‘holland’ Amplifications

The caption to the photograph of the Holland on pages 42-43 of the April/May issue is slightly in error in stating that the two monitors in the background were first used in the 1870s. That is quite correct for the ship in the far background. She’s the Terror , laid down in about 1874 and completed in 1893. The nearer ship, however, was brand new.

She’s recognizable at a glance as one of the Arkansas class of monitors authorized in a fit of congressional panic on May 4, 1898. Masthead detail identifies her as the Florida , later renamed Tallahassee , built by Lewis Nixon of Elizabethport, New Jersey, and commissioned on June 18, 1903.

The ship in the photograph is obviously in commission—ensign flying, fire in the boilers, and crew’s laundry strung up to dry. Which means that the earliest possible date for the photograph is the summer of 1903.