Part 2

Henry S. Baldwin, G. M., 1st class, 24 Seminole Arthur W. Barber, Landsman, 25 Minnesota George S. Baxter, Coxswain, 22 Wyandotte Robert C. Beers, Landsman, 26 Catskill Howard Berry, Ordinary Seaman, 20 Wyandotte Henry W. Bigelow, Seaman, 30 Minnesota Herbert G. Bissell, Ordinary Seaman, 24 Minnesota Fred G. Blakeslee, Seaman, 30 Minnesota Fred E. Bosworth, Quartermaster, 23 Minnesota Arthur L. Brewer, Seaman, 21 Minnesota George Brinley, Seaman, 26 Wyandotte John H. P. Brinley, Seaman, 23 Wyandotte Henry R. Buck, Seaman, 22 East Boston Joseph F. Burke, Landsman, 22 Wyandotte Archibald L. Case, Seaman, 23 Minnesota Henry B. Case, Landsman, 19 Minnesota Robert D. Chapin, Seaman, 22 Minnesota Murray H. Coggeshall, Q. M., 1st Class, 25 Wyandotte George F. Colby, Landsman, 21 Wyandotte Arthur S. Cutting, Landsman, 20 Minnesota Hermann F. Cuntz, Ensign Lr. S. N., 26 Sylvia Stanley K. Dimock, Seaman, 20 Seminole Edward J. Doran, Ship’s Apothecary, 24 Minnesota Henry W. Drury, Seaman, 22 Minnesota Francis E. Field, Seaman, 25 Minnesota George C. Forrest, O. M., 3d Class, 29 Wyandotte George Foster, Coal Passer, 23 Wyandotte Paul Franke, Landsman, 24 Minnesota Burton L. Gabrielle, Ordinary Seaman, 20 Minnesota Christopher M. Gallup, Fireman, 22 East Boston William A. Geer, Landsman, 27 Minnesota Frank W. Gillette, Ordinary Seaman, 23 Wyandotte William Goulet, Landsman, 22 Minnesota James J. Hawley, Q. M., 2d Class, 27 Seminole George A. Holcomb, Ord. Seaman, 22 Seminole Richard J. Holmes, Ordinary Seaman, 25 Minnesota Charles A. Huntington, Chief G. M., 25 Wyandotte William M. Hurd, Seaman, 23 Minnesota Edward Q. Jackson, Ord. Seaman, 23 Minnesota Lorenzo W. Kenyon, Seaman, 20 Minnesota Frank R. Keyes, Chief Quartermaster, 21 Wyandotte Frank E. Kowalsky, Coal Passer, 21 Seminole Arthur P. LeFever, Landsman, 19 Minnesota Michael C. Long, G. M., 2d Class, 28 Wyandotte Oliver W. Malm, Seaman, 25 Minnesota George R. Martin, Ord. Seaman, 19 Minnesota Ralph W. McCreary, B. M., 1st Class, 22 Wyandotte J. Ward McManus, Seaman, 23 Minnesota Louis F. Middlebrook, Ens’n, U. S. N., 32 Enquirer Guy P. Miller, Seaman, 23 Minnesota Hugh I. Miller, Seaman, 25 Minnesota James H. Morgan, Q. M., 1st Class, 23 Seminole Victor F. Morgan, Seaman, 18 Minnesota Shiras Morris, Coxswain, 23 Wyandotte Linwood K. Moses, Landsman, 20 Minnesota Carl C. Nielson, Wardroom Steward, 25 Seminole Edward J. Noble, Ordinary Seaman, 23 Minnesota Edwin T. Northam, Seaman, 23 Minnesota Robert C. Northam, G. M., 2d Class, 25 Minnesota Harry Y. Nutter, Seaman, 26 Minnesota Lauriston F. L. Pynchon, Seaman, 26 Minnesota Judson B. Root, Ordinary Seaman, 22 Minnesota Harrison Sanford, Ordinary Seaman, 21 Wyandotte Charles C. Saunders, Seaman, 22 Minnesota Felton Parker, Lieutenant, U. S. N., 38 Huntress Lyman Root, Ensign, U. S. N., 29 Elfrida Otto M. Schwerdtfeger, Landsman, 22 Minnesota Albert W. Scoville, Jr., Seaman, 21 East Boston Lester H. Scoville, Ordinary Seaman, 20 East Boston William H. Scrivener, Seaman, 21 Minnesota Frederic A. Seaver, Landsman, 34 Minnesota Freeman P. Seymour, Ord. Seaman, 34 Minnesota Forrest Shepherd, Seaman, 28 Wyandotte Herbert E. Storrs, Seaman, 19 East Boston Morton C. Talcott, Landsman, 20 Minnesota George H. Tinkham, Landsman, 22 Wyandotte William C. Tregoning, Seaman, 22 Seminole John F. Twardoks, Landsman, 21 Minnesota Jonathan K. Uhler, Seaman, 24 Minnesota James D. Wells, Seaman, 23 Minnesota Richard B. Wells, Coxswain, 29 Seminole Alanson H. Wightman, Q. M., 1st Cl., 26 Seminole George E. Wilcox, Ord. Seaman, 21 Minnesota Louis B. Wilson, B. M., 1st Class, 26 Seminole Frank L. Young, Cabin Steward, 19 Wyandotte

