Somewhere in the head of the Sound the Shinnecock fell on an evil time. A bushing on a feathering paddle blade in the starboard wheel misbehaved and a bar buckled and for three hours she drifted while engineers made repairs. Finally an emergency landing was made in a convenient coal yard in Port Morris and the battalion trotted at double time for two miles over Harlem cobblestones, arriving just in time to fall in ahead of General Oliver O. Howard and the Grand Army Division.
During the march the men had a coveted opportunity to view the one-armed corps commander at close range. Much of the time the old hero was obliged to ride with his bridle rein in his teeth and with his chapeau in his hand in response to the frantic waves of applause which greeted him. The occupants of the closely packed stands along the line of march rose in wildly cheering masses as they caught sight of the grizzled veteran and the men of the Grand Army of the Republic.
Down Riverside Drive and for four miles in the heart of the city the battalion marched with fixed bayonets. It paraded between solid masses of cheering citizens and almost solid walls of flags and decorations. At every halt the men were refreshed with fruit, coffee or drinkables, sandwiches and salads or cigars, and presented with flowers and souvenirs. At one halt on aristocratic Fifth Avenue a shower of silk college sofa cushions came down from window seats and a Princeton cushion was impaled on the historian’s bayonet.
At the conclusion of the parade many of the division repaired to restaurants near Madison Square and Union Square. Dozens of them found, when they stepped to the cashiers’ coops to liquidate, that unknown civilians had obtained their checks and paid the bills. A man in a sailor uniform in New York City that September afternoon found it no easy task to spend money. Nothing was too good for the bluejackets.
It is to be recorded that Lieutenant Cuntz, Gunner’s Mate Huntington, Coxswain Chapin and Seamen Noble and Nutter preceded the battalion to New York. When the Shinnecock failed to appear, they annexed three stray regulars from the U. S. S. Texas, and assumed an advanced place in the column. In one of the spectators’ stands certain individuals conceived the notion that the eight were Hobson and the Merrimac survivors. In a few moments the word was passed over the stand and the crowd was on its feet in a wild burst of applause.
While Dewey Day experiences were still being talked over, arrangements were quietly made for a presentation to the first commanding officer, Mr. Parker, who was lured to Turnerbund Hall to receive from the command a gold watch with chain and fob, the chain in the semblance of a stud-link ship’s cable and the fob a division pin mounted on a locket.
More of the tang of salt air and of the romance of the ocean came one evening in the next drill season when the division mustered in the parlor to listen to a talk by Professor Henry Ferguson of Trinity College, an honorary member, who told a thrilling tale of shipwreck in the mid-Pacific. Professor Ferguson recited the story of the Hornet, a clipper which sailed from New York in 1866 for San Francisco. When the ship was several hundred miles off the Galapagos fire obliged the crew to take to the three boats, which were provisioned for ten days. It was decided to head for the north, to keep in the track of San Francisco vessels. Merchantmen in those days adhered to Maury’s sailing directions and it was reasoned that chances would be better in the sea highway than in attempting to reach land. By day the heat was nearly intolerable. Nights were treacherous as they induced squalls of the vindictively sudden nature peculiar to those Equatorial waters. Day after day wore by with an unbroken horizon. Finally the boats crawled up into the trade winds. It was decided to separate the boats to increase the chance of finding aid. For twenty-five days the sailors had fought wind, sun, and water and now they were in danger of fighting starvation, the ten days’ provisions, which had been distributed into one-third allowances, being nearly exhausted. The remaining provisions were in turn re-divided, but were gone in a fortnight. The men surviving sought nourishment in the chewing of leather and moist clothing. On the point of utter exhaustion they made a landfall, which proved to be Hawaii, and were rescued by a crew from a coasting station. They had spent forty-three days in an open boat and had traveled nearly three thousand miles.
More of the romance of the sea came to the division when the story of a “war member,” William Hurd, and the schooner Intrepid was told. Less than a month after Professor Ferguson’s lecture, Hurd cleared in New York with his little auxiliary as a trader to carry trinkets, tin jewelry, Yankee notions, canned soups, linens and whatnot to Baranquila and to acquire cocoanuts and rubber on the Mosquito Coast and islands nearby. His auxiliary was sixty-one feet on the water line and eighteen feet beam and thirty-five gross tonnage, or twenty-eight net. She had a powerful gasoline motor. After she cleared, Colombian insurrectionists captured Baranquila and Hurd’s friends in the division began to wonder what would happen to their former shipmate if an insurrecto officer ranged alongside with more of an appetite for grindstones, canned soups and tin jewelry than for international law. But Hurd was able to take care of himself. He prospered as a trader, made a bushel of money, spent it and finally returned.
At the annual banquet of 1900, Admiral Bunce, U.S.N., retired, was a guest and in his speech pointed out that foreign intelligence officers knew full well that seven-tenths of the arms and ammunition made for the government came from Connecticut. In response to a toast another speaker, Francis B. Allen, said:
“It was one of your honorary members, our distinguished Admiral Bunce, who, while in command of the North Atlantic Squadron just prior to the Spanish War, brought not only the fleet but each individual ship to such a degree of excellence in squadron evolutions and gun drills that he enabled his successors to acquit themselves so creditably that Sunday morning outside Santiago Bay when Cervera’s squadron tried to escape that the result afforded us the greatest Fourth of July celebration since Vicksburg surrendered.”