Far China Station by Robert Erwin Johnson

Author:Robert Erwin Johnson [Johnson, Robert Erwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612514826
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

FIGURE 10–1.The luckless Oneida drying sails and hammocks.

The, Oneida’s minute guns had been heard in Yokohama, some ten miles away, and when an officer of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company’s newly arrived iron steamer Bombay stated rather casually that the Bombay had collided with another ship while standing up the bay, fears for the American warship began to mount. Nonetheless, nothing had been done when the Oneida’s surgeon, her senior surviving officer, reached Yokohama early the next morning. Upon receiving his report, Lieutenant Commander Horace E. Mullan of the immobile Idaho requested that foreign men-of-war undertake a search for survivors. The senior British naval officer present lost no time in ordering the survey steamer Sylvia and a steam launch to the scene and asked that the Bombay, the only ship with steam up, assist as well. Her master, Arthur W. Eyre, refused on the ground that the extent of the Bombay’s damage had not yet been ascertained, but an order from the P & O agent sufficed to get her underway a short time afterward. British, French, and Russian vessels participated in the search, to no avail, for the Oneida’s only survivors were the four officers and fifty-seven men saved in her two boats.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Commander Mullan had chartered the former USS Aroostook from her civilian owners to undertake his own search. The Idaho had no engineering personnel and few of the Oneida’s had survived; to fill this need, Captain Dmitry Mikbayloff of the Russian man-of-war Vsadnik volunteered the services of six officers and firemen from his ship. For more than a month, these Russians kept the old gunboat steaming in search of survivors and the remains of victims, as willingly as if one of their own vessels had been lost.

Three days after the disaster, John F. Lowder, the British consul at Yokohama, convened a court to inquire into the circumstances of the Oneida’s loss. It consisted of Lowder himself as president, two commanders from HMS Ocean, and the masters of two British merchant vessels. The court spent two weeks interrogating those in the Bombay and the American survivors, after which it concluded that responsibility for the collision rested with the Oneida but that Eyre had “acted hastily & ill-advisedly, in that instead of waiting and endeavouring to render assistance to the Oneida, he, without having reason to believe that his own vessel was in a perilous position, proceeded on his voyage.”13 For this, his master’s certificate was suspended for six months.

The flagship of the Asiatic Squadron was at Manila in late January, whence she proceeded to Hong Kong. There Admiral Rowan received news of the disaster and as soon as possible the Delaware departed for Yokohama. An engineering casualty en route forced her to return to Hong Kong for repairs, but Commander Francis A. Roe, Rowan’s fleet captain, boarded a passing mail steamer bound for Yokohama, where he convened a naval court of inquiry. A less exhaustive investigation was undertaken—the Bombay had already sailed—and, unlike the British

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