Human loss is ever recorded with a shock. No matter whether out of a clear sky or long-expected, the passing of one’s friend deals a cruel blow.
The Navy Department announced that on August 16, 1915, Commander Jonas H. Holden had been lost at sea. Here, in the twinkling of an eye was gone a gallant officer and more, to me, a shipmate and companion from earliest days.
Holden had been detached from command of the gunboat Annapolis upon the completion of a successful tour of service on the Central American coast during the troublous days of our intervention in Mexico. Under orders to Washington, there to become the director of target practice, he crossed Guatemala and at Puerto Barrios took passage in the steamer Marowijne for New Orleans. Thus he would reach his new duties at the earliest possible moment. I knew that Holden would do this. He never lost a moment in carrying out orders.
The Marowijne, on this her last voyage, touched at Belize and nothing has ever been heard of her since. It is believed that she foundered in the Yucatan Channel and all hands lost. I can clearly visualize Holden in the extremity of this hour, everywhere advising and assisting the ship’s captain. He was the best seaman of his day.
The keynote of the life of Jonas Holden was duty. It was so before he left his home in Burlington, Vermont, to enter the Navy.
I saw him first when we were candidates for the Naval Academy in May, 1892. I was to be his roommate in a private home in Annapolis where he had already arrived. As I awaited his return, I saw a tall, straight lad enter the gate. He was wearing the uniform of a military school. We met casually almost, as boys will, and I asked him the “idea” of the uniform. He had promised his father to wear it in making a call on the Governor of Maryland!
Gosh, how he hated to do it, but it was his duty. He had worn the uniform as a student at the University of Vermont.
I soon found that, in this preparation for the entrance examinations, Holden meant business. Immediately after supper we went to work on our books. This kept me from being a very homesick boy, a thousand miles away from my native New Orleans.
Throughout the first night, we fought the Civil War from our respective and conflicting standpoints. The relative superiorities of the Republican and the Democratic parties consumed the entire succeeding night. But on the third night, we had a problem in common.
That afternoon, we had decided to stroll into the Academy grounds, just to see what we thought of the place. Our reception in the rear of the Officers’ Club by a group of naval cadets (so termed then) was not exactly what we had expected. It is true, we were greeted but we were given rigid instructions to return when we had become proficient in certain calisthenic postures with the head down. This third night, then, found us seriously engaged in the privacy of our room, standing on our heads!
In a few weeks, we were plebes and went at once to sea in the Constellation—that grand old frigate where generations of midshipmen before us had learned their first lessons of seamanship. Naval traditions were a part of her very timbers and, proudly, we wore our first uniforms upon her decks.
Thus began my association with one who was to be without a peer in his profession. Four years as roommates at Annapolis followed and more practice cruises; then graduation in 1896 and, still together, we joined the new cruiser Columbia of the North Atlantic Squadron.
Whoever can forget his first ship or her officers! Captain James H. Sands was a fine figure of a man; Allibone was the executive officer, who clearly and constantly demonstrated to us how little we knew; Billy Driggs, the navigator, who was ever on the side of youth. Lowry, Dee Coffman, Chuck Dougherty, watch officers par excellence, were our friends.
Next, we went to the Maine. A happy ship, where Captain Sigsbee gave us much from his store of navigation. In Richard Wainwright, the second in command, we found the embodiment of officer and gentleman. What a gay year we had in the Junior Officers’ Mess with Worth Bagley, Stuffy Morris, Bronson, Teddy Richards, Crenshaw, and Pope Washington! Then came Havana.
Out of the quiet of a tropic night unannounced, suddenly, disaster overwhelmed our ship. Death struck swiftly. In the vastness of that destruction, human effort seemed futile, life’s chances so slim. Yet, among the rescued, Holden and I found ourselves in the same boat. He had been in his office at work, always at work, and I, below writing home. But here we were in a Ward Liner’s boat—safe.
Nearly all of the survivors were sent to Key West as soon as transportation arrived. Holden and I were the junior officers retained to assist in the search for the bodies of our shipmates and their burial and then to work with the Court of Inquiry in its investigation as to the cause of the catastrophe. The duty was trying, surroundings were unpleasant. There were constant rumors of war. Finally, just before it came, we were ordered home and, with relief in mind and body, we steamed northward out of that harbor.
