James Jonas Madison had been a merchant mariner for most of his life, having first gone to sea in his mid-teens. Soon after the United States entered World War I, he joined the Naval Reserve, and by January 1918 he was commanding officer of the USS Ticonderoga as a lieutenant commander.

The Ticonderoga was the former German steamer Kamilla Rickmers , which had been interned in Manila in 1914 and was later seized by the U.S. government in 1917. She was a single-screw vessel with a top speed of 11 knots, a crew of 124, and two deck weapons—a 3-inch gun forward and a 6-inch gun aft.

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