... Not long after this, when I was still a very small boy, I went to pay a visit to my Aunt Margaret Salter, who lived in West Fourteenth Street, near Sixth Avenue. Aunt Margaret was the wife of Commodore William Dayton Salter, of the United States navy. ... As she spoke beautiful French, she made herself very agreeable to the foreign visitors whom she entertained at the Brooklyn Navy Yard when her husband was commandant. While he was at sea she lived either in New York or Elizabeth. ...
The commodore was a typical sea-captain of the old school; an excellent sailor, a most capable man, and very decided, not to say pig-headed, in all his ideas. He was short, with a ruddy, clean-shaven face. He once told me that he taught all his midshipmen to shave with both hands, so that in case they were wounded they could still shave! He went to sea as midshipman at the age of ten. There were no naval schools in those days; they got their education at sea, and I fancy they did not teach them much apart from seamanship, for the commodore often complained that he was inferior to his wife in accomplishments. He was only twelve when he got into his first sea-fight — the famous battle between the Constitution and the Guerriere in the War of 1812 — and was also in the celebrated stern chase of the Constitution^ the "most exciting in naval annals," when she escaped from the British fleet in the fog. Mr. Dana painted an excellent picture of the chase, getting all the facts for his work from the commodore, and gave him a photograph of it, framed in a bit of wood from the Constitution, which my son Noel has at Danskammer. The last foreign service of the Constitution was the transport of American products to the Paris Exposition of 1878, which makes a link between me and the famous old ship.
When the commodore was young, duelling was still very popular; he told me that there were frequent duels in the cockpit among the midshipmen, and described to me a duel that he had fought with another officer at Naples. I spoke of this duel once to Loyall Farragut, who told me that it was historic in the navy and that he had seen it mentioned in some book. It seems that the Queen of Naples visited the ship, and after she had left, my uncle remarked that she was a handsome and agreeable lady; a fellow officer denied this vigorously, asserting that she was ugly and ill-favored. This was cause enough for a duel, so one was fought and young Salter shot his opponent in the hip. He said to me: **I met him the other day in an omnibus; we are now the best of friends, and by G he limps yet!" This seemed to give him great satisfaction after fifty or sixty years.
In 1841 Captain Salter was put in command of the first steamship in the navy, the Mississippi. Steam was considered a very hazardous experiment, and my uncle said that "it was only when he looked aloft at the sails and yards that he felt at home." In a letter to my aunt he says: "She is a large ship, 120 feet long and 46 wide. I have two ten-inch guns now mounted and four eight-inch; I suppose the others will be forthcoming soon. I shall have a heavy battery. The ship will be all legs and arms, she really looms like a seventy-four. The engine is six hundred horse power, the stack or furnace pipe as big in proportion as our little church steeple. We have much running ice, lots of snow and visitors, the latter interfere much with our work; a boat-load, principally petticoats, is coming alongside now."
The commodore had met many distinguished people, among them Napoleon, who once came aboard his ship in the Mediterranean, and Byron also visited the Constitution. I used to like to hear him talk about them, and about his adventures in South American waters when he was in command of the Brazil squadron. I stayed with Aunt Margaret very often at the Brooklyn Navy Yard when the commodore was commandant there. They had a fine garden and a large fig-tree that lived for many years, and even bore figs, by being covered with straw in winter. ... [more]