From Niantic the division went to the receiving ship Minnesota at the Congress Street slip in the Charlestown Navy Yard. At one time and another officers were detailed and men were drafted to vessels of the “Mosquito fleet,” and these were scattered all the way down the coast to Key West and the Havana Blockade, Ensign Cuntz on the Sylvia having the good fortune to see the Morro.

COURSE FOUR ❦ THE PRAIRIE

Following the excitement of the war summer came a reaction. The membership dropped nearly to the danger point. For a time it was a long and hard beat to windward, a trying fight with wind, wave and tide. Like every command from Connecticut which served in the war with Spain, the division found many of its best members returning to civilian ranks, and that to replace them either numerically or in quality required time and activity. But new blood—or what might be called a saline infusion—came, and before the snows melted the division had weathered the worst.

It was the Prairie which was the division’s floating home on the cruise taken in the following August. On the 16th the battalion sailed from New Haven harbor. Two days later the ship was off Gloucester, home of daring fishermen, and the next day she was in Bar Harbor. On the 21st she put out to sea. She passed outside Nantucket Shoals Lightship and opportunity was given to the men for target practice with great guns at sea, after sub-caliber coming full service charges. On their return members of the division spun exciting yarns concerning diluted saltpeter, embalmed horsehide, hammock ladders and raids on the officers’ refrigerator.

It is to be chronicled that thirteen states were represented in naval militia cruises on the Prairie in 1899 and that Connecticut took third rank among them; also that the Hartford division won first place among the three divisions from Connecticut, Bridgeport having organized the Third Division.

“DEWEY DAY” ❦

Probably the most memorable occasion in the history of the command was September 30, 1899, “Dewey Day,” the day of the giant procession in New York City in honor of the fine old hero of Manila Bay. When the organizations to represent this state were selected, it was the Naval Battalion which headed the list of honor. The First Regiment was not upon the list, but with honorable patriotism officers of the regiment who had served in Camp Alger requested of Lieutenant Lyman Root, Lieutenant Parker’s successor, permission to wear the sailor blue and carry Springfields in the division ranks. Men who had served in distant years in the wooden navy and men who had fought under Dyer in Manila Bay and Wainwright in the combat with the Furor and the Pluton and had returned to Hartford, also asked and received the same permission.

