriate, and most pleasing of all the Colonial devices; when placed in the centre of the Governor's flag it is upon a white disc, and the sun has eight principal rays. When for use on the red or blue ensigns, the sun has twelve principal rays, and both golden sun and crown are placed directly upon the field of the flag. St. Helena, Trinidad, Bermuda, British Guiana, Leeward Isles, Labuan, Bahamas, and Hong Kong all have devices in which ships are a leading feature--in the Bermuda device associated with the great floating dock, in the Hong Kong with junks, and in the other cases variously differentiated from each other, so that all are quite distinct in character. In the device of the Leeward Isles, designed by Sir Benjamin Pine, a large pine-apple is growing in the foreground, and three smaller ones away to the right. It is jocularly assumed that the centre one was Sir Benjamin himself, and the three subordinate ones his family.