The Admiral and the Ambassador (8 page)

The Porters arose early on the morning of May 5 and, after a last-minute flurry of packing, rode by carriage from their Madison Avenue home to the long row of commercial wharfs along Manhattan's West Street, the wide, bricked boulevard hugging the North River, as the lower part of the Hudson was called at the time. The wharfs, which opened under large roofs to the street, were among the newest additions to New York's commercial hub, with local ferries connecting to New Jersey, less than a mile across the river, and large ocean liners linking America to the rest of the world. It was a Wednesday morning, cooled by a steady wind sweeping down from the Hudson River Valley, but with clear skies promising a nice day. The fair weather helped build the crowd, and despite the early hour the piers along West Street were swarming with workers, passengers, and well-wishers seeing friends and relatives off on trips. The Porters' carriage fought its way through crisscrossing traffic of passenger coaches, scurrying pedestrians, and teamsters hauling heavy loads of barrels, crates, and the occasional steel beam.
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The Porters alit in front of the American Line dock at Pier 14, at the western foot of Fulton Street. The pier, only five years old, was a massive 125 feet wide. An ornate three-story facade hid a two-story, iron-framed barn of a building extending 720 feet out over the water on thick wooden pilings driven deep in the river bottom. A huge A
MERICAN
L
INE
sign ran the length of the roof ridge, easily visible from beyond the Hoboken Ferry dock to the north and the Jersey City Ferry dock to the south. On this morning, though, it was hidden on the south side by the two-year-old steamship
St. Paul,
whose forecastle was about the same height as a six-story building, with fore and aft funnels jutting even higher. As the Porters arrived, the funnels were spewing streams of smoke into morning sky in preparation for the 10 A
M
departure of one of its biweekly trips to Southampton, England.

The
St. Paul
was one of eight steamships to leave New York that day; another eleven were putting into port.
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A true luxury liner, the
St. Paul
and its nearly identical sister ship, the
St. Louis,
were the largest US-registered ships on the seas. Built in Philadelphia by William Cramp and Sons, the
St. Louis
launched in October 1894, and the
St. Paul
was pushed into the water six months later. Both were sleek-looking despite their sizes, about 550 feet long and more than 60 feet wide. It took about $3 million and four
thousand men to build each ship, with double-bottomed steel hulls, bulkheads to protect against sinking, and six wood-planked decks over steel beams.

The
St. Paul
was built to move people as much as freight and could hold nearly 1,500 passengers, 320 of them in first-class staterooms on the main deck, 200 in second-class, and 900 in steerage. The first-class salon was large enough to hold all the first-class passengers at once beneath a large, domed ceiling, meant to resemble that of a ballroom in a luxury hotel. And the sister ships were fast. Each had made the crossing between New York and Southampton in six days. It was, at the time, the best ship America had to offer, and fitting for an ambassador's trip to his overseas assignment.
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As departure time neared, the hustle and bustle around Pier 14 picked up. Stevedores scurried about the street-level floor to load the last of the freight, luggage, and provisions aboard while, upstairs, passengers checked in then crossed a level gangplank to the ship's main deck. It was an innovation of the relatively new pier “separating passengers from the dust and dirt that accompanied the loading of cargo and provisions.”
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Scores of well-wishers waved passengers aboard, and newspaper reporters buttonholed the best-known of the passengers for some final words to be duly noted in the papers' next editions.

The Porters had their own entourage of friends “who literally carried us on board the boat” and filled the family's deck suite with flowers.
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The family was traveling in style: the top fare of $750 a head bought a suite with a private bath, toilet, bedroom, and sitting area. Porter's daughter Elsie was caught up in the swirl of excitement. As the privileged child of a wealthy New Yorker, she had traveled by ship to Europe before on a yearlong sojourn with her mother. On that trip, she knew she would return to the United States. This was a trip without a set end. For a seventeen-year-old girl, it was to be a grand adventure and would prove to be a critical juncture in her life.

As the family moved about the ship, other passengers called out Porter's name, as did news reporters seeking a last thought from the new ambassador before they were ushered ashore. Porter was likely the best known of the ship's passengers but hardly the only famous face. John K. Gowdy, an Indiana political bigwig who helped deliver the state's electoral votes
to McKinley, was aboard en route to Paris, where he would work with Porter as the consul general. The president's cousin and political confidant William McKinley Osborne was sailing for London, where he also would serve as consul general, joining fellow passenger Richard Westacott of Boston, recently appointed vice consul. Colonel William H. Williams, a Treasury Department official, was also heading for Paris as an advance force in looming talks about an international approach to “bimetallism,” using both gold and silver to back up national currencies.