With four officers and 112 men the division swung out from the armory on the evening of the 29th and amid red fire and with a band blaring at the front paraded to the railroad station, envied by infantrymen who could not obtain opportunity to march in the mammoth procession. At 11 o’clock the company marched into the Second Regiment Armory in New Haven, stacked arms and was dismissed for a midnight lunch, at which the men stowed away steaming coffee and ham sandwiches and received strict orders not to leave the building. Then they made living pillows of one another and slumbered innocently on benches in the gallery till some wee, sma’ hour or other in the morning, when the Second Regiment crashed out with “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and summoned them back to the world of consciousness and sin. At 3 o’clock they fell in and marched out into a hospitable rain punctuated by milkmen and policemen. Three-quarters of an hour later they boarded the side-wheeler Shinnecock. At 4 o’clock the steamer got under way and the men began to look forward to a night of rest. One man slept on his arm under a table in the dining saloon piled six feet high with camp chairs. Another was lost to the world under the break of the pilot house. Still another slept on unbaled hay for the field officers of the Second Regiment. Some slumbered in gangways and some on the paddle boxes. The mathematical boys of the division demonstrated the problem that it was possible to sleep anywhere in space.

Somewhere in the head of the Sound the Shinnecock fell on an evil time. A bushing on a feathering paddle blade in the starboard wheel misbehaved and a bar buckled and for three hours she drifted while engineers made repairs. Finally an emergency landing was made in a convenient coal yard in Port Morris and the battalion trotted at double time for two miles over Harlem cobblestones, arriving just in time to fall in ahead of General Oliver O. Howard and the Grand Army Division.

During the march the men had a coveted opportunity to view the one-armed corps commander at close range. Much of the time the old hero was obliged to ride with his bridle rein in his teeth and with his chapeau in his hand in response to the frantic waves of applause which greeted him. The occupants of the closely packed stands along the line of march rose in wildly cheering masses as they caught sight of the grizzled veteran and the men of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Down Riverside Drive and for four miles in the heart of the city the battalion marched with fixed bayonets. It paraded between solid masses of cheering citizens and almost solid walls of flags and decorations. At every halt the men were refreshed with fruit, coffee or drinkables, sandwiches and salads or cigars, and presented with flowers and souvenirs. At one halt on aristocratic Fifth Avenue a shower of silk college sofa cushions came down from window seats and a Princeton cushion was impaled on the historian’s bayonet.

At the conclusion of the parade many of the division repaired to restaurants near Madison Square and Union Square. Dozens of them found, when they stepped to the cashiers’ coops to liquidate, that unknown civilians had obtained their checks and paid the bills. A man in a sailor uniform in New York City that September afternoon found it no easy task to spend money. Nothing was too good for the bluejackets.

It is to be recorded that Lieutenant Cuntz, Gunner’s Mate Huntington, Coxswain Chapin and Seamen Noble and Nutter preceded the battalion to New York. When the Shinnecock failed to appear, they annexed three stray regulars from the U. S. S. Texas, and assumed an advanced place in the column. In one of the spectators’ stands certain individuals conceived the notion that the eight were Hobson and the Merrimac survivors. In a few moments the word was passed over the stand and the crowd was on its feet in a wild burst of applause.

While Dewey Day experiences were still being talked over, arrangements were quietly made for a presentation to the first commanding officer, Mr. Parker, who was lured to Turnerbund Hall to receive from the command a gold watch with chain and fob, the chain in the semblance of a stud-link ship’s cable and the fob a division pin mounted on a locket.

More of the tang of salt air and of the romance of the ocean came one evening in the next drill season when the division mustered in the parlor to listen to a talk by Professor Henry Ferguson of Trinity College, an honorary member, who told a thrilling tale of shipwreck in the mid-Pacific. Professor Ferguson recited the story of the Hornet, a clipper which sailed from New York in 1866 for San Francisco. When the ship was several hundred miles off the Galapagos fire obliged the crew to take to the three boats, which were provisioned for ten days. It was decided to head for the north, to keep in the track of San Francisco vessels. Merchantmen in those days adhered to Maury’s sailing directions and it was reasoned that chances would be better in the sea highway than in attempting to reach land. By day the heat was nearly intolerable. Nights were treacherous as they induced squalls of the vindictively sudden nature peculiar to those Equatorial waters. Day after day wore by with an unbroken horizon. Finally the boats crawled up into the trade winds. It was decided to separate the boats to increase the chance of finding aid. For twenty-five days the sailors had fought wind, sun, and water and now they were in danger of fighting starvation, the ten days’ provisions, which had been distributed into one-third allowances, being nearly exhausted. The remaining provisions were in turn re-divided, but were gone in a fortnight. The men surviving sought nourishment in the chewing of leather and moist clothing. On the point of utter exhaustion they made a landfall, which proved to be Hawaii, and were rescued by a crew from a coasting station. They had spent forty-three days in an open boat and had traveled nearly three thousand miles.

