Hans Konrad Van Tilburg, A Civil War Gunboat in Pacific Waters: Life on Board USS Saginaw

Abstract

As many of us know, maritime archaeology is about more than just recording, measuring, and preserving old bits of wood for posterity. It is also about researching the rich histories and telling the unique stories of the artefacts we discover. Many of these objects were involved in multiple historical events, touched thousands of lives, and helped to shape the fortunes of entire nations; yet, they have been repeatedly overlooked or deemed unimportant and uninteresting by historians, sociologists, philosophers, and other scholars. The present book by Hans Konrad Van Tilburg offers a unique view of the history of such an artefact. It covers the ten-year career of a small, little-known vessel, USS Saginaw, a 155-foot, fourth-rate, wooden side-wheel steamer that served as a gunboat and all-purpose vessel for the United States Navy from 1860 to 1870. Since she was built during the long transition from sail to steam, she was a hybrid vessel and had both forms of motive power. Van Tilburg tells her story using a range of documentary sources, including the logs and letters of those who lived onboard. During her brief period of service, Saginaw traveled to a number of distant and exotic locations. Along the way, she encountered a diverse mix of people: Taiping rebels in East Asia, Confederate spies along the west coast of the United States, Mexican revolutionaries in Central America, etc. Saginaw played an important role in US domestic and international affairs during her decade of service. Her career was a slice of history. USS Saginaw was the first American warship built on the west coast of the United States. She was constructed in 1859 at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, opened just 5 years earlier, near San Francisco. Shortly after her first commissioning in 1860, she was attached to the United States Navy’s East India Squadron and charged with the task of suppressing piracy and protecting US commercial shipping interests along the Chinese coast. During the nineteenth century, trade between East and West was volatile and hostile yet profitable for anyone willing to take the risk, commit the necessary security forces, and shoulder the enormous financial burden of maintaining them. In the early part of the century, the US government decided to take that risk and set up special remote naval units in the Pacific