From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life

Оглавление

Alfred Thayer Mahan. From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life

PREFACE

INTRODUCING MYSELF

I. NAVAL CONDITIONS BEFORE THE WAR OF SECESSION

II. NAVAL CONDITIONS BEFORE THE WAR OF SECESSION

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

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

V. MY FIRST CRUISE AFTER GRADUATION—NAUTICAL CHARACTERS

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

VII. INCIDENTS OF WAR AND BLOCKADE SERVICE

VIII. INCIDENTS OF WAR AND BLOCKADE SERVICE—CONTINUED

IX. A ROUNDABOUT ROAD TO CHINA. 1867

X. CHINA AND JAPAN

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

XII. EXPERIENCES OF AUTHORSHIP

Отрывок из книги

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.

.....

Late in the ensuing spring Mr. Murray wrote me that he would nominate me for the appointment. Just what determined him in my favor I do not certainly know; but, as I remember, Mr. Davis had authorized me to say to him that, if the place were given me, he would use his own influence with President Pierce to obtain for a nominee from his district a presidential appointment to the Military Academy. Mr. Murray replied that such a proposition was very acceptable to him, because the tendency among his constituents was much more to the army than to the navy. At that day, besides one cadet at West Point for each congressional district, which was in the gift of the representative, the law permitted the President a certain number of annual appointments, called "At Large"; the object being to provide for sons of military and naval officers, whose lack of political influence made it difficult otherwise to enter the school. This presidential privilege has since been extended to the Naval Academy, but had not then. The proposed interchange in my case, therefore, would be practically to give an officer's son an appointment at large in the navy. Whether this arrangement was actually carried out, I have never known nor inquired; but it has pleased me to believe, as I do, that I owed my entrance to the United States navy to the interposition of the first and only President of the Southern Confederacy, whose influence with Mr. Pierce is a matter of history.

I entered the Naval Academy, as an "acting midshipman," September 30, 1856.

.....