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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