The USS Swatara, named for a creek in Pennsylvania, was one of a large class of small screw sloops built during the War Between the States. When launched in 1865 at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, a Navy junior christened her with the usual ceremony. As completed on the thirteenth of that May, she displaced some 831 tons with a battery of ten guns. Like many contemporary vessels, she was constructed of unseasoned white oak because of the wartime cry for speed, and because most of the customary sources of live oak were in the hands of the Confederate forces.
Fifteen years later the ships built in this way were literally falling apart. Each was a mass of temporary soft patches. Congress would not authorize replacement ships, nor the junking of existing ones. The small repair appropriations they granted each year would accomplish little more than rainproofing the patches with another layer of paint.
About 1871 Secretary of the Navy George Robeson decided to concentrate the inadequate repair funds on a few of the worst vessels, and to “repair” these by jacking up the name and building an entirely new ship under it. The Swatara was the first of the selected vessels to complete “repairs” in this circumvention of Congress and the law. It was a slow job because the niggardly repair funds available would not pay for continuous work. However, the New York Navy Yard completed the new Swatara of good live oak in May of 1874. There was no sponsor, no launching ceremony, and a quiet commissioning for this vessel.
Before her “repairs,” the Swatara was 216 feet long, 30 feet wide, and had a draft of 12 feet and a displacement of some 800 tons. She was powered by an Isherwood engine. After “repairs,” she was 216 feet long, 37 feet wide, had a draft of I65 feet, displaced some 1900 tons, and sported a compound engine. There is no record that any one got fired or put in jail for this completely illegal “repair” that more than doubled the size of a naval vessel.
As soon as she was fitted out, she sailed on June 8, 1874, for the southern hemisphere with a party of scientists to observe the transit of Venus.
In 1882 after Commodore R. W. Shufeldt had succeeded in negotiating a treaty at Tientsin with Li Hung Chang, the Chinese viceroy, he proceeded on the Swatara to Korea and completed treaty negotiations with that country. Then, as Commodore Dudley W. Knox has written in his A History of the United States Navy, “On signal the Swatara in the distance fired a salute of twenty-one guns to celebrate the important event of bringing the Hermit Kingdom into the family of nations, opening it to American trade and assuring our seamen of safety on that coast.” The ship’s last claim to mention in history came three years later when she participated in discouraging revolutionary activity that threatened to stop transportation across the isthmus of Panama.
Three photographs on the opposite page were taken just before her departure from New York for Panama, and the fourth when she was at Portsmouth for overhaul in 1887- 88. The Swatara was sold out of the Navy in 1896.
(The U. S. Naval Institute will pay $25.00 for each illustrated Page from the Old Navy submitted to, and printed in, the Proceedings.)
