To see that this was done on schedule time we received orders by wireless to sail on the 14th to Mexico. The _North Atlantic Fleet_ was formed of some thirty-six warships, and these were manned by no less than 15,000 blue jackets and marines. We were soon heading south. Talk about cleaning up Mexico! Why, we had a fleet that could have cleaned up the world, and a mighty pretty sight did she make, too. When we got there the fleet was split up into two squadrons, one going to Tampico and the other, to which the _Alabama_ belonged, going to Vera Cruz, the Atlantic port nearest to Mexico City. From what I gathered from the officers the purpose of President Wilson was not to make war on poor old war-ridden, moth-eaten Mexico, but simply to blockade the ports of Tampico and Vera Cruz and take over their customs houses until such time as Huerta could see the necessity of ordering the Commander of the Mexican Army to salute. Two days later when we were steaming at full speed for Mexican waters, I caught the message that Huerta had again agreed to salute and since he knew we were coming I believed that he would do it this time sure and that our next orders would be to steam to northern waters. I was out of luck, that’s all. But we kept right on going just the same. What Huerta really said was that if his Army fired the salute it would be right, he thought, for our Navy to salute in turn. Huerta was informed that this was always the custom when salutes of this kind were fired and that our Navy would, of course, return it. We learned by wireless the next day that Huerta had again flopped over and he now wanted the salute to be fired gun for gun, that is, his army would fire the first gun, then our fleet would fire the next one and so on. Not only this but he wanted President Wilson to sign some kind of a paper and tied the whole proceedings in a hard knot with a lot of other strings. These conditions which Huerta wanted to impose President Wilson would not agree to and there was nothing else left for him to do but to back the ultimatum on the day he said he would. On the way down I had plenty of time to look over the _Alabama_, to get acquainted with the men and to get my bearings. I can’t tell you here the little things that happened on board but I must say a word about the _Alabama_. The battleship, in her day, was the giant of all the sea-fighting craft and her _armor_, that is, the steel covering that protects her, is a great piece of work. First of all the whole main deck is made of thick sheets of steel called _armor plate_ and this covers the ship from her stem to stern-post just above the water line.