In the cool, clear evening of January 23, 1870, USS Oneida bobbed gently in the rolling swell inside of Yokohama Bay. Her less than graceful lines earned her the sobriquet “The Ugly Duckling” and she deserved it. She lacked berths for the enlisted men, and many of them spent their nights in the open air, sheltered only by the boom cover. They may have preferred sleeping in outside; the berth deck also housed the galley, and smoke from the cooking fires blew back into the men’s quarters where it mixed with the smell of a hundred unwashed bodies.
Many of the crew had been aboard Oneida for three years, and had grown to love the cramped vessel. Dr. Edward Frothingham signed on in January 1867 as a Surgeon’s Assistant. Only 27 when he came aboard, Frothingham had already served with the 44th New York Regiment in the Peninsular Campaign, transferred to the Medical Corps for the duration of the Civil War, entered Columbia University Medical School, earned his medical certificate, and applied for a position in the Navy; he alone among the seventeen applicants passed the Navy’s entrance examination. As a man of letters, he supplemented his meager Navy pay by agreeing to write columns to the New York Times each time Oneida docked.
Oneida spent three years wandering from one port to another, and Frothingham enjoyed himself capitally. He toured the Cape Verde Islands, and visited the American cemetery there; an American midshipman who’d lost his life to fever years before was its only inhabitant. Under the lights of a full Rio de Janeiro moon, he’d danced with dark skinned Portuguese girls at a ball thrown by Brazilian Emperor Pedro II in honor of the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Alfred.
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