Hugh Rodman: Yarns of a Kentucky Admiral

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Yarns of a Kentucky Admiral

By
Hugh Rodman
Rear Admiral, United States Navy

[A three-quarter-length photograph, three-quarters left, of a man in late middle age in an American dress naval uniform; his hands are in his pockets; his left sleeve is prominently visible, with its gold stripes of various widths, almost up to his elbow. He is United States Navy Admiral Hugh Rodman, author of the book transcribed in full on this site.]

Admiral Hugh Rodman

The Author and the Book

Hugh Rodman, a graduate of the Naval Academy, Class of 1880, is best known as the commander of the U. S. Navy's Battleship Division 9, that served in the North Sea in World War I as Battle Squadron 6, an integral part of the British Grand Fleet; after the war he was Commander-in‑Chief of the U. S. Navy's Pacific Fleet.

His book is aptly titled, since it is in no way a connected autobiography, but rather a loosely chronological thread of stories he chooses to tell us; a more formal biographical article, published just after World War I, by Jouett Taylor (Mrs. John S.) Cannon can be found in Vol. 18, No. 51, pp57‑63 of the Register of Kentucky State Historical Society, under the straightforward title "Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman".

[p7] Contents

I	In Old Kentucky	13
II	Early Days in the Navy	24
III	Some Rough Weather on the High Seas	46
IV	A Bit of Nautical Talk	68
V	Strange Phenomena of the Sea	85
VI	A Hawaiian Coronation and a Few Fish Stories	94
VII	Some Nautical Feats of the Hawaiians and Others	117
VIII	Anent the Gay South Sea Islands	135
IX	Hunting and Shooting in Alaska	157
X	Alaska, Whales and Lighthouses	170
XI	Gunboating in Asiatic Waters	192
XII	The Canal Zone	215
XIII	With Commodore Dewey in 1898	237
XIV	In the Mists Off Scotland, 1917‑18	261
XV	The Navy as a National Asset and Necessity	288

List of Illustrations

Admiral Hugh Rodman	Frontispiece

Midshipmen at drill in the days when Admiral Rodman was at the Naval Academy.	16
Spar deck of the U. S. S. Santee, station ship at the Naval Academy	22
An old-time sailing vessel on which Admiral Rodman served as midshipman	30
U. S. S. New Mexico, the flag-ship of Admiral Rodman, Commander-in‑Chief of the Pacific Fleet	42
Old-time sailing man-of‑war under top sails and courses in heavy weather	54
Battle-ship in heavy sea	64
A devil-fish	72
The Monongahela, a similar ship to Farragut's flag-ship, the Hartford	82
Vessel in which Admiral Rodman cruised to China and returned, 1886‑1889	86
Old-time sailors	92
United States Pacific Fleet off Lahaina Roads, Maui	100
A colony of sea birds on Midway Island	112
Hawaiian war canoe, — warriors masked	126
Admiral Sir David Beatty, R. N., Captain Wurtsburg, U. S. N., Admiral Hugh Rodman, U. S. N.	148
Admiral Rodman and hunting party on a mountain-top in Alaska	166
On the banks of an Alaskan trout stream	166
Landing a four-pound trout from an Alaskan stream	166
U. S. S. Utah, coming bows‑on	184
Group of officers on the U. S. S. Elcano, gunboating on the Yangtze Kiang, China	206
Hongkong Harbor, where Dewey's Fleet lay prior to sailing for Manila	206
Catch of Tarpon, Gatun Spillway, Panama	230
The Battle of Manila Bay	244
Gun salvo broadside from a modern battle-ship	258
Admiral Beatty, Admiral Rodman, King George V, Prince of Wales, and Admiral Sims, aboard U. S. S. New York	276
Surrender of the German Fleet, Admiral Rodman pointing it out to Admiral Sims	290
King Albert and Queen Elizabeth of Belgium being welcomed aboard the U. S. S. New York by Admiral Rodman	300

Technical Details

Edition Used

These webpages transcribe my copy of the original hardback edition of 1928, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis. It is marked, contradictorily,

and

but is now in the public domain because neither copyright was renewed in 1955/1956 or 1954/1955 as the case may be, as then required by law: details here on the copyright law involved.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57 these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the authors' own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Illustrations and Proofreading

The printed edition includes 26 photographs, tipped in at various points, not usually related to the text. A few of them even seem to have little bearing on that text. I've exercised considerable liberty in moving them from their original pages in the book to places that seemed more germane. The photos are all black-and‑white; I've colorized them slightly to navy blue. In addition, I inserted one color photograph of my own that perfectly illustrates Adm. Rodman's description of his hometown.

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if successful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents below, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; a red background would mean that the page had not been proofread. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was remarkably well proofread. The inevitable typographical errors were very few, and most of them were caught in an errata list on (the unnumbered) p5: I folded those corrections in without marking them. The other errors are almost all trivial: I marked them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read what was actually printed. One correction didn't lend itself to that treatment because it conflicted with HTML: it is marked with a bullet like this.º Similarly, underscored measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles.

Adm. Rodman regularly writes practise for the noun. I've left it.

A number of other odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked. They are also few.

Any overlooked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

$[A photograph of a three-masted sloop under full sail; it is the U. S. S. Essex, a ship on which Admiral Hugh Rodman sailed for three years. The image serves as the icon on this site for his autobiographical memoirs, \'Yarns of a Kentucky Admiral\'.]$

The icon I use to indicate this subsite is the photo of the sailing ship in which the author lived toward the beginning of his naval career (p86).

Images with borders lead to more information.
The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)

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