More of the romance of the sea came to the division when the story of a “war member,” William Hurd, and the schooner Intrepid was told. Less than a month after Professor Ferguson’s lecture, Hurd cleared in New York with his little auxiliary as a trader to carry trinkets, tin jewelry, Yankee notions, canned soups, linens and whatnot to Baranquila and to acquire cocoanuts and rubber on the Mosquito Coast and islands nearby. His auxiliary was sixty-one feet on the water line and eighteen feet beam and thirty-five gross tonnage, or twenty-eight net. She had a powerful gasoline motor. After she cleared, Colombian insurrectionists captured Baranquila and Hurd’s friends in the division began to wonder what would happen to their former shipmate if an insurrecto officer ranged alongside with more of an appetite for grindstones, canned soups and tin jewelry than for international law. But Hurd was able to take care of himself. He prospered as a trader, made a bushel of money, spent it and finally returned.

At the annual banquet of 1900, Admiral Bunce, U.S.N., retired, was a guest and in his speech pointed out that foreign intelligence officers knew full well that seven-tenths of the arms and ammunition made for the government came from Connecticut. In response to a toast another speaker, Francis B. Allen, said:

“It was one of your honorary members, our distinguished Admiral Bunce, who, while in command of the North Atlantic Squadron just prior to the Spanish War, brought not only the fleet but each individual ship to such a degree of excellence in squadron evolutions and gun drills that he enabled his successors to acquit themselves so creditably that Sunday morning outside Santiago Bay when Cervera’s squadron tried to escape that the result afforded us the greatest Fourth of July celebration since Vicksburg surrendered.”

A month later Ensign Middlebrook launched the Veteran Association down well-greased ways, and on May 23 the battalion had its first field day, assembling at Savin Rock. It was reserved for Gunner’s Mate Chapin to make known to Hartford a new method of celebrating the Fourth of July. He navigated a picked gun crew at the close of the midwatch from the armory to the City Hall and at sunrise pumped out a salute of twenty-one shots from the lean throat of a Hotchkiss one-pounder. Irate sleepers admitted that Chapin’s method was convincing. They were justly incensed when he marched the crew under the Asylum Street bridge and fired a like salute, and still more so when he took it to the Park Terrace and discharged a fourteen-shot salute. Chapin proposed to fire a salute in Wethersfield, but ammunition ran low.

❦

COURSE FIVE ❦ THE PRAIRIE AGAIN

That summer’s cruise was on the Prairie and led to Penobscot Bay. The division sent in a whaleboat crew to race against one from the First Division on that water, and its crew defeated that from the Elm City by a quarter of a length, one of the New Haven officers marveling at this result and asserting that it was a mystery of the deep. It also captured two other boat races.

Later in the summer camping parties spent week-ends in Paradise, the narrow strip between Bodkin Rock and the river a short distance below Middletown. The division’s steamboat and the pulling boats which had come a season or two before were in popular favor. They gave silent lessons to the boys in boat engine work and in the stowing of dunnage, thereby adding variety to the oarsmen’s drill of the early spring.

December 22, Lieutenant Parker died at his home in South Lancaster, Mass. mourned by all who knew him. A patriotic officer, a loyal friend, he had won the affection of the command.

One minute prior to midnight December 31, two gun crews unlimbered in the rear of the City Hall and on the dot of midnight, the opening of the new century, Gunner’s Mate Chapin fired the first shot in a salute of twenty-one guns, a welcome to the newborn heir of time.

