Part 10

1863-1865

The Pocahontas came North for repairs in the late summer of 1862, and after a brief leave I was ordered to the Naval Academy. Under the stress of the war, this had been broken out from its regular seat at Annapolis and transferred for the moment to Newport. All the arrangements were temporary and extemporized. The principal establishment, housing the three older classes, was in a building in the town formerly known as the Atlantic Hotel; while the new entries, who were very numerous, were quartered on two sailing-frigates, moored head and stern in the inner harbor, off Goat Island. This duplex arrangement necessitated a double set of officers, not easy to be had with war going on; the more so that the original corps had been depleted by the resignations of Southern men. The embarrassment arising from the immediate scantness of officers led naturally, if perhaps somewhat irreflectively, to a great number of admissions to the Naval Academy, disregardful of past experience with the '41 Date, and of the future, when room at the top would be lacking to take in all these youngsters as captains and admirals. Thus was constituted the "hump," as it came to be called, which, like a tumor on the body, engaged at a later day the attention of many professional practitioners. As it would not absorb, and as the rough-and-ready methods by which civil life and the survival of the fittest deal with such conditions could not be applied, it had to be dissipated; a process ultimately carried out with indifferent success. While it lasted it caused many a heartache from postponement. As one of the sufferers said, when hearing the matter discussed, "I don't know about this or that. All I know is that I have been a lieutenant for twenty years." Owing to the slimness of the service in the lower grades they became lieutenants young; but there they stuck. Every boom is followed by such reaction, and for a military service war is a boom. Expansion sets in; and when contraction follows somebody is squeezed. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars there were over eight hundred post-captains in the British navy. What could peace do for them?

Eight pleasant months I spent on shore at the Academy, and then was again whisked off to sea, there to remain for substantially all the rest of the war. Although already prominent as a fashionable watering-place, Newport then was very far from its present development; but in winter it had a settled and pleasant, if small, society. At this time I met the widow of Captain Lawrence of the Chesapeake, who survived until two years later. She was already failing, and not prematurely; for it was then, 1862-63, the fiftieth year since her husband fell. She lived with a sister, also the widow of an officer, and was frequently visited by her granddaughter, the child of Lawrence's daughter, a singularly beautiful girl. I remember her pointing to me a picture of the defeat of the Peacock, by the Hornet, under her grandfather's command; on which, she laughingly said, she had been brought up. This meeting had for me not only the usual interest which a link with the distant past supplies, but a certain special association; for my grandmother, then recently dead, had known several of Lawrence's contemporaries in the navy, and my recollection is that she told me she had seen him leaving his wife at their doorstep, when departing to take command of the Chesapeake.

When the summer of 1863 drew nigh, the question of the usual practice cruise came up. I have before stated the two opinions: one favoring a regular ocean voyage, with its customary routine and accidents of weather; the other more disposed to contracted cruising in our own waters, anchoring at night, and by day following a formulated programme of varied practical exercises. For this year both plans were adopted. There were two practice-ships, one of which was to remain between Narragansett and Gardiner's Bay, in Long Island. I was ordered as first lieutenant of the other, which was to go to Europe. The advisability of this step for a sailing-ship was on this occasion doubly questioned, for the Alabama had already begun her career. In fact, one of the officers then stationed at the school had been recently captured by her, when making a passage to Panama in a mail-steamer. I remember his telling me, with glee, that when the Alabama fired a shot in the direction of the packet, called, I think, the Ariel, a number of the passengers took refuge behind the bulkheads of the upper-deck saloons, which, being of light pine, afforded as much protection as the air, with the additional risk of splinters. He hoped to escape observation, but the Confederate boarding-officer had been a classmate of his, and spotted him at once. Being paroled, he was for the time shut off from war service, and was sent to the Academy. He was a singular man, by name Tecumseh Steece, and looked with a certain disdain upon the navy as a profession. In his opinion, it was for him only a stepping-stone to some great future, rather undefined. At bottom a very honest fellow, with a sense of duty which while a midshipman had led him to persist defiantly in a very unpopular--though very proper--course of action, he yet seemed to see no impropriety in utterly neglecting professional acquirement, rather boasting of his ignorance. The result was that, having been detailed for the European cruise, he was subsequently detached; I think from doubt of his fitness for the deck of a sailing-vessel. While at the Academy at this time, he took a first step in his proposed career by writing a pamphlet, the title and scope of which I now forget; but unluckily, by a slip of the pen, he wrote on the first page, "We judge the known by the unknown." This, being speedily detected, raised a laugh, and I fear prevented most from further exploration of a somewhat misty thesis. He was rather chummy with me, and tried mildly to persuade me that I also should stand poised on the navy for a flight into the empyrean; but, if fain to soar, which I do not think I was, like Raleigh, I feared a fall. For himself, poor fellow, weighted by his aspirations, he said to me, "I don't fear death, I fear life;" and death caught him early, in 1864, in the shape of yellow-fever. One of his idiosyncrasies was a faith in coffee as a panacea; and I heard that while sickening he deluged himself with that beverage, to what profit let physicians say.

