He also was responsible for ‘doing slight damage’ to an Argentinean warship during a storm off Buenos Aires on November 3, 1874. In 1874, Mahan ran the USS Wasp into a barge at the ship’s anchorage in Montevideo, Uruguay. ‘Vanity excited,’ he wrote of the experience on the Iroquois, which was, however, an exception, not the rule. Returning from target practice in the Pacific Ocean aboard the USS Iroquois, Mahan managed to bring his ship back into Japan’s Yokohama Harbor without hitting another vessel. His lack of confidence in handling ships was apparent from his reaction to a successful, routine maneuver in 1869. Mahan reluctantly returned to sea duty and soon built upon the shaky record he had established while serving on the Pocahontas. Mahan, who rated himself intellectually superior to almost everyone, was not well liked by his students, and during his 13 months in Newport, he rapidly began to dislike his chosen profession. Mahan’s effectiveness as a teacher of seamanship proved to be as questionable as his own ability to handle a ship he later recalled the ‘humiliation’ and ‘bad luck’ of having to teach subjects such as knotting, which he considered unworthy of his time. The vain executive officer deflected any blame for his slip-up by suggesting that the fault lay with his superior, Captain Drayton, who, he sarcastically noted, ‘had done a good deal of staff duty had less than the usual deck habit of his period.’įollowing this incident, Mahan served ten months on blockade duty before the Navy Department assigned him to teach seamanship at the Naval Academy, which had been transferred from Annapolis, Maryland, to Newport, Rhode Island, as a wartime precaution. Suddenly, the Pocahontas slammed into the anchored Union sloop Seminole. Mahan enjoyed studying human emotions and expressions, but as the Pocahontas‘s deck officer that day, he should have been watching the direction in which his ship was drifting. As his vessel moved through the water to join the rest of the flotilla in Port Royal Sound, Lieutenant Mahan became engrossed in observing his superior officer, who was deep in thought over the fate of his defeated brother inside the pulverized fort. Delayed by a storm and mechanical problems, the Pocahontas arrived on the scene after the other ships had pounded the fort into submission. On November 7, 1861, a small Union fleet assaulted Fort Walker at Port Royal, South Carolina, a Confederate stronghold on the edge of Drayton’s hometown that was commanded, as chance would have it, by his brother Thomas. Captain Drayton was familiar with his new junior officer and noted in his diary that Mahan was ‘young enough not to have too fixed ways and is quite clever.’ Drayton, however, had never seen Mahan handle a ship. As a young first lieutenant in 1861, Mahan was named the executive officer of Captain Percival Drayton’s 11-gun USS Pocahontas, and immediately set a dubious standard for his budding career. Naval Academy in 1856, he was involved in numerous maritime mishaps. During a forty-year naval career that began as a midshipman at the U.S. Mahan’s fear of accidents at sea was not unfounded. From his writings, readers would never have guessed, however, that the renowned champion of the United States Navy hated the sea, and while an active-duty naval officer, lived in constant fear of ocean storms and colliding ships. As the author of numerous articles and books, including the landmark The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, Alfred Thayer Mahan was widely regarded as a brilliant naval theorist. He was perhaps the most celebrated naval historian of his era, an influential promoter of United States naval and commercial expansion during America’s rise to world power in the late nineteenth century. Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Reluctant Seaman Close
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