Great White Fleet - Fleet Composition

Fleet Composition

The fourteen-month long voyage was a grand pageant of American seapower. The squadrons were manned by 14,000 sailors. They covered some 43,000 nautical miles (80,000 km) and made twenty port calls on six continents. The fleet was impressive, especially as a demonstration of American industrial prowess (all eighteen ships had been constructed since the Spanish-American War), but already the battleships represented the suddenly outdated 'pre-dreadnought' type of capital ship, as the first battleships of the revolutionary Dreadnought class had just entered service, and the U.S. Navy's first dreadnought, South Carolina, was already fitting out. The two oldest ships in the fleet, Kearsarge and Kentucky, were already obsolete and unfit for battle; two others, Maine and Alabama, had to be detached at San Francisco, California because of mechanical troubles and were replaced by the Nebraska and the Wisconsin. (After repairs, Alabama and Maine completed their "own, more direct, circumnavigation of the globe" via Honolulu, Guam, Manila, Singapore, Colombo, Suez, Naples, Gibraltar, the Azores, and finally back to the United States, arriving on 20 October 1908 long before the remainder of the fleet, which had taken a more circuitous route.)

The battleships were accompanied during the first leg of their voyage by a "Torpedo Flotilla" of six early destroyers, as well as by several auxiliary ships. The destroyers and their tender did not actually steam in company with the battleships, but followed their own itinerary from Hampton Roads, Virginia to San Francisco, California.