The decision that one of the practice-ships should go to Europe had, I think, been determined by the officer who was to have commanded the Macedonian, the vessel chosen for that purpose. She was not the one of that name captured in 1812 by the United States,--the only one of our frigate captures brought into port,--but a successor to the title. Before she went into commission, the first commander was detached to service at the front; but no change was made in her destination, even if any misgivings were felt. One of my fellow-officers at the Academy, who was not going, remarked to me pleasantly that, if we fell in with the Alabama, she would work round us like a cooper round a cask; an encouraging simile to one who has looked upon that cheerful and much one-sided performance. We were all too young--I, the senior lieutenant, was but twenty-two--and too light-hearted to be troubled with forebodings; and, indeed, there was in reason no adequate inducement for the Confederate cruiser to alter her existing plans in order to take the Macedonian. Had we come fairly in her way, to gobble a large percentage of the Naval Academy might have been a fairly humorous practical joke; but it could have been no more. I remember Mr. Schuyler Colfax, afterwards Vice-President, then I think a member of the House, being on board, and mentioning the subject to me. "After all," he said, "I suppose it would scarcely do for one of our vessels to be deterred from a cruise by regard for a Confederate cruiser." Considering the disparity of advantage, due to steam, I should say this would scarcely be a working theory, in naval life or in private. Our military insignificance was our sufficient protection. During my cruise in the Congress, a ship much heavier every way than the Macedonian, the commander of one of our corvettes, substantially of the Alabama class, said to our captain, "I suppose, if I fell in with you as an enemy, I ought to attack you." "Well," replied the other, "if you didn't, you should pray not to have me on your court-martial."

The officer originally designated to command the Macedonian had been very greatly concerned about the midshipmen's provisions: the quality of which they should be, and the room to be kept for their stowage. I wonder would his soul have been greatly vexed had he accompanied me the first evening out, as I inspected the steerage while they were at supper? "What!" shouted one of them to a servant, as I passed. "What! No milk?" The mingled consternation, bereavement, and indignation which struggled for full expression in the words beggar description. I can see his face and hear his tones to this day. Laughable to comedy; yet to a philosophizing turn of mind what an epitome of life! Do we not at every corner of experience meet the princess who felt the three hard peas under the fifty feather-beds? Sydney Smith's friend, who had everything else life could give, but realized only the disappointing view out of one of his windows? We might dispense with Hague Conferences. War is going to cease because people adequately civilized will not endure hardness. Whether in the end we shall have cause to rejoice in the double event remains to be seen. The Asiatic can endure.

Among the Macedonian's lieutenants was the late Admiral Sampson. We had also for deck officers two who had but just graduated; one of them a young Frenchman belonging to the royal house of Orléans, who had been permitted to take the course at our naval school, I presume with a view on his part to possible contingencies recalling the monarchy to France. Under Louis Philippe, a member of the family had been prominent in the French navy, as the Prince de Joinville; and had commanded the squadron which brought back the body of Napoleon from St. Helena. The representative with us was a very good-tempered, amiable, unpresuming man, too young as yet to be formed in character. As messmates we were, of course, all on terms of cordial equality, and one of our number used frequently to greet him with effusion as "You old King." He spoke English easily, though scarcely fluently, and with occasional eccentricity of idiom. At the Academy, before graduation, he took his turn with others of his class as officer of the day, one of whose duties was to keep a journal of happenings. I chanced once to inspect this book, and found over his signature an entry which began, "The weather was a dirty one."

