The detail pitched camp on rising ground in the rear of the Hotel Munnatawket, not far from the site of the battalion’s camp some five years later.
The Maine lay at anchor in Fisher’s Island Sound. The remainder of the division went by rail to New Haven on the following Monday morning and sailed for the island on the steamer Richard Law. The two divisions with the engineer branch and the staff made the battalion nearly 140 strong.
Captain Sigsbee was in command of the ship, the same officer who was in command when the tragedy in the harbor of Havana happened seven months later. His face became familiar to most of our men, as did also that of Lieutenant Wainwright, executive officer at the time of the explosion, and when that tragedy came the horror had a personal as well as a patriotic interest for many members of the Second Division, who remembered by name and face many a man in the ship’s complement.
Most of the work was at Camp Long or in small boats, but not a little was on the ship, where gun drill was among the most interesting of the branches. A lecture on the Whitehead torpedo was a feature of the curriculum.
One afternoon during the tour of duty on the Maine, the signal squads of the First and the Second Divisions met in a contest for a trophy cup and the squad from the Second won. The winning team included Quartermasters Cheney and Wightman and Seamen Bosworth and V. Morgan.
It is interesting to hark back to the Maine days and to record that a racing cutter crew was evolved and that it received some, if not much, instruction and encouragement from men on the Maine. Out of the mist of that week it is recorded that this crew was made up of these oarsmen: First, Seaman Baxter; Second, Quartermaster Wightman; Third, Coxswain Osgood; Fourth, Seaman Wells; Fifth, Gunner’s Mate Root; Sixth, Seaman Havens; Seventh, Seaman Gilbert; Eighth, Boatswain’s Mate Morrell; Ninth, Coxswain Northam; Tenth, Seaman Ingalls; Eleventh, Gunner’s Mate Cuntz, and Twelfth, Seaman J. Morgan. Without experience the crew contested with the crack twelve of the New Haven Division and was beaten only by three-quarters of a boat length.
The Hartford Division returned on the tugs Coulston and Mabel, arriving at the steamboat landing in the early evening.
