The remainder of the fleet, as finally made up, consisted of six sloops-of-war, sixteen gunboats, and five other vessels, besides transports carrying fifteen thousand troops commanded by Gen. B. F. Butler. The whole number of guns was over two hundred. The flagship _Hartford_ was a wooden steam sloop-of-war, one thousand tons' burden, with a length of two hundred and twenty-five feet, and a breadth of forty-four feet. She carried twenty-two nine-inch guns, two twenty-pounder Parrott guns, and a rifled gun on the forecastle, while her fore and main tops were furnished with howitzers and surrounded with boiler iron to protect the gunners. The _Brooklyn_, _Richmond_, _Pensacola_, _Portsmouth_, and _Oneida_ were similar to the _Hartford_. The _Colorado_ was larger. The _Mississippi_ was a large side-wheel steamer. This was the most powerful expedition that had ever sailed under the American flag, and the man that was chosen to command it, Capt. David G. Farragut, was as unknown to the public as Ulysses S. Grant had been. But he was not unknown to his fellow-officers. Farragut was now sixty years of age, being one of the oldest men that took part in the war, and he had been in the navy half a century. He sailed the Pacific with Commodore Porter years before Grant and Sherman were born, and participated in the bloody encounter of the _Essex_ and _Phoebe_ in the harbor of Valparaiso. He was {91} especially familiar with the Gulf of Mexico, and had pursued pirates through its waters and hunted and fought them on its islands. There was nothing to be done on shipboard that he could not do to perfection, and he could have filled the place of any man in the fleet--except perhaps the surgeon's. He was born in Tennessee, and married twice in Virginia; and if there had been a peaceable separation he would probably have made his home in the South. He was at Norfolk, waiting orders, when Virginia seceded, but he considered that his first duty was to the National Government, which had educated him for its service and given him rank and employment. When he said that "Virginia had been dragooned out of the Union," and that he thought the President was justified in calling for troops after the firing on Sumter, he was told by his angry neighbors that a person holding such sentiments could not live in Norfolk. "Very well, then," said he, "I can live somewhere else." So he made his way North with his little family, and informed the Government that he was ready and anxious for any service that might be assigned to him.