While at the school, the young duke had been provided with a guide, philosopher, and friend, in the person of an accomplished ex-officer of the French navy, who had been obliged to quit that service, under the Empire, because of his attachment to the exiled monarchy. I knew this gentleman very well at Newport, exchanging with him occasional visits, though he was much my senior in years. His name was Fauvel, which the midshipmen, or other, had promptly Anglicized into Four Bells--a nautical hour-stroke. I suppose this propensity to travesty foreign or difficult names is not merely maritime; but naturally enough my reading has brought me more in contact with it in connection with naval matters. Thus the Ville de Milan, captured into the British service, became to their seamen the "Wheel 'em along;" and the Bellerophon, originally their own, is historically reported to have passed current as the "Bully Ruffian." Captain Fauvel accompanied us in the Macedonian; but after arriving in England, as we were to go to Cherbourg, his charge and he left us, neither being persona grata at that date in a French harbor. When we reached Cherbourg, Fauvel's wife was there, either resident or for the moment, and at our captain's invitation visited the ship to see where her husband had been living, and would again be when we reached a more friendly port. As contrary luck would have it, while she was on board, the French admiral and the general commanding the troops came alongside to return the official call paid them. The awkwardness, of course, was merely that her presence obtruded the fact, otherwise easily and discreetly ignored, that when out of French waters we were hospitably entertaining persons politically distasteful to the French government, the courtesies of which we were now accepting; and there was a momentary impulse to keep her out of sight. A better judgment prevailed, however, and a very courteous exchange of French politeness ensued between the officials and the lady, to whom doubtless political significance attached. A more notable circumstance, in the light of the then future, was that during our few days in Cherbourg arrived the news of the capture of the city of Mexico by the French troops; and before our departure took place the official celebration, with flags and salutes, of that crowning event in an enterprise which in the end proved disastrous to its originator, and fatal to his protégé, Maximilian.

The Macedonian, for a sailing-vessel, had a quite rapid run across from Newport to Plymouth, eighteen days from anchor to anchor, though I believe one of our frigates, after the war, made it in twelve. This was the only occasion, during my fairly numerous crossings, that. I have ever seen icebergs under a brilliant sky. Usually the scoundrels come skulking along masked by a fog, as though ashamed of themselves, as they ought to be. They are among the most obnoxious of people who do not know their place. This time we passed several, quite large, having a light breeze and perfectly clear horizon. After that it again set in thick, with the usual anxiety which ice, unseen but surely near, cannot but cause. Finally we took a very heavy gale of wind, which settled to southwest, hauling gradually to northwest and sending us rejoicing on our way a thousand miles in four days, much of this time under close-reefed topsails.

I am not heedless of the great danger of merely prosing along in the telling of the days of youth, so I will shut off my experience of the Macedonian with an incident which amused me greatly at the time, and still seems to have a moral that one needs not to point. While lying at Spithead, a number of the midshipmen were sent ashore to visit the dock yard,--professional improvement. When they returned, the lieutenants in charge were full of the block-making processes. The ingenuity of the machinery, the variety and beauty of the blocks, the many excellences, had the changes rung upon them, meal after meal, till I could hear the whir of the wheels in my head and see the chips fly. Meantime, our captain went to London, having completed his official visiting, and an English captain came on board to return a call. Declining my invitation to enter the cabin, he walked up and down the quarter-deck with me, discussing many things; under his arm his sword. Suddenly he stopped short, and pointing with it to a big iron-strapped leading-block, he said, "Now that is what I call a sensible block; I wonder why it is we cannot get blocks like that in our ships." I was not prepared with a reason for their defects, then or since; but my unreadiness has not marred my enjoyment of these divergent points of view. Perhaps the captain was a professional malcontent; for, looking at a Parrott rifled hundred-pounder gun which we carried on the quarter-deck, he said, interrogatively, "Not breech-loading?" "No," I answered, "breech-loading is not in favor with us at present." "And very right you are," he rejoined. I think they then (1863) still had the Armstrong breech-loading system. This incident may deserve a place in the palæontology of gun-making. There are now, I presume, no muzzle-loaders left; unless in museums, as specimens.

