The Ark
Check out this amazing crew shot of USS Arkansas (Battleship No. 33) assembled on deck, circa April-Sept 1914.
Note the sweeping collection of mascots (monkey, dogs, cats, a goat, and birds), as well as the ship’s baseball championship pennant flying, among other awards and trophies.
(Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph NH 96594)
Inset of the above. I count a retriever, a goat, and at least seven parrots in this one sample.
Plus a monkey and a mouser.
The third U.S. Navy ship to bear the name of the Diamond State, Arkansas was laid down on 25 January 1910 at Camden, launched just a year later on 14 January 1911, and commissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 17 September 1912, Capt. Roy Campbell Smith (USNA 1876) in command.
Smith is surely the skipper shown in the image, as he remained the proverbial Noah on “The Ark” until October 1915.
A closer look at Smith. Note the parrot and Ark’s accumulation of trophies and loving cups. At the time, she carried the fleet’s coaling record, having taken on 687 tons from USS Cyclops in an hour. Smith, born in Texas in 1858 to Charles Henry Smith, an assistant surgeon general of the United States, fought at Santiago on USS Indiana, earned a Navy Cross, and later married Admiral Sampson’s daughter. Before Arkansas, he served as naval attaché in Paris and commanded the cruiser USS Chattanooga. After leaving Arkansas, he was governor general of Guam, supervisor of New York harbor, and on the board of the Naval War College before retiring in 1921 after 51 years of service.
Caption: Arkansas churns through the waves with the traditional “bone in her teeth,” most likely during her sea trials, 1912, in an image captured by the noted maritime and naval photographer Nathaniel Livermore Stebbins (1847–1922). (Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph NH 96594)
After extensive antebellum cruising, including a European tour, service in Mexico (Veracruz) in 1914, Arkansas joined the other American battleships in Rosyth, as part of the British Grand Fleet’s Sixth Battle Squadron during the final year of the Great War.
Rebuilt 1925-26 to upgrade her coal plant to an oil-fired one, along with a host of other modernizations, Arkansas was a fixture of interbellum Fleet Exercises and midshipmen’s summer training cruises.
Much active WWII service in the Atlantic and then in the Pacific earned the aging dreadnought four battle stars.
From her War History:
Sadly, the Ark met the sun during the Bikini atomic bomb tests, with the uncrewed battlewagon just 250 yards from the epicenter of the Baker shot on 25 July 1946, “sinking of Arkansas by hammering it more or less straight down into the lagoon bottom.”
Arkansas, broken and lost, was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 15 August 1946.
