Word: fleetingly
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Admiral Cervera's fleet was somewhere in the Atlantic between Spain and America, and the Flying Squadron was formed to guard our Atlantic Coast. In 1891 Congress passed the Ocean Mail Act providing for a subsidy for fast vessels carrying the mails and suitable for naval auxiliaries. The American Line proposed to purchase two large British passenger vessels if it could obtain for them the American registry necessary to bring them to the terms of the Ocean Mail Act. By a special act of Congress this was permitted on condition that the American Line build, in American yards and according...
Promptly upon the declaration of war with Spain all four were procured by the navy and fitted with guns and naval crews. Because of their speed and steaming radius they were sent scouting for Admiral Cervera's fleet. They were all we had in the way of auxiliaries capable of this work and they were available only because of the mail subsidy...
...even after this we did not learn our lesson. In 1908-09 President Roosevelt, because of certain situations abroad, sent an American fleet around the world. Did American auxiliary colliers and supply ships go along with the American fighting ships? No. The United States Government hired merchant ships and colliers from foreign lines to do this work. Some of these ships were manned by Chinese. Then came the World War and this, is so recent that everybody knows of the money that had to be spent to build ships to carry our troops and supplies across the Atlantic...
...meeting of the Engineering Society in Room 110 of Pierce Hall at 8 o'clock this evening eight reels of official navy moving pictures showing destroyers in action and taken during practice sessions of the Atlantic fleet off the West Indies will be exhibited. Life on a modern battleship in all its phases will also be depicted. The films will also show several instances of spectacular naval operations...
...crews of these little vessels began their arduous service with absolutely no training in ordinary seamanship, not to mention the detailed tactics required for the peculiar warfare in which they were to be employed. The entire fleet did not contain more than one percent of graduates of Annapolis or five percent of experienced sailors. Practically all, officers and men, were civilians, a few more amateur yachtsmen, but the bulk of them were American college undergraduates. "Boys of Yale, Harvard, Princeton-indeed practically every college and university in the land-had dropped their books, left the comfort of their fraternity houses...