Very shortly after the Macedonian's return home I was sent to New Orleans, for a ship on the Texas blockade; transportation being given me on one of the "beef-boats," as the supply-vessels were familiarly known. Among fellow-passengers was one of my class; for a while, indeed, my room-mate at the Academy. When we reached New Orleans the chief of staff said to me, "There is a vacancy on board the Monongahela," a ship larger and in every way better than the Seminole to which I was ordered; moreover, she was lying off Mobile, a sociable blockade, instead of at a jumping-off place, the end of nowhere, Sabine Pass, where the Seminole was. He advised me to apply for her, which I did; but Commodore Bell, acting in Farragut's absence in the North, declined. I must go to the ship to which the Department had assigned me, and for which it doubtless had its reasons. So my classmate was ordered to her instead, and on board her was killed in the passage of the Mobile forts the following August. I can scarcely claim a miraculous escape, as it does not appear that I should have got in the way of the ball which finished him; but for him, poor fellow, who had not been long married, the commodore's refusal to me was a sentence of death.

I shall not attempt to furbish up any intellectual entertainment for readers from the excessively dry bones of my subsequent blockading, especially off the mouth of the Sabine. Only a French cook could produce a passable dish out of such woful material; and even he would require concomitant ingredients, in remembered incidents, wherein, if there were any, my memory fails me. Day after day, day after day, we lay inactive--roll, roll; not wholly ineffective, I suppose, for our presence stopped blockade-running; but even in this respect the Texas coast had largely lost importance since the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the previous summer, had cut off the trans-Mississippi region from the body of the Confederacy. We used to see the big, light-draught steamers coming up the river, or crossing the lagoon-like bay, sometimes crowded with people; and the possibility was discussed of their carrying troops, and of their coming out to attack us, as not long before had been successfully done against our vessels inside Galveston Bay. In a norther, possibly, such a thing might have been tried, for the sea was then smooth; but in the ordinary ground-swell I imagine the soldiers would have been incapacitated by sea-sickness. The chances were all against success, and no attempt was ever made; but it was something to talk about.

The ensuing twelve or fifteen months to the close of the war were equally uneventful. Long before they ended I had got back to the South Atlantic coast. To this I was indebted for the opportunity of being present when the United States flag was ceremoniously hoisted again over what then remained of Fort Sumter, by General Robert Anderson, who, as Major Anderson, had been forced to lower it just four years before. Henry Ward Beecher delivered the address, of which I remember little, except that, citing the repeated question of foreigners, why we should wish to re-establish our authority over a land where the one desire of the people was to reject it, he replied, "We so wish, because it is ours." The sentiment was obvious enough, one would think, to any man who had a country to love and objected to seeing it dismembered, but to many of our European critics it then seemed monstrous in an American; at least they said so. The orator on such an occasion has only to swim with the current. The enthusiasm is already there; he needs not to elicit it. Here and again a blast of eloquence from him may start the fire roaring, but the flame is already kindled. The joy of harvest, the rejoicing of men who divide the spoil, the boasting of them who can now put off their harness, need not the stimulation of words.

