Volume 62, Number 1 (2009) Winter

The United States Fleet in the Strait of Magellan on 5 February 1908, by Henry Reuterdahl (1871–1925), oil-on-canvas painting. This cover image completes our centennial observance of the world cruise of the U.S. Navy’s “Great White Fleet,” which ended in early 1909. We marked the hundredth anniversary of its December 1907 departure with Professor James R. Holmes’s “’A Striking Thing’: Leadership, Strategic Communications, and Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet,” in our Winter 2008 issue (which actually appeared in late 2007).

Henry Reuterdahl, born in Sweden, was a war correspondent and artist with Collier’s magazine during the Spanish-American War. Chosen to accompany the Great White Fleet as correspondent, he sailed in the battleship USS Minnesota from Hampton Roads to San Francisco. Reuterdahl painted this view in 1910 for Truman H. Newberry, who had served under President Theodore Roosevelt as Secretary of the Navy in 1908–1909. Newberry’s grandson presented the painting to the Hope Club, which loaned it to the Naval War College Museum for its “Great White Fleet” exhibit between January and April 2008