A naval crew was put aboard as soon as the quarters were ready. For the most part they were eager and youthful volunteers who had chosen the Navy because it seemed to promise speedier action than the Army. They had lost no time in enlisting, many of them preferring the humble station of a bluejacket to the delay incident to studying for a commission at Plattsburg. The lack of seafaring experience was atoned for by unbounded zeal and enthusiasm. Their sublime ignorance was unclouded by doubts. They yearned to fight German submarines and expected to find them. It was a democracy of the forecastle in which social distinctions were thrown overboard as so much rubbish. The yachts recruited many of their men from the universities, from offices in Wall Street and Broadway, and as sweating “gobs” with blistered palms they rubbed elbows or bunked with youngsters of all sorts and were proud of it. Princeton was strong aboard the _Corsair_, and more than a dozen of her sons, as a stentorian glee club, enlivened the Bay of Biscay with praise of Old Nassau. The older officers of the regular service disliked this new word “gob” as undignified and untraditional, but the Reserve Force adopted it with pride as the badge of their high-hearted fraternity. [Illustration: COMMANDER THEODORE A. KITTINGER, U.S.N., COMMANDING U.S.S. CORSAIR] The _Corsair_ was fortunate in the officers assigned for the hazardous employments of the war zone. Lieutenant Commander Theodore A. Kittinger, U.S.N., was in command of the yacht, having been transferred from the destroyer _Cushing_ which had taken part in the long and arduous training that had whetted the flotilla personnel to a fine edge. The service record of Commander Kittinger helps one to realize how varied is the experience and how rigorous the training of a naval officer, even in time of peace. Graduated from Annapolis in 1901, he served first in the battleship _Alabama_, of the North Atlantic Squadron, as junior watch and division officer, on deck and in the engine-room. As an ensign he was in the converted yacht _Vixen_ in 1903 when she cruised in Caribbean waters and kept an eye on the attempt of the former Kaiser to meddle in the affairs of Venezuela. Then shifted to the China station, the youthful officer was in the monitor _Monadnock_ and the cruiser _New Orleans_ during the anti-foreign riots and the Russo-Japanese War.