CHARLES A. E. KING, LT, USN
Charles King '80
Charles Alfred King was admitted to the Naval Academy from Maryland on September 14, 1876 at age 18 years 1 months.
Photographs
Photograph from the collection of the Nimitz Library at the US Naval Academy.
Loss
Charles died on December 25, 1900 of "Bright's disease" while aboard U.S.S. Solace, near Hong Kong. He had been sick prior to his death; he "was recently ordered to sea against his wishes and those of his friends, who believed him too ill for active service…"
Other Information
From researcher Kathy Franz:
Charles married Minnie Broumel at Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church in New York City on October 27, 1883. Minnie died on February 27, 1927, in Manhattan and was buried in Greenmount Cemetery.
Charles' father James was a well-known Baltimore printer and one time foreman of The Sun Job Printing Office. His mother was Charlotte. His uncles were Andrew J. King, clerk to the mayor, and Judge William J. King of the Appeal Tax Court.
Charles authored “The Mate’s Secret” which was published on September 5, 1898, in The Baltimore Sun. It was published earlier in the New York Herald:
Engineer Charles A. E. King, of the United States Navy, writes to the New York Herald as follows: Surveying a tropical ocean in June in a vessel of the old navy, always under steam, is not the lightest duty that naval men are called upon to perform, so it is little wonder that when the sloop of war Alert reached Yokohama after a long tour of this service, several of her officers were down with sickness. So their places were filled by others, drawn from the ships of the squadron, provisions laid in and preparations made to return south to the scene of her labors, the survey of Britomart Reef.
This reef, reported and placed upon the charts long ago, had been the terror of merchant skippers for years. It lay in the Pacific ocean, somewhere between the Bonin Island and the Ladrones. Its exact location was in doubt.
There was great bustle of preparation on board the stanch little ship as stores and coal were taken on board, and much running about of stewards and caterers of messes to see that the needs of the inner man would be met during the hot and tedious cruise ahead.
The caterer of the junior officers’ mess had told his messmates that a pleasant surprise awaited them when Guam should be reached, for that island over which our flag now flies, was to be our furthest stopping place, and there under the “blood and gold” of Spain we were to learn the secret of all his smiles and pleasantries. So we cheerfully chipped in our hard-earned silver dollars for mess stores which Uncle Sam, with unappreciative acuteness, thinks his officers better able to buy then himself.
Off For Guam.
And so we made ready to sail one night and stood by to “up anchor” at daybreak, when frosty Fuji Yama should show his lofty head above the mists of morning.The junior officers’ quarters were provided with four bunks and ten officers. As ten into four, you can’t, somebody, in fact, almost everybody, would be without a bunk. So three swung in hammocks beneath a hatch that formed a target for the skillful water throwers when working above decks in the morning. One slept on the mess table and one under it. The tenth man, the caterer, a mate of long experience and beard, slept nowhere that we could ever learn, or if he had a sleeping place he guarded that secret as carefully as the one he was to share with us at Guam.
We had turned in for our last restless night at Yokohama when the ship shook from stem to stern. The small cadet sang out, “What’s that?” The long cadet replied, “The mate has dropped his secret,” and crawled from his place beneath the table.
Everybody jumped to the deck to find the bay a mass of turbulent waves that rocked the ship violently for a moment, and then the water settled down to its usual placidity. The mate appeared, and, with his usual smile, said, “Earthquake.” Hundreds lost their lives on the shores of the bay that night, but we never knew it until we came back from Guam.
We sailed away in the morning, and, sounding as we went, left Fatsizio, the Japanese penal colony for women, on our starboard hand and shortly came to the Bonin Islands.
Here an anchorage was found in a deep pit in the many colored coral to which a channel leads, like a bridle path through a forest. When the sun was gone the call and cry of turtles, cooped in pens by the islanders for export, made night hideous.
Weird Fourth of July.