The exact coincidence of raising the flag over Sumter on the anniversary of its lowering was artificial, but the date of the surrender of Charleston, February 18th, was just opportune to complete the necessary arrangements and preparations without holding back the ceremony, on the night of which--Good Friday--within twelve hours, President Lincoln was murdered. Joy and grief were thus brought into immediate and startling contrast. A perfectly natural and quite impressive coincidence came under my notice in close connection with these occurrences. I was at this time on the staff of Admiral Dahlgren, commander-in-chief of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the last two years of the war, and accompanied him when he entered Charleston Harbor, which he had so long assailed in vain. The following Sunday I attended service at one of the Episcopal churches. The appointed first lesson for the day, Quinquagesima, was from the first chapter of Lamentations, beginning, "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!... She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!" Considering the conspicuous, and even leading, part played by Charleston in the Southern movement, "the cradle of secession," her initiation of hostilities, her long successful resistance, and her recent subjugation, the words and their sequence were strikingly and painfully applicable to her present condition; for the Confederate troops in evacuating had started a large destruction of property, and the Union forces on entering found public buildings, stores, warehouses, private dwellings, and cotton, on fire--a scene of distress to which some of them also further contributed. I myself remember streets littered with merchants' correspondence, a mute witness to other devastation. My recollection is that the officiating clergyman saw and dodged the too evident application, reading some other chapter. Many still living may recall how apposite, though to a different mood, was the first lesson of the Sunday--the third after Easter--which in 1861 followed the surrender of Sumter and the excited week that witnessed "the uprising of the North,"--Joel iii., v. 9: "Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles: Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all men of war draw near; let them come up. Beat your ploughshares into swords, and your pruning-hooks into spears; let the weak say, I am strong." I was not in the country myself at that time, and my attention was first drawn to this in 1865 by a clergyman, who told me of his startled astonishment upon opening the Book. In the then public temper it must have thrilled every nerve among the hearers, already strained to the uttermost by events without parallel in the history of the nation.

Being on Dahlgren's staff gave me also the opportunity of seeing, gathered together in social assembly, all the general officers who had shared in the March to the Sea. This was at a reception given by Sherman in Savannah, within a week after entering that city, which may be considered the particular terminus of one stage in his progress through the heart of the Confederacy. The admiral had gone thither in a small steamer, which served as flag-ship, to greet the triumphant chief. Few, if any, of the more conspicuous of Sherman's subordinates were absent from the rooms, thronged with men whose names were then in all mouths, and who in honor of the occasion had changed their marching clothes for full uniform, rarely seen in campaign. From the heads of the two armies, the union of which under him constituted his force, down through the brigade commanders, all were there with their staffs; and many besides. The tone of this gathering was more subdued than at Fort Sumter, if equally exultant. Success, achievement, the clear demonstration of victory, such as the occupation of Savannah gave, uplifts men's hearts and swells their breasts; but these men had worked off some of their heat in doing things. Besides, there yet remained for them other and weighty things to do. It could be felt sympathetically that with them the pervading sensation was relaxation--repose. They had reached their present height by prolonged labor and endurance, and were enjoying rather the momentary release from strain than the intoxication of triumph.

In expectation of the victorious arrival of the army in Savannah, I had been charged with two messages, in pathetic contrast with each other. The first was from my father to Sherman himself, who twenty years before had been under his teaching as a cadet at the Military Academy. I cannot now recall whether I bore with me a letter of congratulation which my father wrote him, and to which he pleasantly replied that he had from it as much satisfaction as when in far-away days he had been dismissed from the blackboard with the commendation, "Very well done, Mr. Sherman." My reception by him, however, was in the exact spirit of this remark, and characteristic of the man. When I mentioned my name he broke into a smile--all over, as they say--shook my hand forcibly, and exclaimed, "What, the son of old Dennis?" reverting instinctively to the familiar epithet of school-days.

My other errand was to a former school-mate of my mother's, resident in Savannah, with whom she had long maintained affectionate relations, which the war necessarily suspended. The next day I sought her out. When I found the house, she was at the door, in conversation with some of the subordinate officials of the invading army, probably with reference to the necessity of yielding rooms for quarters. The men were perfectly respectful, but the situation was perturbing to a middle-aged lady brought for the first time into contact with the rough customs of war, and she was very pale, worried in look, and harassed in speech; evidently quite doubtful as to what latent possibilities of harm such a visit might portend--whether ultimately she might not find herself houseless. I made myself known, but she was not responsive; courteous, for with her breeding she could not be otherwise, but too preoccupied with the harsh present to respond to the gentler feelings of the past. It was touchingly apparent that she was trying hard to keep a stiff upper lip, and her attempted frame of mind finally betrayed itself in the words, uttered tremulously, with excitement or mortification, "I don't admit yet that you have beaten us." I could scarcely contest the point, but it was very sad. At the moment I could almost have wished that we had not.

