[Editor: This article, about the visit of the Great White Fleet (US Navy) to Australia in 1908, was published in The Townsville Daily Bulletin (Townsville, Qld.), 20 August 1908.]
Admiral Sperry.
No stranger in Australia.
“I have been 46 years in the service, man and boy. That takes in the time from when I entered the naval academy to now. In that 46 years, including a month’s vacation each of my four years in the academy, I have had leave amounting to one year and ten months, the remaining 46 years and two months I have been every day on duty. Since 1871 I have had six weeks’ leave, which was spent with my wife on our honeymoon in Savannah. Yes, I have been in Australia. It was in 1869 on the old Kearsage — the original Kearsage, the one that finished the Alabama. I was an ensign then; the captain was Jim Thornton who had been the executive officer on the day they whipped Semmes and the celebrated Confederate cruiser. It was Thornton’s idea of lowering the anchor chains over the side and covering them with canvas painted to look like the hull that saved the Kearsage’s boilers. That was a bully cruise. We youngsters loved that life, roaming through the south seas, and it will be a great delight for me to go over it again with so magnificent a fleet as this.”
“What Australian ports will you take in?”
“Of course, I can’t say what the navy department will order, but it will likely be Sydney first and then Melbourne. Though, if we want to go from Honolulu without stopping to coal in either the Samoan group or the Fijis we had better go to Auckland, a run that could be made direct from Honolulu without a stop.”
“It is hardly likely. We would have to take pilots then, and you know the navy is not partial to pilots. We like to do our own navigating. We will get along well enough with British Admiralty charts. I think we never get enough credit for the navigating we do without local assistance. A great howl is always made if we strike a rock; it would be fine business for them if they could add the navy to their list. Everything was done to make it appear that we had pilots through the straits of Magellan, when, as you know, our own navigators only laughed at the suggestion. The passage of Magellan, however, is not difficult.”
“Then you will have no pilots.”
“Of course not. There is no place where they could be use. We will go outside the Barrier Reef on the east coast of Australia. The straits of Macassar is the only other ticklish place, and our charts will see us through there.”
Admiral Sperry said a number of other things, one of which is worth quoting.
“The hardest job I ever had in my life was when I went to The Hague as the United States naval delegate to the Peace Conference. I sweat blood over that.”
“Why so hard? That was a ‘kidglove’ assignment, which popular notion always ascribes as being especially congenial to a naval officer.”
“There were kid gloves aplenty, but we forgot them readily enough. You see, I was appointed to revise the articles on maritime law and I was put up against the most plausible lot of schemers you ever saw in your life. It is not a square deal to run in a simple-hearted, honest-minded American naval officer with a bunch of slick Latin lawyers.”
“What did they do to you?”
“About every third day they would present an article for my acceptance which would look, on the face of it, perfectly simple, fair and above board. But the minute you began to cross-question it, and penetrate, and go back to your room and let it soak in, and then compare it with treaty regulations you would find that in some obscure, but yet patent, way the United States was going to get the little end of the stick. I do believe they thought we were easy. I grew ten years older there in three months.”
Source:
The Townsville Daily Bulletin (Townsville, Qld.), 20 August 1908, p. 7
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