In November 1894, the William Cramp & Sons Building & Engine Company launched the steamship St. Louis for the International Navigation Company of New York. A passenger and cargo liner, the ship sailed the transatlantic route from New York to Southampton in the United Kingdom for four years as part of the American Line. Then war broke out in 1898 and changed the history of the quiet, previously unknown ship.
When the United States declared war on Spain, the U.S. Navy had undergone more than a decade of growth. However, there still were not enough ships to serve all the needs of a maritime war with a great power navy, even if that power was in decline. To answer the need for transports, auxiliaries, and other supporting vessels, the Navy chartered ships from American steamship lines and converted them for naval use. The St. Louis was leaving the United Kingdom at the outbreak of the war, and, during her voyage home, the International Navigation Company signed the papers for her to enter into the naval service.
Arriving in New York on 22 April 1898, the ship was prepared for an immediate conversion. The shipwrights went to work, installing four rapid-firing 5-inch guns as a main battery and eight 6-pounder guns as a secondary. On 24 April, the ship was commissioned as an auxiliary cruiser with Captain Caspar Goodrich in command. The work of installing the guns, loading the ammunition and stores, and embarking the crew was done with incredible speed. With a wardroom of 27 officers and a crew of 350 sailors, many of them employees from the International Navigation Company and the original crew of the ship, the USS St. Louis set sail on 30 April and steamed south.
Arriving off the coast of Guadeloupe, with orders to patrol for the possible arrival of the Spanish fleet, Goodrich and his crew had more than simply using their newly installed guns in mind. The wardroom brainstormed ways to be useful to the war effort, in addition to keeping an eye on the horizon. It was quickly suggested that the undersea telegraph cables, which had been laid from island to island to connect the Caribbean for communication, might be a valuable target. With the outbreak of war and the introduction of signals intelligence—in a sense, the earliest versions of cyber warfare—the St. Louis could search for the cables that networked Cuba and Puerto Rico with Spain, cutting off the enemy’s ability to communicate. The auxiliary cruiser slipped into port at Guadeloupe, and Goodrich communicated with Washington and Rear Admiral William Sampson, commander of the North Atlantic Squadron, announcing his intention to cut the cables connecting Spain’s colonies with the rest of the Spanish Empire.
On 13 May, Goodrich and his crew neared their first quarry—a cable stretching between St. Thomas and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Before he joined the St. Louis’s merchant crew—and then the Navy when the ship was leased—Chief Officer T. G. Segrave had spent years on ships laying telegraph cable. Now–Brevet Lieutenant Segrave suggested catching and cutting cables would be easy. Assuming the telegraph company would have laid cables along the shortest line possible, with Segrave’s advice Goodrich and the crew determined the likely location of the St. Thomas–San Juan cable. Once in the right area, the crew dropped grappling hooks off the bow and began to steam ahead as slowly as possible. Before long, they had hooked the cable, and the line was pulled up with a steam capstan. All it took was a few hard blows with an axe from the damage control locker and the cable parted and was tossed back over the side.
With that done, Goodrich and Segrave plotted their next target. The cable between Santiago de Cuba and Jamaica seemed a logical next operation, and the St. Louis’s navigation team plotted the suspected location. On 18 May, the ship sailed close to shore searching for the cable and came within range of the batteries from the Morro Castle protecting the harbor. For 40 minutes, the crew worked their guns in an exchange of fire with the castle while a team streamed the grappling hooks overboard to catch the cable. Three thousand yards from shore, the gunboat Wompatuck joined them, as the crew on the bow raised then cut the cable and let the ends splash back into the sea. When Admiral Pascual Cervera and his fleet arrived the next day, they found themselves cut off from communication with Spain.
With experience now on their side, the crew of the St. Louis set to more work in their cyber campaign against Cuba. The next cable they targeted connected Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Haiti. The crew cut it on 20 May. On 22 May, the auxiliary cruiser was over the cable originating in Ponce, Puerto Rico, but was unable to catch it with the hooks. On 18 June, the St. Louis found and severing the cable connecting Cienfuegos with Santiago, thus cutting off all telegraph communication between Havana and Cervera’s fleet.
With the protocyber campaign coming to a close, and the blockading fleet gathered on the south side of Cuba to face down Cervera, Goodrich led the St. Louis in a series of traditional naval missions. The ship joined a small squadron that bombarded the forts protecting Guantanamo Bay on 3 June. On the 10th, a sharp lookout spotted a Spanish merchant ship, which the crew intercepted and took as a prize. Goodrich and his crew discovered a pair of British merchant ships trying to run the blockade into Cuba and intercepted both. Two days later, the St. Louis joined the U.S. fleet in the Battle of Santiago Bay, where the forces under Commodore Winfield Scott Schley defeated and captured the Spanish fleet as it tried to escape from the harbor.
Following the American victory in the battle, Captain Goodrich and his ship took on missions much closer in character to the St. Louis’s origins as an Atlantic liner. Spanish prisoners of war were gathered from ships that surrendered or were sunk for transport to the United States. The St. Louis was given the honor of carrying most of the officers, including Admiral Cervera himself, and several hundred sailors, moving 700 total prisoners to Portsmouth Naval Station in New England. Following delivery of the prisoners, the St. Louis embarked the Third Regiment of Illinois Infantry from Hampton Roads, Virginia, as well as the staff of the 1st Corps under Major General John Rutter Brooke, future governor of Puerto Rico and commander of the island’s occupation. Goodrich and his crew took great pride in their efforts to provide hot coffee for every soldier during the transit, delivering the troops to Arroyo, Puerto Rico, on 2 August.
The St. Louis returned to New York before moving to the Philadelphia Navy Yard for conversion back to a transatlantic liner. On 2 September, after 131 days of service in the U.S. Navy, the St. Louis was decommissioned and rejoined the American Line. The ship resumed her regular schedule between New York and the United Kingdom. In 1917, when war returned to the Atlantic world, the St. Louis joined the U.S. Navy again, but to alleviate confusion with the heavy cruiser St. Louis (C-20) that was commissioned in 1906, the converted troop transport was renamed Louisville (SP-1644). The ship made six voyages across the Atlantic carrying elements of the American Expeditionary Force to the Western Front.
Decommissioned in September 1919 and once again renamed St. Louis, the ship was moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, for reconversion to a passenger liner. In early January 1920, a shipyard worker’s blowtorch slipped and set a fire that spread rapidly through the ship. With little firefighting capability available, the fire rapidly grew out of control, and the veteran of two wars was scuttled at the moorings to put the fire out.
A century before cyber operations became a common discussion in the naval strategic and policy world, the converted auxiliary cruiser St. Louis set a new course as a raider in the Spanish-American War. Converting civilian vessels had been common in early American conflicts, but even as the “New Navy” at the end of the 19th century grew, it remained necessary to augment the fleet’s heavier warships with lighter ones that could take on raiding roles and serve as transports and mother ships for creative new missions. Today, ships such as the expeditionary sea bases and expeditionary fast transports are examples of Navy ships derived from civilian ones.
As the Navy looks to grow its fleet in the 21st century, the legacy of converted auxiliary warships such as the St. Louis offers interesting examples from our naval past to study in the great power competition of the modern day.
