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FROM SAIL TO STEAM

RECOLLECTIONS OF NAVAL LIFE


BY

CAPT. A. T. MAHAN

U.S.N. (RETIRED)

AUTHOR OF
"THE INFLUENCE OF SEA-POWER UPON HISTORY" ETC.


HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMVII




Copyright, 1906, 1907, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published October, 1907.




CONTENTS


    CHAP.                                                         PAGE

          PREFACE                                                    v

          INTRODUCING MYSELF                                        ix

    I.    NAVAL CONDITIONS BEFORE THE WAR OF SECESSION--THE
          OFFICERS AND SEAMEN                                        3

    II.   NAVAL CONDITIONS BEFORE THE WAR OF SECESSION--THE
          VESSELS                                                   25

    III.  THE NAVAL ACADEMY IN ITS RELATION TO THE NAVY AT
          LARGE                                                     45

    IV.   THE NAVAL ACADEMY IN ITS INTERIOR WORKINGS--PRACTICE
          CRUISES                                                   70

    V.    MY FIRST CRUISE AFTER GRADUATION--NAUTICAL CHARACTERS    103

    VI.   MY FIRST CRUISE AFTER GRADUATION--NAUTICAL SCENES
          AND SCENERY--THE APPROACH OF DISUNION                    127

    VII.  INCIDENTS OF WAR AND BLOCKADE SERVICE                    156

    VIII. INCIDENTS OF WAR AND BLOCKADE SERVICE--CONTINUED         179

    IX.   A ROUNDABOUT ROAD TO CHINA                               196

    X.    CHINA AND JAPAN                                          229

    XI.   THE TURNING OF A LONG LANE--HISTORICAL, NAVAL, AND
          PERSONAL                                                 266

    XII.  EXPERIENCES OF AUTHORSHIP                                302




PREFACE


When I was a boy, some years before I obtained my appointment in the
navy, I spent many of those happy hours that only childhood knows
poring over the back numbers of a British service periodical, which
began its career in 1828, with the title _Colburn's United Service
Magazine_; under which name, save and except the Colburn, it still
survives. Besides weightier matters, its early issues abounded in
reminiscences by naval officers, then yet in the prime of life, who
had served through the great Napoleonic wars. More delightful still,
it had numerous nautical stories, based probably on facts, serials
under such entrancing titles as "Leaves from my Log Book," by Flexible
Grommet, Passed Midshipman; a pen-name, the nautical felicity of which
will be best appreciated by one who has had the misfortune to handle a
grommet[1] which was not flexible. Then there was "The Order Book," by
Jonathan Oldjunk; an epithet so suggestive of the waste-heap, even to
a landsman's ears, that one marvels a man ever took it unto himself,
especially in that decline of life when we are more sensitive on the
subject of bodily disabilities than once we were. Old junk, however,
can yet be "worked up," as the sea expression goes, into other uses,
and that perhaps was what Mr. Oldjunk meant; his early adventures as a
young "luff" were, for economical reasons, worked up into their
present literary shape, with the addition of a certain amount of
extraneous matter--love-making, and the like. Indeed, so far from
uselessness, that veteran seaman and rigid economist, the Earl of St.
Vincent, when First Lord of the Admiralty, had given to a specific
form of old junk--viz., "shakings"--the honors of a special order, for
the preservation thereof, the which forms the staple of a comical
anecdote in Basil Hall's _Fragments of Voyages and Travels_; itself a
superior example of the instructive "recollections," of less literary
merit, which but for Colburn's would have perished.

Any one who has attempted to write history knows what queer nuggets of
useful information lie hidden away in such papers; how they often help
to reconstruct an incident, or determine a mooted point. If the
Greeks, after the Peloponnesian war, had had a Colburn's, we should
have a more certain, if not a perfect, clew to the reconstruction of
the trireme; and probably even could deduce with some accuracy the
daily routine, the several duties, and hear the professional jokes and
squabbles, of their officers and crews. The serious people who write
history can never fill the place of the gossips, who pour out an
unpremeditated mixture of intimate knowledge and idle trash.