We had scarcely a chance to purchase uniforms as we dashed to our homes— where greetings awaited us—before new orders came. Amid the widespread preparations for war, we found ourselves on the gunboat Scorpion sailing out of New York for Cuban waters again, now as commissioned officers.
Carrying dispatches, patrolling on the Santiago blockade, convoying, attacks on Manzanillo, and chasing suspicious ships kept the little Scorpion with the big 5-inch battery busy enough.
When the Spanish Squadron was sunk and the enemy ashore surrendered, our fleet steamed away victorious, but the Scorpion had to remain to assist in salvage operations. In the fall, we went to Havana to fly the flag of Admiral Sampson, a member of the Evacuation Commission.
In December of 1898 we were ordered home. Spirits ran high and, alas, so did the seas. Winter gales, fog, and casualties were our lot as we fought our way northward once more. An incredibly long passage of 25 days brought us at last to our anchorage in New York Bay, exhausted and thankful. Fears had been felt for her safety, but that staunch little craft weathered many an Atlantic storm during the subsequent quarter-century of her proud commission. One incident of that voyage is vivid to this day.
We were lying-to off Frying Pan Shoals, that blood brother of Diamond Shoal with the same nasty winter disposition. Unable to make any headway against the nor’-easter, the Scorpion had labored crazily for several days, battened down, fore and aft. We were marooned in a stuffy chart- house when off watch, with hard-tack and wretched coffee for our fare. Lashed to the binnacle when on the bridge, the spray froze on our faces as it struck. Our muscles were sore, and our eyes strained in trying to “keep her so.” It was not a happy time. But we did succeed in keeping her head to sea; we had tried everything else, when, suddenly, the crash of a cross sea, as it boarded us aft, carried away the rail, then the hand steering wheel and the thrust against the rudder parted the turnbuckle of the steam steering gear. Instantly, the ship fell off into the trough of the sea.
“All hands save ship!” rose the cry as a wave covered us, poured down the fire- room ventilators, filled both gangways to the rail, smashed the deck skylights, flooding the quarters below.
Preston, on the bridge with a useless wheel; I, to the fireroom scuttle begging the men to stand to their furnaces with nearly a foot of water on the floor plates.
But Holden, it was, who saved that ship.
Waist-deep in the swirling water in the port gangway, he called for volunteers as he worked his way aft. From the remnant of the flagstaff as it floated past him, he cut the halyards. Abreast one of his gun mounts, he reached beneath it for two iron jacking bars that he knew were there. Two men were with him now, Cape Cod fishermen, “for the duration of the war.” They reached the wreck of the hand steering wheel—the bronze hub was intact. With the flag halyards they lashed the jacking bars to this hub at right angles. The seamen put the helm down and up came the good ship Scorpion before the next sea could engulf her.
Standing thus in the cold water surging about them, seamen steered that ship. Other men lashed along the top of the deckhouse passed the word to them from the bridge. The gale persisted.
Several nights later, without warning, a sea boarded us forward, smashing the hatch cover and filled the forehold. A cry from aft, “She won’t steer!” Her rudder was out of water for she was down by the head. Officers and men bailed out that hold by hand all night long. The pumps were useless; their lead suctions through the coal bunkers had been melted in the bunker fires caused by spontaneous combustion.
With the morning, the sea fell, but fog then enshrouded us, and in it we steamed from Hatteras to the Narrows. But we did get home.
A month later, Holden and I were speeding eastward through Suez to the Philippines as watch officers in the Solace. The insurrection parted us in the islands, and, later on, Holden did a fine staff job in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.
The next year, we met again as instructors at Annapolis. We broke out the old books once more, we were on the sunny side of them now. Then, three years in the new Maine.
Steadily Holden’s star rose. His was a variety of duties. It is difficult to say in which he excelled. Ordnance was his forte but seamanship was his first love. He was truly an officer of the line, and his profession was his life’s essence. He was the pattern of duty, performed with sympathetic understanding. I missed him in the World War, we had stood side by side so often.
We may not know the plan of the Great Commander. We can have no conception of the duties of those called to serve in the Fleet Above. But this I know, whatever these duties may be, there is one who performs them full well. He was my shipmate in those years that are gone.