Halifax (which would cease to be an Imperial fortress with the 1867 confederation of the Dominion of Canada, military defence of Canada would be transferred to the militia of the government of the dominion and the British Army withdrew most of its establishment from the continent; the Royal Naval Dockyard, Halifax would be closed in 1905, and sold to the government of the dominion in 1907) and Bermuda controlled the trans-Atlantic sea lanes between North America and Europe, and were placed to dominate the Atlantic seaboard of the United States (as demonstrated during the American War of 1812 when the squadron of the Royal Navy's North America Station maintained a blockade of the Atlantic coast of the United States and launched the Chesapeake Campaign from Bermuda, defeating American forces in the Battle of Bladensburg, capturing and burning Washington, DC, and raiding Alexandria, Virginia), as well as to control the western Atlantic Ocean from the Arctic to the West Indies (in the Twentieth Century, the Bermuda-controlled North America and West Indies Station of the Royal Navy would become the "America and West Indies Station", its area growing to include the western South Atlantic and the Atlantic coast of South America, as well the Pacific Coast from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic). Gibraltar controlled passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and Malta, aside from supporting operations in the Mediterranean and Black Sea, served as a base for naval and military forces that would be able to deploy relatively quickly to the Indian and Pacific Oceans once the Suez Canal was completed in 1869.