Abraham Jacob Hollandersky
Abe "The Newsboy" Hollandersky (December 3, 1888 – November 1, 1966) became the second American boxer to win the Panamanian Heavyweight Title when he defeated Californian Jack Ortega in nine rounds in Panama City on May 30, 1913. American congressmen, Naval personnel, and canal workers were among the crowd of nearly two thousand who watched Hollandersky gain victory over an opponent who outweighed him by over thirty-five pounds. The "New York Times" announced Hollandersky's best known win the following morning.
Abraham Jacob Hollandersky
Hollandersky's voyage to Australia occurred not long after he met Theodore Roosevelt, early in his boxing career, around 1906–08 as part of the Cruise of the Great White Fleet. The second half of the fourteen-month cruise, much of which included Abe, routed sixteen state-of-the-art coal burning American battleships with white painted hulls from the California coast to, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and China.
Japan was already threatening as a naval power and President Roosevelt, architect of the cruise, intended to demonstrate the strength of the American fleet to both allied countries and potential enemies. Hollandersky sailed aboard the "USS Kearsarge" and served as her newsboy as she circumnavigated the globe and docked at the Navy's most exotic ports. The pinnacle of naval technology at the time, the "Kearsarge" served as the flagship of the North Atlantic fleet through 1905. Both heavily armed and armored, she carried a crew of 550, and could cruise at a top speed of twenty miles per hour. She docked in Australia in August 1908, along with close to a thousand sailors from the fifteen other Naval vessels who flooded the streets and received a warm reception in Melbourne and Sydney. Abe would have had time to take primarily the Australian leg of the cruise. He likely stopped at Aukland, New Zealand, and possibly the Philippines as he was absent from New London through much of 1906, six months in 1907 and nine months in 1908 which included the period when the "Kearsarge" arrived in Melbourne in August. His rigorous boxing and wrestling schedule precluded him from traveling continuously for the full fourteen months of the cruise.