Nongovernment people of note were aboard too, including Manton Marble, the owner and editor of the
New York World
newspaper during and after the Civil War. President Lincoln had ordered Marble imprisoned after the pro-slavery editor published an article in spring of 1864 based on a hoax letter that claimed Lincoln wanted to draft four hundred thousand men for the Union Army. (Soldiers occupied the newspaper offices for two days at the peak of the showdown.) In the decades after the war, Marble was an active Democrat, and President Cleveland had sent him on a tour of Europe to measure support for bimetallism. Marble was all but retired now and off to England, where he would live most of the rest of his life with his daughter and her husband.
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The
St. Paul
also was carrying Henry Dazian, whose family business was creating costumes for Manhattan stage productions. And cast members of the play
Secret Service
by William Gillette, which had just finished a critically acclaimed run at Garrick Theatre on West Thirty-Fifth Street, were settling into cabins on their way for a performance tour of England.
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How many of his fellow passengers Porter knew before the voyage is unclear, but he likely was well acquainted with James D. Cameron, who was off to Europe with his wife after stepping down in March as US senator from Pennsylvania. Cameron also had served as President Grant's last war secretary, when Porter was Grant's personal secretary. And while it was barely noted, William S. Cramp and his wife were aboard too. Cramp was head of engineering for his family's shipbuilding firm in Philadelphia, which had built the
St. Paul.

One of the more intriguing figures aboard was Major General Nelson A. Miles. Like Porter, Miles was a Civil War hero. Where Porter moved into politics, Miles made a career of the military and went on to lead brutal
pacification campaigns against Native Americans. Although he was not directly involved and later criticized the action, Miles's troops were responsible for the 1890 massacre of more than 150 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee. Miles was born in rural Westminster, Massachusetts, about fifty miles west of Boston, and like many young men he entered the military with the outbreak of the Civil War. He became not only a military leader but also a military student who longed to witness some of the great armies of Europe in battle. That winter, tensions between Greece and Turkey over a Christian uprising in Crete turned into a military scuffle in February when Turkish ships shelled a Cretan village. Confrontations with Greek troops escalated, diplomats were recalled, and on April 17, Turkey declared war. Miles saw his chance, quickly packed his bags, and, accompanied by his aide (and future general) Marion P. Maus, he left Washington, DC, on May 4 to catch the sailing of the
St. Paul
the next day. It was a bit of a gamble, given the amount of time it would take to get to the war zone. He told a reporter as the
St. Paul
prepared to sail that he “would not be surprised to find on arriving in Europe that the Greco-Turkish war is over.” At the very least, he said, he could tour European capitals and get a sense of military policies.
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So it was a mixed group of passengers settling in as, with a flurry of horn blasts and cheers, a tugboat slowly pulled the
St. Paul
away from Pier 14 and out into the river. Porter was at the deck rail with everyone else, waving a small American flag as the gap between ship and shore slowly widened. The ship eased into the main channel and then turned under its own power and began heading south past Ellis Island, which just five years earlier had become the first landing spot for immigrants arriving in New York. A little farther along the ship passed the Statue of Liberty, fittingly on this morning, a gift from France a decade earlier. From there the ship steamed through the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn and on beyond the spit of land that forms Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and then finally out onto the open ocean.

Over the next eight years, Porter would return to the United States just once. And when he finally sailed home for good, he would return with the body of an American hero.

N
EAR THE END OF
its voyage to Europe, when it reached a spot a few hundred miles southwest of England, the
St. Paul
steamed across an invisible line: the course followed more than a century earlier by a small fleet under the command of John Paul Jones.

Jones and his ships had set forth from the Île de Groix, off the south coast of Bretagne, France, before dawn on August 14, 1779. The Scottish-born American naval commander was aboard the warship
Bonhomme Richard,
accompanied by six other American and French ships. It was Jones's second foray into British waters, and his intent was to seize as many British ships as he could in the name of the Continental Congress and bring the violence of the American Revolution to England herself.

As a military maneuver, Jones's efforts didn't have much effect on the war. The psychological effect, though, was considerable. Jones, in the earlier sortie, had invaded the port of Whitehaven, the first time a foreign force had attacked a British port since 1667. His men had also raided the
mansion of the Earl of Selkirk, making off with the family silver. So the presence yet again of Jones and a fleet of mismatched warships off the British coast stirred the island with fear. While the excursions would cement Jones's reputation for skill and cunning at sea and help establish him as the father of the US Navy, to the British, Jones was a pirate, and his return to the land of his birth at the helm of an American navy ship was viewed as an act of treason.

Jones was born July 6, 1747, in a worker's cottage on the Arbigland estate near Kirkbean in southwest Scotland, overlooking the Solway Firth, which separated Scotland from England. His name then was the same as that of his father, John Paul (the son would add “Jones” later), a gardener for the Craik family. Jones was the fourth of seven children, though only five survived into adulthood.
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The details of his early schooling are murky, but at age twelve Jones moved across the firth to Whitehaven, the port he would later attack, to apprentice himself to merchant John Younger, who handled trade with the American colonies. Dumfries, the market town closest to where Jones was born, was also a major hub for tobacco imports, so the region had a steady and deep relationship with sea trade. Jones's oldest sibling, William, had already followed the trade route to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he made his fortune as a tailor and local businessman.
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Jones, though, was as much interested in the way the goods moved as in the trade itself. As a child, he watched ships ply the Solway Firth and later taught himself celestial navigation. He made his first transatlantic crossing at age thirteen aboard one of Younger's ships, but the next year Younger went bankrupt and Jones was cast out on his own. He spent the next few years moving from ship's crew to ship's crew, sailing between England and the West Indies and also several times to Africa on slavers before giving it up for more conventional trade.