Bailey I (Coast Survey Schooner)
1856–1873
The first U.S. Navy ship named for Jacob Whitman Bailey, born on 29 April 1811, in Ward, Mass. Bailey became a professor of chemistry, minerology, and geology at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
Bailey married Maria (née Slaughter), daughter of Samuel Slaughter of Culpeper, Va. Their union produced four children (eldest–youngest): Maria W., Samuel S., Loring W., and William W.
Tragedy struck the family on the afternoon of 28 July 1852, however, when paddle wheel steamboat Henry Clay sank while en route from Albany, N.Y., to New York City. Bailey, his wife, and two of their children, Maria and William, booked passage on board Henry Clay for the brief voyage. Some survivors afterward claimed that Henry Clay raced another steamboat, Armenia, something which vessels often did to market their speed in order to draw passengers.
Henry Clay collided with Armenia at one point, and both ships separated and resumed their heading downriver, but a fire erupted on board Henry Clay as she passed Yonkers. The pilot turned the ship toward the eastern shore of the Hudson River and she careened into the riverbank, enabling a number of people near the bow to leap to safety. More than 80 of the nearly 500 people on board, including Bailey’s wife and daughter, nonetheless perished in the conflagration, though he and his son survived. A number of prominent socialites died and hundreds of people along the shore witnessed the disaster, and critics pressured Congress to enact stronger legislation to protect passengers traveling on board these ships. Congress correspondingly passed the Steamboat Act of 1852 on 30 May of that year, which emphasized more rigorous regulations for operating steamboats, their inspections, and licensing of pilots and engineers.
Bailey mourned the loss of his wife and daughter and had her interred in the Military Academy Post Cemetery. He resolutely continued his work, became a naturalist and pioneer microscopist, and studied offshore sediments for the Coast Survey, as well as for Matthew F. Maury of the Naval Observatory. Bailey died at West Point on 26 February 1857, and was buried at the Military Academy Post Cemetery.
I
(Schooner: length 70'; beam 20'; draft 2'2"; class Bailey)
The first Bailey, a Coast Survey schooner also sometimes listed as J.W. Bailey, was built in 1856 and served the survey until just after the outbreak of the American Civil War. Early in the fighting, Cmdr. James H. Ward led a Union flotilla -- subsequently named the Potomac Flotilla -- that attempted to disrupt smugglers slipping supplies across the Potomac River from Maryland to Confederate troops in Virginia. Ward broke his pennant in steamer Thomas Freeborn, which mounted one long and one light 32-pounder, and operated with a number of other ships including steamers Reliance and Resolute, Acting Master’s Mate William Budd, each of which carried a single 24-pound howitzer.
The ships patrolled key areas in their endeavors to curtail the smuggling and Coast Survey schooner Dana, Acting Master’s Mate Robert B. Ely, watched the area off Nanjemoy Creek and Port Tobacco, Md. Cmdr. Stephen C. Rowan, who commanded screw sloop-of-war Pawnee, granted Henry Knight, the master of shallop H. Day, a pass to fish off Nanjemoy Creek on 16 June. Rowan’s pass forbade Knight to “communicate with Virginia shore on pain of seizure and confiscation. Not to be underway at night.” The following day, however, Union ships discovered H. Day “under suspicious circumstances” below Nanjemoy and opposite Mathias Point, Va., and promptly seized her. Ward then appropriated H. Day as a tender for Dana, and used her to supplement the other vessels to support the flotilla’s operations. Whenever possible, they transferred coal from government steamers along the river, an average of 40 or 50 tons per tender, which, in Dana’s case, enabled the schooner to conduct vigilant patrols of some of the shallow inlets along the Potomac. Ward reported to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles on 20 June that “the secession feeling is largely demonstrative” at Port Tobacco and Leonardtown, Md., and he deployed Coast Survey schooner Howell Cobb, Acting Master’s Mate Frank, off Breton Bay in order to break-up the smuggling from those areas to Virginia. Bailey, Acting Master’s Mate James L. Gray, worked with the ships off these areas, as well as off St. Mary’s River. During these patrols on the 27th, a Confederate sharpshooter killed Ward during a battle at Mathias Point, giving him the sad distinction of the first Union naval officer to fall in the war.
In December 1861, Bailey rescued five “contraband” African Americans, men who had escaped from their Confederate owners near Lower Machodoc, Va.: Henry Lewis, who had been held by a doctor named Brown; Parker Smith, who had escaped from a Mr. Dailey of Kinsale; Frederick Johnson and Robert Mealy, who had been held by a man ironically named Bailey; and John Smith. The men had seen Southerners hauling a small steamboat from the Rappahannock River to Machodoc Creek, and observed that she mounted a small gun forward and carried an estimated 100 muskets. They also reported a number of enemy troops encamped nearby, which they estimated at nearly 500 soldiers with four pieces of artillery.