Trash? Upon the whole is not the trash the truest history? perhaps not
the most valuable, but the most real? If you want contemporary color,
contemporary atmosphere, you must seek it among the impressions which
can be obtained only from those who have lived a life amid particular
surroundings, which they breathe and which colors them--dyes them in
the wool. However skilless, they cannot help reproducing, any more
than water poured from an old ink-bottle can help coming out more or
less black; although, if sufficiently pretentious, they can
monstrously caricature, especially if they begin with the modest
time-worn admission that they are more familiar with the marling-spike
than with the pen. But even the caricature born of pretentiousness
will not prevent the unpremeditated betrayal of conditions, facts, and
incidents, which help reconstruct the _milieu_; how much more, then,
the unaffected simplicity of the born story-teller. I do not know how
Froissart ranks as an authority with historians. I have not read him
for years; and my recollections are chiefly those of childhood, with
all the remoteness and all the vividness which memory preserves from
early impressions. I think I now might find him wearisome; not so in
boyhood. He was to me then, and seems to me now, a glorified Flexible
Grommet or Jonathan Oldjunk; ranking, as to them, as Boswell does
towards the common people of biography. That there are many solid
chunks of useful information to be dug out of him I am sure; that his
stories are all true, I have no desire to question; but what among it
all is so instructive, so entertaining, as the point of view of
himself, his heroes, and his colloquists--the particular contemporary
modification of universal human nature in which he lived, and moved,
and had his being?

If such a man has the genius of his business, as had Froissart and
Boswell, he excels in proportion to his unconsciousness of the fact;
his colors run truer. For lesser gobblers, who have not genius, the
best way to lose consciousness is just to IT themselves go; if they
endeavor to paint artistically the muddle will be worse. To such the
proverb of the cobbler and his last is of perennial warning. As a
barber once sagely remarked to me, "You can't trim a beard well,
unless you're born to it." It is possible in some degree to imitate
Froissart and Boswell in that marvellous diligence to accumulate
material which was common to them both; but, when gathered, how
impossible it is to work up that old junk into permanent engrossing
interest let those answer who have grappled with ancient chronicles,
or with many biographies. So, with a circumlocution which probably
convicts me in advance of decisive deficiency as a narrator, I let
myself go. I have no model, unless it be the old man sitting in the
sun on a summer's day, bringing forth out of his memories things new
and old--mostly old.

                                                          A. T. MAHAN.




INTRODUCING MYSELF


While extracts from the following pages were appearing in _Harper's
Magazine_, I received a letter from a reader hoping that I would say
something about myself before entering the navy. This had been outside
my purpose, which was chiefly to narrate what had passed around me
that I thought interesting; but it seems possibly fit to establish in
a few words my antecedents by heredity and environment.

I was born September 27, 1840, within the boundaries of the State of
New York, but not upon its territory; the place, West Point on the
Hudson River, having been ceded to the General Government for the
purposes of the Military Academy, at which my father, Dennis Hart
Mahan, was then Professor of Engineering, as well Civil as Military.
He himself was of pure Irish blood, his father and mother, already
married, having emigrated together from the old country early in the
last century; but he was also American by birthright, having been born
in April, 1802, very soon after the arrival of his parents in the city
of New York. There also he was baptized into the Roman Catholic
Church, in the parish of St. Peter's, the church building of which now
stands far down town, in Barclay Street. It is not, I believe, the
same that existed in 1802.

Very soon afterwards, before he reached an age to remember, his
parents removed to Norfolk, Virginia, where he grew up and formed his
earliest associations. As is usual, these  his whole life; he
was always a Virginian in attachment and preference. In the days of
crisis he remained firm to the Union, by conviction and affection; but
he broke no friendships, and to the end there continued in him that
sure