Using an old French chart, Commander James Findlay Schenck, the 53-year-old commander of the U.S. steamer Saginaw, decided to begin his inquiry into the disappearance of the American bark Myrtle, at Qui Nhon, on the coast of Cochin China. A white flag reflecting the Saginaw’s peaceful intent was run up the foremast gaff (the Stars and Stripes already flew from her main), and the gunboat stood in the town’s harbor at five minutes before noon on 30 June 1861, anchoring in four fathoms of water. Schenck planned to communicate with the shore at 1300 “unless an official visit was made to us before that time.”
Ten minutes after the Saginaw had anchored, however, Qui Nhon’s fort fired what the Yankees considered a “well directed shot” that splashed close by. Schenck immediately ordered the anchor weighed, but his tars were no sooner carrying out the command when a second “equally well directed” round “went over and very near us.” A third shot splashed off the Saginaw’s starboard bow as the side-wheeler gathered speed. Too far from the fort to employ his two 24-pounder smoothbore bronze boat howitzers, Schenck, as the white flag descended from the fore, ordered the Saginaw “to return the compliment” with a more powerful weapon.
The little warship about to fire in anger for the first time had been the very first to be built at the Mare Island Navy Yard of Vallejo, California. Construction began in July 1858. The Toucey, as she was originally known (so named to honor serving Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey), was laid down on 16 September 1858. Made of live oak, white oak, pine, and laurel wood—all cut on the West Coast—the side-wheel gunboat entered her element on 3 March 1859, christened by the daughter of Captain Robert B. Cunningham, the commandant of the yard. A correspondent for the San Francisco Herald noted how the sponsor “performed the ceremony of Naval Baptism by breaking a bottle of wine, the generous fluid being of California vintage.”
Subsequently renamed Saginaw, for the river in Michigan, the brig-rigged side-wheeler was commissioned on 5 January 1860 with Commander Schenck in command. The Saginaw’s shakedown excited praise. “Her engines [also built locally, at Union Iron Works of San Francisco] worked with as much ease and regularity as though they had performed for years,” the New York Herald’s reporter wrote, and the new warship returned to her building yard “having performed in a most satisfactory manner.”
With Schenck’s “faith in her ability and strength to weather in safety any gale of wind he may chance to fall in with,” the Saginaw set course for the Orient on 8 March 1860. She proceeded via the Sandwich (present-day Hawaiian) Islands, reaching Honolulu on 22 March and staying until 9 April, and ultimately reached Shanghai, China, on 12 May. Subsequently, Flag Officer Cornelius K. Stribling, commanding the U.S. East India Squadron, called the Saginaw “an admirable dispatch vessel, and well calculated to do good service on this station.”
The Saginaw’s spaces were divided into three roughly equal parts. Forward, the crew slept on the berth deck in hammocks hung from hooks in the overhead. Subsisting on a diet of beans, potatoes, salt meat, bread, pickled vegetables, and coffee, the sailors were rough-hewn men of as many as nine different nationalities. Compartments for the purser’s small stores and clothing, seamen’s stores, beans, and a master’s storeroom occupied other places in the forward part of the ship, as did a small dispensary.
Amidships, separating the enlisted men from the officers, lay the machinery spaces with a compact and simple oscillating cylinder plant. A writer from the New York Herald described the machinery as being of “the most exquisite description and finish and workmanship,” with a boiler located ahead of the coal bunkers on each side. Another bunker spanned the ship’s breadth, giving the Saginaw space for roughly 123 tons of the dusky fuel.
Continuing aft on the berth deck, there were compartments along the port side for the engineers, master, and purser as well as the captain’s pantry. Compartments for the second lieutenant, third lieutenant, and surgeon were on the starboard side. Aft of them was the ward room proper and then the captain’s cabin.
Water casks and tanks, stores of various kinds, and the sail room were in the lowest part of the ship, the hold. A locker for shot lay forward, one for shells lay aft, the latter just forward of the magazine and aft of the bread room, spirit room, and after hold.
Off Qui Nhon that June day in 1861, gun drill paid off. The Saginaw’s iron 32-pounder, commanded by Lieutenant Marshal C. Campbell, began a deliberate fire, alternating shot and shell. The first shell exploded directly over the fort, triggering a secondary explosion, a “dull, heavy report” that Schenck interpreted as either “the bursting of a gun or the explosion of a powder magazine.” No further firing came from the Cochin Chinese, who precipitately abandoned the strongpoint. “I suspect,” the side-wheeler’s captain wryly reported, “we must have given them a very good opinion of our target practice.”
Such was the lot of the Saginaw, to “show the flag” along Asia’s coast and up the mighty Yangtze amid the turbulence of the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion. Japan, “opened” less than a decade before, constituted the ship’s second major area of operations.
In 1862 the Saginaw, regarded as rotten and unseaworthy after her hard service in Asia, limped back to California and was refitted. She guarded lines of commerce and communication, investigated rumors of Confederate intrigue on the Pacific littoral, and stood ready to protect American lives and property as unrest convulsed Mexico. As it had been in the Orient, when a nation relatively new to the international arena could only deploy a limited naval presence to hunt for pirates or support diplomatic missions, the Saginaw’s service along the West Coast proved arduous and far-reaching, extending to the laying of telegraphic cable off the Pacific Northwest coast.
After the United States acquired Alaska from Russia in 1867, the Saginaw supported the government’s administration of that wild territory and conducted surveys of its waters. Storms of the natural and human kind, the latter reflecting the resistance of indigenous populations to the new government, taxed the ship and her sailors. On completion of that tour, the Saginaw supported dredging operations at Midway Atoll from 24 March to 21 October 1870. The work there having been discontinued, the Saginaw, then under the command of Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Sicard, sailed for San Francisco on 28 October 1870.
Despite all precautions, however, the side-wheeler grounded during the mid-watch on 29 October at Kure Atoll. Ironically, she had neared Kure to rescue any mariners who might be shipwrecked there. A volunteer crew of Lieutenant John G. Talbot, the ship’s executive officer, and four enlisted men set out in the ship’s modified gig for the Sandwich Islands, 1,000 miles away, to report what had befallen the ship. At the end of their perilous 31-day voyage, all but Coxswain William Halford drowned in Kauai Island’s turbulent surf. A steamer provided by Hawaii’s King Kamehameha V proceeded posthaste and rescued all hands at Kure. Halford received the Medal of Honor. He, like the ship in which he had served, truly had done “good service.”
Saginaw-class Side-Wheel Gunboat
Displacement: 508 tons
Length (between perpendiculars):155 feet
Breadth (extreme): 26 feet
Depth of Hold: 11 feet, 6 inches
Armament (1860): 1 32-pounder | 2 24-pounder boat howitzers
Complement (1860): 59 officers and enlisted men