Acting Master’s Mate William T. Street subsequently relieved Ely and received a warning that the Confederates intended to use their vessel to attack Union ships. Street therefore patrolled the area and, on 10 December 1861, he took Dana from Blakistone Island to search the streams between Breton Bay and Piney Island. Street received information that led him to believe that smugglers worked the area, and anchored Dana off Poplar Hill Creek. The crew lowered the ship’s boat and unsuccessfully searched that inlet, as well as one at Bley Creek. The wind died and Dana hove to, but at 8:00 p.m. a lookout sighted a white light that Street surmised to be Bailey and dispatched her boat. The wind rose and the stranger revealed herself as Bailey and closed and anchored nearby. Street and Gray discussed the situation, and resolved to anchor at the mouth of Floods Creek, which they reached at about midnight, and to set out the following morning to reconnoiter the area.
Each of the ships lowered a boat after sunrise and as they touched the shore, an African American slave named John Hanson, who was held by a Mr. Able, warned them that a pair of boats, belonging to smugglers T.W. Gough and a man he identified as Mr. Matingly, had slipped over to Virginia on the night of the 6th, rowed by six slaves: William Dims, who was held by Gough; and Wat Barnes, John Bradmar, Ned Downs, John Gordon, and Ned Owens. The smugglers surreptitiously muffled their oars with sheepskins and hid the boats up the creek, laying their oars aside in the brush. The landing party seized the boats, discovered the oars, and brought them all back to the ships. During subsequent patrols the Coast Survey crews learned that a number of smugglers worked the operation, including men by the names of John Blackiston [Blakistone?] Jr., Mr. Dills, N. Ford, Mr. Moore, Mr. Phinick, and George Simms and his (unnamed brother). They thus continued their patrols in the area for some time afterward.
Bailey continued her operations during the following years and in 1864, Assistant Charles O. Boutelle led surveying steamer Vixen, Acting Master Robert Platt, Bailey, and Caswell, another schooner, in charge of Master William H. Dennis, and further developed the channels leading into Charleston, S.C. Assistant W.S. Edwards took part in the endeavors during part of the season, reset the buoys, and prepared new sailing directions. Under Edward’s direction, Sub-Assistant Webber sounded Folly River and Lighthouse Inlet; and the service continued sounding the hydrography of Wassaw Sound, Ga., and made a resurvey of the bar and channel of the St. Johns River to a point near Mayport Mills, Fla. As heretofore, his party in Vixen, performed the pilot service required for the vessels of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, Rear Adm. John A. Dahlgren in command, who had relieved Rear Adm. Samuel F. Du Pont on 6 July 1863.
Following the war, Bailey resumed her peacetime surveying work and Sub-Assistant R.E. Halter used Bailey’s boats to sound Tenant’s harbor and the western entrance to Penobscot Bay, between Buckley’s Island and the mainland, Maine (19 August–31 October 1866). The men connected throughout with the hydrography outside, which had been performed in a previous season. J.B. Adamson and Eugen Elliott aided them, but Adamson fell ill before they completed the soundings and F.W. Perkins relieved him and continued the work. Coast Survey steam launch Barataria ran the principal soundings, and the expedition put up a total of 47 signals, and recorded an aggregate of nearly 30,000 casts of the lead line, including supplementary soundings in the immediate vicinity of the islands that lie off the entrance to George’s River.
Sub-Assistance Cleveland Rockwell led a party in Bailey that surveyed the topography of St. Catherine’s Sound, Ga., the next year (6 March–22 May 1867), working principally on the island of that name, and tracing the shores of Walburg Creek, and part of North Newport River. Sub-Assistant J.A. Sullivan relieved Rockwell on 6 April, and continued the field-work completed the plane-table sheet to join the survey of Sapelo Sound, and then extended the survey northward to include the North Newport River. Bailey came about in May and then made for Portland, Maine.
Halter there used Bailey and steam launch Sagadahoc to sound the Friendship River, and, in connection with that work, to extend the hydrography of the Medomak River southward to Cranberry Island (12 July–4 November 1867). In addition, his expedition sounded John’s Bay, connecting at Pemaquid Point Light with hydrography of Muscongus Bay. Foul weather slammed into the party, however, and prevented them from sounding a part of the approach to the Medomak. Bailey ran 751 miles during these latter soundings in New England waters, and the surveyors measured 6,600 angles and cast the lead 53,000 times.
The Coast Survey disposed of Bailey in 1873.
Mark L. Evans
Updated, Robert J. Cressman
3 November 2021
