Farragut’s Forgotten Flagship
The call of “square-rigger in sight,” standing toward the harbor entrance at Newport, Rhode Island, late one afternoon in December 1901, prompted commotion on the foc’sle of the training ship Newport . At those words, Apprentice Joseph L. Bachus noted, “up from below tumbles every jack in the ship.” The training ship Constellation , moored nearby, asked the newcomer, with black hull and buff stack and upperworks, to identify herself. When the flags “G,” “One,” “Eight,” and “Six” fluttered from the stranger—Navy code for the Hartford —Bachus later wrote, “Oh, what a cheer went up!”
