From Midshipman to Rear Admiral

about in boyhood, and of which I had heard many stories while I was at Annapolis. My mother did not sympathize with my feelings very much, but she did somewhat, for she herself was of an adventurous disposition; perhaps this was the reason she had married a minister. At length, about the first of August, orders came for midshipman B. A. Fiske to report on August 15, 1874, to the commander-in-chief of the North Pacific Fleet at the navy-yard at Mare Island, California. My mother was almost prostrated when the orders finally came; but she went bravely with me to the station, and waved farewell as the train started to the west. The trip to Mare Island, which is about forty miles from San Francisco, took seven days. It was really a most uncomfortable trip, but to a man who was only two months more than twenty years old it was full of adventure and sometimes of excitement. The railroad had been completed only a few years before, and it was hardly yet finished in all ways. There were no dining-cars, of course, and we took our meals at stations along the road, which in many cases were of unpainted pine boards. There had been a number of attacks on the trains by Indians, and so every man of us carried arms of some description. I carried a tremendous navy revolver,which could fire six 45-caliber bullets, and which had belonged to my uncle. We occasionally saw Indians galloping about, and the villages that we passed were of the crudest character. At some of the stat...