Century No. Twenty’s first gift to the division was an indoor baseball team. The sport was new to the armory and it jumped (or slid) into instant favor. The first game was with a team from Company A and to the astonishment of everybody and most of all themselves the sailors won, by a score of 17 to 12. They contended with a hurricane of batting in the second inning and dragged anchor, but they weathered the storm and won with an inning to spare. One of the division advocated a diamond of this kind:

Home plate on the forecastle near the foremast, for baseline the starboard foremast shrouds and for first base the foretop; along main topmast stay to second base, the main top-masthead; down main topmast rigging to third base, the main top; then down the mainstay and on to the point of beginning. None of the other teams would play on that diamond.

In a sham battle held in the armory in Governor McLean’s honor the division had a conspicuous part and in the spring the battalion had its field day in the South Meadow. Governor McLean had appointed Mr. Middlebrook to be naval aide on his staff, with the rank of captain, the highest rank which any member has obtained in the Connecticut naval militia, later naval-aides having the rank of lieutenant-commanders.

❦

COURSE SIX ❦ TO CAMP NEWTON

The third anniversary of the mustering in of the battalion at Niantic was observed by an outing at Woodmont, followed by a week-end cruise on the Elfrida, the converted yacht once owned by W. Seward Webb and purchased by the government at the breaking out of the war with Spain. At a banquet in the Pembroke Hotel at Woodmont, General Edward E. Bradley, adjutant-general when the First Division organized, and Senator Joseph R. Hawley were speakers.

Master-at-Arms Murphy trained a volunteer racing cutter crew at intervals in the course of the summer, bitterly lamenting that he never had the same men two evenings running. Still he had men who were fairly proficient when the battalion had its annual tour of duty, at Camp Newton on Fisher’s Island. Tent life was varied by considerable work in pulling boats. It was expected that a cutter race would be rowed between the Hartford racing crew and a crew picked from the New Haven and Bridgeport Division, but the latter did not materialize. That spectators might not be disappointed, two crews were selected from the Hartford oarsmen, Lieutenant Lyman Root acting as coxswain for one and Assistant Surgeon Carroll C. Beach for the other. Mr. Root’s crew was inspired by the presence of Dick, the division’s mascot, a corpulent bulldog with a blue flat cap cocked rakishly over one ear. With one hand on the tiller and the other on the dog’s collar, Mr. Root incited his crew and won by a half-length in a course of half a mile.

For most of the six days rain came down in buckets. The camp work was a practical lesson to the men of the division. That they returned healthy, well disciplined, and contented, as well as much more familiar with duty either afloat or ashore, demonstrated the learning capacity of the men and the value of the camp.

On the return the Elfrida cast off, outside Saybrook Light, a tow consisting of the steam whaleboat and the division’s cutter, its barge and its pulling whaleboat. The “whaler” with the pulling boat in tow started up the river, but a squall descended and gave work to all hands. The crews landed in Essex in torrents, and after making the boats snug for the night, turned in at a sail loft near the landing.

In the autumn the division sustained another severe affliction in the death of its first honorary member, a firm friend in fair weather and foul, Admiral Francis M. Bunce, an officer whom it had been a rare privilege to honor. A veteran of the Civil War, a seasoned sailor, a loyal Hartford man who took pride in his townspeople, the Admiral had richly merited the division’s high esteem. His strong, yet kindly face the men missed and mourned.

In the autumn an order came for a parade in New Haven, and when the personal escort for President Roosevelt was selected, it was found to be the Naval Battalion; and when the parade started it was found that the senior division, the Second, was next to the President’s carriage.

Wall-scaling had a conspicuous part in the drill of the winter, and in the spring small boat work and volunteer work on the Elfrida, the battalion’s practice vessel, were attractions for those most interested in the command. The Elfrida played her part well in the duty of the spring field day of 1902, when the battalion rendezvoused in Bridgeport.