At the mouths of the Georgia rivers Sherman's soldiers struck tide-water, many of them for the first time in their lives; and a story was current that two, foraging, lay down to sleep by the edge of a stream, and were astounded by waking to find themselves in the water. To consider the tide, however, is an acquired habit. Sherman's approach to the Atlantic had given rise to a certain amount of naval and military activity on the part of the forces already stationed there. In connection with this I had been sent on some staff errand that caused me to spend a couple of days on board the Pawnee, which had just been carrying about army officers for reconnoissances. "By George!" said her captain, laughing and bringing down his fist on the table, "you can't make those fellows understand that a ship has to look out for the tide. I would say to them, 'See here, the tide is running out, and if we don't move very soon we shall be left aground, fast till next high-water.' 'Oh yes, yes,' they would reply, 'all right'; and then they would forget all about it, and go on as if they had unlimited time." But of course the captain did not forget.

The fall of Richmond and Charleston, and the surrender of Lee's army, assuring the early termination of hostilities on any grand scale, the admiral had kindly transferred me from his staff back to the ship on board which I had joined the squadron a year before, and which was soon to return North. War service, nominal at least, was not, however, quite over; for after some brief repairs we were sent down to Haïti to take up the duty of convoying the Pacific Mail steamers from the Windward Passage (between Cuba and Haïti) some distance towards Panama. It is perhaps worth recording that such an employment incident to the war was maintained for quite a while, consequent upon the capture of the Ariel, before mentioned. Upon my personal fortunes it had the effect of producing a severe tropical fever, engendered probably during the years of Southern service, and brought to a head by the conditions of Haïti. Whatever its cause, this led to my being invalided for six months, at the expiration of which, to my grievous disappointment, I was again assigned to duty in the Gulf of Mexico. The War of Secession then--December, 1865--was entirely over; but the Mexican expedition of Napoleon III., the culminating incident of which, the capture of Mexico, we had seen celebrated at Cherbourg in 1863, was still lingering. Begun in our despite, when our hands were tied by intestine troubles, it now engaged our unfriendly interest; and part of the attention paid to it was the maintenance of a particular squadron in those waters--observant, if quiescent. Here again sickness pursued, not me, but my ship; from the mouth of the Rio Grande we returned to Pensacola, with near a hundred men, half the ship's company, down with fever. It was not malignant--we had but three deaths--but one of those was our only doctor, and we were sent to the far North, and so out of commission, in September, 1866. The particular squadron was continued till the following spring, when, under diplomatic pressure, the French expedition was withdrawn; but by then I was again in Rio de Janeiro on my way to China.

The headquarters of this temporary squadron was at Pensacola; but until her unlucky visit to the Rio Grande my ship, the Muscoota, one of the iron double-ender paddle steamers which the war had evolved among other experiments, lay for some months at Key West, then, as always from its position, a naval station of importance. I suppose most people know that this word "Key," meaningless in its application to the low islands which it designates, is the anglicized form of the Spanish "Cayo." Among the valued acquaintances of my life I here met a clergyman, whose death at the age of eighty I see as these words pass from my pen. As chaplain to the garrison, he had won the esteem and praise of many, including General Sherman, for his devotion during an epidemic of yellow-fever, and he was now rector of the only Episcopal parish. He told me an anecdote of one of his flock. Key West, from its situation, had many of the characteristics of an outpost, a frontier town, a mingling of peoples, with consequent rough habits, hard drinking, and general dissipation. The man in question, a good fellow in his way, professed to be a very strong churchman, and constantly so avowed himself; but the bottle was too much for him. The rector remonstrated. "----, how can you go round boasting yourself a churchman when your life is so scandalous? You are doing the Church harm, not good, by such talk." "Yes, Mr. Herrick," he replied, "I know it's too bad; it is a shame; but, you see, all the same, I am a good churchman. I fight for the Church. If I hear a man say anything against her, I knock him down." It was at Mr. Herrick's table I heard criticised the local inadequacy of the prayer-book petition for rain. "What we want," said the speaker, "is not 'moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth,' but a hard down-pour to fill our tanks." Key West and its neighbors then depended chiefly, if not solely, upon this resource for drinking-water.

