After a cruise in South American waters in the old frigate _Congress_, Mahan at once received his commission as lieutenant, August 31, 1861, and soon afterward an appointment as second in command of the steam corvette _Pocahontas_, then in the Potomac flotilla. It illustrates the rapid promotion of those war-time days that each member of his class received similar advancement in the first year of the war. In the _Pocahontas_ he came under fire in the attack on Port Royal, and afterward spent many weary months in blockade duty, first in the _Pocahontas_ off the south Atlantic coast, and later in the _Seminole_ off Sabine Pass, Texas. This latter station, Mahan remarks, “was a jumping-off place, the end of nowhere.” “Day after day we lay inactive—roll, roll.” The monotony was broken by a pleasant eight months at the Naval Academy in Newport and a “practice cruise” to England in the _Macedonian_; and in the last year of the war he saw more varied service on the staff of Rear Admiral Dahlgren, again on the Atlantic coast blockade. Commissioned lieutenant commander in 1865, Mahan passed the ensuing twenty years in the customary routine of alternate sea and shore duty. In 1867–1869, a long cruise in the steam frigate _Iroquois_ to Japan, via Guadeloupe, Rio, Cape Town, Madagascar, Aden, and Bombay, gave opportunity, unusual even in the navy, to see the world, and brought him to Kobe in time to witness the opening of new treaty ports and the last days of medieval Japan. In 1885, when he had reached the rank of captain and was forty-five years of age, he had yet had little opportunity to display the distinctive talents which were to win him permanent fame. Partly, perhaps, in consequence of a book by his pen entitled “The Gulf and Inland Waters” and published two years before, but more likely as a result of the shrewd estimate which naval officers form regarding their fellows in the service, he was requested at this time to give a series of lectures on naval history and tactics at the Naval War College, then just established at Newport, Rhode Island. His acceptance of this duty marks a turning point in his career. The call reached him in the _Wachusett_ off the west coast of South America. It was nearly two years later, in August, 1886, when he took up his residence at the college, succeeding Rear Admiral Luce as president. A change of political administration in the meantime had brought about a less favorable policy toward this new departure in naval education, with the result that, to quote Mahan again, the college “was reefed close down, looking out for squalls at any moment from any quarter,” for the next four or five years. It bears evidence to his tact and tenacity, and it was not the least of his accomplishments for the navy, that he piloted the institution safely through this crucial period, with scant appropriations or none at all, in the face of a hostile Secretary of the Navy and a lukewarm service.