We sailed away one day, bound south, and came at dusk on July 4 to Farrallon de Paharos. This volcanic cone rises in graceful swoops from the water and is cleft from the summit to base with great fissures, which look into the molten earth beneath and from which the liquid fire ever bubbles and rolls until, finding the water far below, it sends clouds of steam high into the air. We left this place of sulphurous fumes when the tropical night had closed upon us and looked in awe at this fitting Fourth of July display, as the Alert gradually crept into the darkness.We worked to the southward, buoyed up by thoughts of Guam and the mate’s secret that we should learn there. About this time canned peaches came to be plentiful on the mess table, so that we had them stewed for breakfast, cold for tiffin and baked into pies for dinner. In fact, canned peaches soon grew to be our principle diet, until we tore our hair and hurled abusive epithets at the smiling mate, our caterer. His appetite for peaches never palled, and for all abuse he would only say: “Wait until we get to Guam,” and nod as if to say, “When Guam is reached how remorseful you will all be for this treatment of me.”
All things come to an end at last, and one night the navigator told us we would see the shores of Guam at sunrise in the morning. What a joyful prospect it was to know that we would touch the green earth once more and learn the mate’s tantalizing secret.
Away From Guam!
The ocean and sky grew ugly that night, and by 10 o’clock we were pitching and tossing in a fearful sea that threatened to lay us on our beam ends. The heat was terrific, for it was a “black storm,” and there was not a breath of wind, and one poor chap, a fireman, crazed with heat and work, rushed up from below and threw himself into the inky waters. Away went the lifeboat, and into it a fearless crew, but we never saw the man again, and it was with the greatest difficulty that we recovered the boat’s crew after two hours of hard battling with the waves.We were in the dead centre of a whirling storm, and the greatest intensity and danger seemed to lie toward our haven – Guam. The skipper, one of the best that ever trod a quarterdeck, was a wise man, and gave orders to work about slowly and steam easily – away from Guam! All night we labored to save the ship, and when at dawn the wind burst upon us we were ready to make a brave struggle for life. And so we pulled through at last, many, many miles to the north of Guam, and when the sea went down no order came to turn to the southward again.
We pushed along to the north hour after hour, and as the time went by the mate’s smiling face grew dark and gloomy, melancholy and sad, and we pined for the secret we were to have known in Guam.
Still the canned peaches fed our hungry mouths at every meal; peaches morning, noon and night, until our patience was utterly exhausted, and we resolved to wreak vengeance on the mate and wring from him his secret.
We put our heads together one day at tiffin and refused to eat the peaches, and demanded to know with one voice why we had nothing but peaches, and what was the gladsome secret that we would have had revealed has the skipper taken us to Guam.
The mate implored: we insisted, until at last, with tearful face and voice, he told us this tale of woe: “You see,” he said, in deep funereal voice, “it was this way. I had heard that neither the Spaniards nor the natives of Guam had ever tasted the sweetness of canned peaches, and so I thought that if I bought a lot of it and took it with us we could sell the stuff for its weight in Spanish pesetas at the island and make ourselves a little fortune. So” (and here he shrunk from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde) “I put all the mess money in canned peaches – and we didn’t go to Guam – and, oh, Lord! There is nothing left to eat but canned peaches.”
The secret was told at last, and the silence that ensued was broken by the small cadet as he hurled a plate at the China boy who just then appeared bearing a can of peaches.
Ominous mutterings and savage looks thereafter greeted each appearance of the ruined speculator who had staked his all (and ours) on peaches and had lost.
Yokohama and a real dinner were many days away, but both were reached at last, and as we pledged each other in mellow wine at the Union Club the night of our arrival, our hearts were softened, and we had even a kind thought of the wretched mate and his most disastrous secret.
Time has slipped away since then, but not one of the junior officers of the Alert can pass to this day a grocer’s shop without an inward shudder at the thought that perhaps behind the polished glass of the window there may lurk a can of peaches of the brand that was to make our fortune when the sloop of war Alert dropped anchor off the Spanish Isle of Guam.
He is buried in the Naval Academy Cemetery, and was survived by his wife.
Memorial Hall Error
Illness is not a criteria for inclusion in Memorial Hall.
Charles is one of 4 members of the Class of 1880 on Virtual Memorial Hall.
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