A ROUNDABOUT ROAD TO CHINA

1867

With the termination of the War of Secession, which had concentrated the entire effort of the navy upon our own coasts and inland waters, the policy of the government reverted, irreflectively perhaps, to the identical system of distribution in squadrons that had existed before. The prolonged tension of mind and effort during four years of overwrought activity was followed by a period of reaction, to which, as far as the administration of the navy was concerned, the term collapse would scarcely be misapplied. Of course, for a few years the evil effects of this would not be observable in the military resources of the government. Only the ravages of time could deprive us of the hundreds of thousands of veterans just released from the active practice of war; and the navy found itself in possession of a respectable fleet, which, though somewhat over-specialized in order to meet the peculiar conditions of the hostilities, was still fairly modern. There was a body of officers fully competent in numbers and ability, and comparatively young. In the first ship on board which I made a long cruise, beginning in 1867, of ten in the ward-room, three only, the surgeon, paymaster, and chief engineer, were over thirty; and they barely. I myself, next to the captain, was twenty-six; and there was not a married man among us. The seamen, though professionally more liable to dispersion than the land forces, were not yet scattered. Thus provided against immediate alarms, and with the laurels of the War of Secession still fresh, the country in military matters lay down and went to sleep, like the hare in the fable, regardless of the incessant progress on every side, which, indeed, was scarcely that of the tortoise. Our ships underwent no change in character or armament.

Twenty years later, in the Pacific, I commanded one of these old war-horses, not yet turned out to grass or slaughter, ship-rigged to royals, and slow-steamed. One day the French admiral came on board to return my official visit. As he left, he paused for a moment abreast one of our big, and very old, pivot guns. "Capitaine," he said, "les vieux canons!" Two or three days later came his chief of staff on some errand or other. That discharged, when I was accompanying him to his boat at the gangway, he stopped in the same spot as the admiral. His gaze was meditative, reminiscent, perhaps even sentimental. "Où sont les neiges d'antan?" Whatever their present merits as fighting-machines, he saw before him an historical memento, sweeping gently, doubtless, the chords of youthful memories. "Oui, oui!" he said at last; "l'ancien systême. Nous l'avons eu." It was a summary of American naval policy during the twenty years following 1865; we "hail" things which other nations "had had," until Secretary Chandler started the movement of renovation by the first of all necessary steps, the official exposure of the sham to which we had allowed ourselves to be committed. There is an expression, "quaker guns," applied to blackened cylinders of wood, intended to simulate cannon, and mounted upon ramparts or a ship's broadside to impose upon an enemy as to the force before him. We made four such for the Macedonian, to deceive any merchant-men we spoke as to our battery, in case she should report us to an Alabama; and, being carried near the bows, much trouble they gave us, being usually knocked overboard when we tacked ship, or set a lower studding-sail. Well, by 1885 the United States had a "quaker" navy; the result being that, not the enemy, but our own people were deceived. Like poor Steece's passengers on board the Ariel, we were blissfully sheltering behind pine boards.

In 1867, however, these old ships and ancient systems were but just passing their meridian, and for a brief time might continue to live on their reputation. They were beautiful vessels in outline, and repaid in appearance all the care which the seamen naturally lavishes on his home. One could well feel proud of them; the more so that they had close behind them a good fighting record. It was to one such, the Iroquois, which had followed Farragut from New Orleans to Vicksburg, that I reported on the second day of that then new year. She was destined to China and Japan, the dream of years to me; but, better still, there was chalked out for her an extensive trip, "from Dan to Beersheba," as a British officer enviously commented in my hearing. We were to go by the West Indies to Rio de Janeiro, thence by the Cape of Good Hope to Madagascar, to Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea, to Muscat at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, and so by India and Siam to our first port in Chinese waters, Hong Kong. The time, too, was apposite, for Japan had not yet entered upon the path of modernization which she has since pursued with such revolutionary progress. Some eight or ten years ago there lunched with me a young Japanese naval officer, who I understand has occupied a position of distinguished responsibility during the recent war with Russia. I chanced to ask him if he had ever seen a two-sworded man. He replied, Never. He belonged to the samurai class, who once wore them; but in actual life they have disappeared. When the Iroquois reached Japan, and throughout her stay, two-sworded men were as thick almost as blackberries. To European prepossessions it was illuminating to see half a dozen riding down a street, hatless, crown of the head shaved, with a short pigtail at the back tied tight near the skull and then brought stiffly forward close to the scalp; their figures gowned, the handles of the two swords projecting closely together from the left side of their garments, and the feet resting in stirrups of slipper form, which my memory says were of straw-work; but of that I am less sure. This equipment was completed by a painted fan stuck in the belt, and at times an opened paper umbrella. I have been passenger in the same boat with some of these warriors, accoutred as above, and using their fans as required, while engaged in animated conversation with the courtesy and smiling affability characteristic of all classes in Japan. Such, in outward seeming, then was the as yet raw material, out of which have been evolved the heroic soldiery who have recently astonished the world by the practical development they have given to modern military ideas; then as unlike the troops which now are, except in courage, as the ancient Japanese war-junk is to the present battle-ship. I was in Japan at the arrival of their first iron-clad, purchased in the United States, and doubtless long since consigned to the scrap-heap; but of her hereafter.

