Down Riverside Drive and for four miles in the heart of the city the battalion marched with fixed bayonets. It paraded between solid masses of cheering citizens and almost solid walls of flags and decorations. At every halt the men were refreshed with fruit, coffee or drinkables, sandwiches and salads or cigars, and presented with flowers and souvenirs. At one halt on aristocratic Fifth Avenue a shower of silk college sofa cushions came down from window seats and a Princeton cushion was impaled on the historian’s bayonet.
At the conclusion of the parade many of the division repaired to restaurants near Madison Square and Union Square. Dozens of them found, when they stepped to the cashiers’ coops to liquidate, that unknown civilians had obtained their checks and paid the bills. A man in a sailor uniform in New York City that September afternoon found it no easy task to spend money. Nothing was too good for the bluejackets.
It is to be recorded that Lieutenant Cuntz, Gunner’s Mate Huntington, Coxswain Chapin and Seamen Noble and Nutter preceded the battalion to New York. When the Shinnecock failed to appear, they annexed three stray regulars from the U. S. S. Texas, and assumed an advanced place in the column. In one of the spectators’ stands certain individuals conceived the notion that the eight were Hobson and the Merrimac survivors. In a few moments the word was passed over the stand and the crowd was on its feet in a wild burst of applause.
While Dewey Day experiences were still being talked over, arrangements were quietly made for a presentation to the first commanding officer, Mr. Parker, who was lured to Turnerbund Hall to receive from the command a gold watch with chain and fob, the chain in the semblance of a stud-link ship’s cable and the fob a division pin mounted on a locket.
More of the tang of salt air and of the romance of the ocean came one evening in the next drill season when the division mustered in the parlor to listen to a talk by Professor Henry Ferguson of Trinity College, an honorary member, who told a thrilling tale of shipwreck in the mid-Pacific. Professor Ferguson recited the story of the Hornet, a clipper which sailed from New York in 1866 for San Francisco. When the ship was several hundred miles off the Galapagos fire obliged the crew to take to the three boats, which were provisioned for ten days. It was decided to head for the north, to keep in the track of San Francisco vessels. Merchantmen in those days adhered to Maury’s sailing directions and it was reasoned that chances would be better in the sea highway than in attempting to reach land. By day the heat was nearly intolerable. Nights were treacherous as they induced squalls of the vindictively sudden nature peculiar to those Equatorial waters. Day after day wore by with an unbroken horizon. Finally the boats crawled up into the trade winds. It was decided to separate the boats to increase the chance of finding aid. For twenty-five days the sailors had fought wind, sun, and water and now they were in danger of fighting starvation, the ten days’ provisions, which had been distributed into one-third allowances, being nearly exhausted. The remaining provisions were in turn re-divided, but were gone in a fortnight. The men surviving sought nourishment in the chewing of leather and moist clothing. On the point of utter exhaustion they made a landfall, which proved to be Hawaii, and were rescued by a crew from a coasting station. They had spent forty-three days in an open boat and had traveled nearly three thousand miles.