In May 1846, 33-year-old Lieutenant Tunis A. M. Craven, U.S. Navy, a married father of six children, received orders to the 16-gun sloop-of-war Dale. Under Commander William W. McKean, the Dale set sail for the Pacific on 6 June. The little ship, 150 men living together in a hull just 117 feet fore to aft, encountered a week of “disagreeable weather, chilly head winds and rain,” Lieutenant Craven wrote in his personal journal, lamenting, “our ship is under water the whole time and I see small chance for comfort.” The stormy conditions further prompted him to observe that the “charms of sea life” existed “only in the minds of poets who had made a pleasure trip on a mill pond; for myself, I have never been able to discover the delights of the sea.”
Laid down early in 1839 at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and designed by naval constructor John Lenthall, the Dale was launched on 8 November 1839. She was built at a cost of $107,722 and sponsored by Commander John M. Dale, son of Commodore Richard Dale, for whom the ship was named. The latter, who had died in 1826, served under Captain John Paul Jones in the Bonhomme Richard and had later commanded the Mediterranean Squadron in 1801. Commissioned at her building yard on 11 December 1839, Commander John Gwinn in command, the Dale proceeded to Norfolk to fit out. She then departed on her first voyage to the Pacific on 13 December 1840, returning to Philadelphia on 20 October 1843 to be placed in ordinary.
Now, arriving off San Francisco on 14 December 1846, the Dale found herself caught up in the war with Mexico. The Navy’s mission was one of patrolling, executing cutting-out expeditions, and occasionally fighting a pitched battle ashore. Among the Dale’s activities in the months that followed were landings to protect supply lines. While none were large-scale battles, they nonetheless were small victories—and victories achieved at no cost in American lives.
One such skirmish began on the morning of 30 January 1848, when Lieutenant Craven led an expedition ashore to surprise the Mexican garrison at Cochori that had been positioning itself to interfere with obtaining supplies. The Dale’s landing force rowed four miles, then disembarked three miles from the village. “With quick step and profound silence,” the men marched toward their objective. Craven deployed First Lieutenant Robert Tansill’s 12 Marines to move up on the garrison and conceal themselves until the sailors had gotten near enough to begin the assault on the barracks.
Lieutenant Fabius Stanly led the Dale’s tars undetected “through thicket and hedge” to within 100 yards of the enemy. While Stanly took part of the force to the right, Craven took one to the left. As the latter group rounded a corner, however, a shot rang out from a sentry atop the building. Stanly, surprise lost, boldly charged the front of the barracks himself and seized the sentry there with his own hands, but not before the latter sounded an alarm.
Craven ordered a charge, but the “pitchy dark” made it difficult to see targets of opportunity. Some of the Mexicans escaped. Nonetheless, a volley of fire from the Dale’s Marines told Craven that Tansill’s Leathernecks had overcome what pickets had been deployed. All told, five Mexican soldiers lay dead, two wounded. The Dale’s sailors and Marines captured 11 privates, “twenty stands of arms, 500 rounds of ball cartridges, a stand of colors, and a quantity of provisions . . . as well as the guard boat.”
Lieutenant Craven soon discovered that they also had taken into custody one Captain Mendoza and his lieutenant—with their mistresses—“all in charming déshabille [undressed],” the women being “in no wise agitated . . . very interesting indeed.” As the eastern sky began to lighten, Craven ordered Stanly and a party of men to further search the barracks, then told Captain Mendoza and his subaltern to get dressed. Craven took them out to the Dale in his own boat—Mendoza forlorn but the lieutenant “quite delighted with the idea of not being numbered among the dead”—then provided them a breakfast of “stewed oysters, omelette, toast, and hot coffee.”
After the assault Craven reflected on “the sad business of war.” Among the effects of the enemy dead, a sergeant’s cartridge box had been found containing “carefully preserved, several letters from his wife, telling of the health of the children, of her affection, and desire to see him return from the war. She is sixty leagues from here and in a few days will receive the sad news of her loss.”
On 2 November 1848, Craven recalled, he “left the good ship Dale” to sail home in the sloop Warren. As he disembarked, he later recorded with understandable pride, the Dale’s crew had gathered on the foc’sle “and gave me three such hearty cheers as would gratify any public man.” (Those crewmen probably would not have been surprised to learn that at the Battle of Mobile Bay on 5 August 1864, Craven would go down with his ship—the monitor Tecumseh—when he stepped aside to allow his pilot to escape the doomed vessel.)
Shortly after Craven’s departure, as the Dale readied to depart California, Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones, commander-in-chief, Pacific Squadron, wrote to the commanding officer expressing appreciation for “the discipline and efficiency of your ship, and for the prompt and ready executions of all my orders. . . . The conduct, and good example of your Petty Officers, Seamen, and Marines, on all occasions, whether during the late war, or since the peace, and above all, their unshaken allegiance to their Country, and their Duty, too strong to be overcome by the highest Golden Allurements, entitles them to not only my thanks, but to the Nation’s gratitude, and the [well-deserved] Praise from every tongue.” While such words ring overly flowery to modern ears, they apparently were genuine—and none of the Dale’s hardy sailors or Marines deserted to join the Gold Rush.
The Dale arrived in New York on 22 August 1849. She subsequently made three voyages to Africa, serving to interdict the slave trade, then fought in the Civil War, taking two prizes. Moored at Annapolis, Maryland, from 1866 to 1884, she served as a U.S. Naval Academy training ship, and then was moved to the Washington Navy Yard. There she served for a decade as a receiving ship—housed over and looking “more like an ark than a sailing ship,” one observer noted.
The Dale and her four sisters—Yorktown, Preble, Marion, and Decatur, all launched in 1839—proved, as howard I. Chapelle wrote in his The American Sailing Navy, “rather popular; they sailed very well, and were stiff [stable at sea].” historian K. Jack Bauer praised them as “a very successful class.” Of that quintet, the Dale lived longest, even though her final workmanlike appearance belied her handsome origins.
Transferred to the state of Maryland’s Naval Militia in 1895, the Dale was renamed the Oriole on 30 November 1904. Stricken from the Navy’s list of active ships on 27 February 1906 she was transferred to the Revenue Cutter Service at Baltimore on 23 July 1906, and served as a floating barracks for fledgling Revenue Cutter Service officers enrolled at the School of Instruction at Arundel Cove. Returned to the Navy 15 years later, the Oriole was then sold to a Mr. Matson of Baltimore for $213.30.