The Russo-Japanese War began halfway around the world and ended on the Maine border at Portsmouth, N.H., where President Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace agreement. The bloody conflict, which paved the way for much bigger wars, provoked a huge interest in Maine, where it dominated newspaper front pages for months after it began in February 1904.

The interest was well-placed. The first war in which “a colored people defeated a white people in modern times,” according to my politically incorrect college world history textbook, it was also the first war in which armored battleships, self-propelled torpedoes and modern machine guns (thanks to Maine’s Sir Hiram Maxim) were used.

The conflict had far-reaching repercussions that affected the world for the rest of the century. Defeated by the Japanese, the Russians turned their attention to the Balkans, helping to stir the toxic broth leading to the First World War. The humiliation of the czarist government led to the Russian revolutions in 1905 and 1917 and the birth of Soviet Communism.

The Japanese victory meanwhile touched off nationalist revolutions throughout Asia, effectively ending European supremacy there. One can add World War II and the Vietnam conflict to the list of international catastrophes that were directly influenced by the events leading up to the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905.

Most of the newspaper coverage came from wire reports, but Mainers had a voracious appetite for international news back then, and the editors at the Bangor Daily News wrote editorials and searched for local angles to help give the war added relevance at home. Here is a sampling from the early months from the pages of the NEWS.

Feb. 18, 1904: Ten days after the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Port Arthur in Manchuria, William Walz, dean of the University of Maine School of Law, then located in Bangor, predicted the war would be over in a year, but that France and England would next clash and then the United States and Germany “in about 20 or 30 years.” When asked if Russia would sue for peace if its lines of communication with its army in Manchuria were cut off, the former professor at a Japanese university smiled, saying, “It is rather impossible to imagine a white nation suing for peace with a yellow nation.”

Feb. 22: Mainers were reminiscing about the time the Russian Navy came to Southwest Harbor in 1878. Four of the Russian captains whose battleships had recently been destroyed by the Japanese at Port Arthur 26 years later were among a large delegation of Russian navy men visiting Maine on their way to Philadephia to pick up some battle cruisers. The Cimbria and its “700 warrior sailors” had remained for weeks at Southwest Harbor. In an interview, Dr. Augustus Hamlin, who had entertained some of the officers at his Bangor home, recounted how the Russians had tried out their first telephone there – the first ever seen in the state of Maine – a miniature device brought to Bangor by Isaiah Stetson, a student at Yale and Hamlin’s neighbor.

Feb. 23: A Bangor Daily News editorial declared: “Should Russia conquer Japan within a year, her despotic sway would become so great that the rest of Europe would have to combine and prevent her from gaining control of the earth, and Japan would cease to exist, except as a Russian province. Should Japan win within a year or so, she would soon claim and control Siberia and thus be in shape to move upon and conquer China, thus making herself the ruling power in Asia. As soon as she became mistress of half the earth’s population she should arrange treaties, and by employing cheap labor, could control the manufacture of nearly every article in general use, thus compelling the factories of England, Germany and America to shut down from competition and forcing civilization back by nearly twenty years.”

March 8: Sen. Eugene Hale of Maine lambasted a fellow senator for suggesting the United States had special ties with Japan and should use its warships to prevent the dismemberment of China. Hale urged complete neutrality, offering this prophecy: “[I]f she emerges triumphant from this war, the country that the United States will find her greatest rival in trade, her greatest antagonist in competition; the nation most likely to aggress, to monopolize and control China, is not Russia, but is Japan.”

March 15: “A weary looking lot of immigrants passed through Bangor yesterday noon bound for the large eastern cities from St. John where they were landed a few days ago. There were 94 of them and for the most part they are Russian Jews escaping military service. This lot is only a very small parcel compared with the army that is being landed in Boston and New York – all fleeing from the terrible military arm of Russia.”

March 16: The Rev. I.W. Cate, a missionary in Japan who previously had been pastor of the Universalist church in Machias, took a decidedly pro-Japanese stance in an article republished in the BDN: “Japan stands for free and enlightened government; for reciprocal trading relations; for sympathetic interests in the welfare of people; for straightforwardness in diplomacy; for the integrity of China and the natural development of its genius under the stimulus of Western civilization. Russia is notoriously opposed to these. Her government is tyrannical and oppressive at home and cannot fail to be brutal abroad.”

The war raged on for another year and a half until Roosevelt mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth, an event that a famous historian with Maine ties declared a major mistake 60 years later. The treaty made Japan the dominant naval force in the Pacific.

“Between 1941 and 1945 the United States paid heavily for the long-term results of Roosevelt’s meddling, for which, ironically enough, he was awarded the Nobel peace prize,” wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in “The Oxford History of the American People.”

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.