Chatham’s Admiral: Charles H. Rockwell, 1840 1908

After retiring from the United States Navy in 1902, Rear Admiral Charles Rockwell settled at his desk in The Moorings, his longtime home in Chatham, on Cape Cod. There, he set out to write a memoir titled The Autobiography of a Seaman. For a man who had left school at thirteen to go to sea, he was quite a good writer, and in almost 50 years on the world’s oceans, he had certainly come up against enough experiences to write about…. On an early page I wanted to explain why the admiral’s father, a Congregational minister, was so convinced that his son should not go to sea as a young teenager. Before stepping into the pulpit of a church in Chatham, the preacher had been a chaplain aboard a U. S. Navy frigate. He had seen the rawest side of navy life. This seemed important, so we located the 1842 book that the Rev. Mr. Rockwell wrote about his own experiences at sea. Later in these chapters, I decided to explain more fully about the deplorable state of the U. S. Navy in the years right after the Civil War. It also meant transfusing more detail on America’s commitment to showing the flag around the world and what the raucous, unbridled life was like in the territory of Alaska when Rockwell arrived in 1879 to help set up a navy-enforced government.