A glance over the list of vessels in the Navy Register of 1907 shows me that the once abundant Indian names have disappeared, except where associated with some State or city; or, worse, have been degraded to tugboats, a treatment which the Indian, with all his faults, scarcely deserves. They no longer connote ships of war. Iroquois, Seminole, Mohican, Wyoming, Oneida, Pawnee, and some dozens more, are gone with the ships, and like the tribes, which bore them. Yet what more appropriate to a vessel meant for a scout than the tribal epithet of a North American Indian! Dacotah, alone survives; while for it the march of progress in spelling has changed the c to k, and phonetically dropped the silent, and therefore supposedly useless, h. As if silence had no merits! is the interjection, ah, henceforth to be spelled a? Since they with their names have passed into the world of ghosts--can there be for them a sea in the happy hunting-grounds?--it may be historically expedient to tell what manner of craft they were. If only some contemporary had done the same by the trireme, what time and disputation might have been saved!

The Iroquois and her sisters, built in the fifties, were vessels of the kind to which I have applied the term corvette, then very common in all navies; cruisers only; scouts, or commerce-destroyers. Not of the line of battle, although good fighting-ships. Ours were of a thousand tons, as size was then stated, or about seven hundred tons "displacement," as the more modern expression runs; displacement being the weight of the water displaced by the hull which rests in and upon it. Thus measured, they were from one-third to one-fourth the dimensions of the vessels called third-class cruisers, which now correspond to them; but their serviceableness in their time was sufficiently attested by the Confederate Alabama, substantially of this general type, as was her conqueror, the Kearsarge. For external appearance, they were something over two hundred feet long, with from one-fifth to one-sixth that width, and sat low in the water. Low and long are nautical features, suggestive of grace and speed, which have always obtained recognition for beauty; and the rail of these vessels ran unbroken, but with a fine sweep, from bow to stern. Along the water-line, and extending a few inches above it, shone the burnished copper, nearly parallel to the rail, between which and it glistened the saucy black hull.

Steam had not yet succeeded in asserting its undivided sway; but the Iroquois and her mates marked a stage in the progress, for they carried sails really as auxiliary, and were intended primarily to be fast steamers, as speed was reckoned in their time. The larger vessels of the service were acceptedly slow under steam. They had it chiefly to fight with, and to help them across the places where wind failed or weakened. These corvettes carried sails with a view to saving coal, by utilizing the well-defined wind zones of the ocean when fair for their course. Though the practical result for both was much the same, the underlying idea was different. In the one, sail held the first place; in the other, steam; and it is the idea which really denotes and maintains intellectual movement and material progress. This was represented accordingly in the rig adopted. Like a ship, they had three masts, yes; but only the two forward were square-rigged, and on each of them but three sails. The lofty royals were discarded. The general result was to emphasize the design of speed under steam, and the use of sails with a fresh, fair wind only; a distinct, if partial, abandonment of the "auxiliary" steam reliance which so far had governed naval development. It may be added that the shorter and lighter masts, by a common optical effect, increased the impression of the vessel's length and swiftness, as was the case with the old-time sailing-frigate when her lofty topgallant-masts were down on deck.