The first USS Annapolis (PG-10/IX-1) was a gunboat in the United States Navy. She was named for Annapolis, Maryland.
Annapolis was laid down on 18 April 1896 at Elizabethport, New Jersey, by Lewis Nixon and his shipyard superintendent, Arthur Leopold Busch; launched on 23 December 1896; sponsored by Ms. Georgia Porter, the daughter of Captain Theodoris Porter; and commissioned at New York on 20 July 1897, Commander John J. Hunker in command.
Service history
Spanish–American War
Following commissioning, the gunboat operated along the east coast and in the Caribbean Sea engaged in training missions. In March 1898, she was assigned to the North Atlantic Fleet. By April, the U.S. was on the verge of war with Spain over conditions in Cuba. On 18 April, the warship departed New York on her way to the Florida coast. She arrived at Key West on the 25th, the day on which President William McKinley signed a joint resolution of Congress that formalized the fact that a state of war had existed between the U.S. and Spain since the 21st. She made a round-trip voyage from Key West to Port Tampa and back before joining the blockade off Havana on 2 May. She remained there for 19 days. On 8 May, she assisted in capturing the Spanish sailing vessel Santiago Apostol, bound from Yucatan to Havana with a cargo of fish.
The remainder of that tour passed more or less routinely, and Annapolis retired from Cuban waters on 21 May. She spent eight days at Key West and two weeks at Port Tampa before rejoining the blockade at Daiquiri on 22 June. The following day, the gunboat moved to Guantánamo Bay. On 29 June, while she was on station at Guantánamo Bay with the torpedo boat and cruiser , Annapolis she assisted those ships in the capture of the British steamer Adula. On 13 July, she left the Guantánamo Bay area to make a reconnaissance visit to Baracoa on Cuba's northeastern coast. While at Baracoa on the 15th, she conferred with a group of friendly Cubans and engaged in a brief gun duel with an enemy shore battery near the eastern end of the town. She departed Baracoa that same day and resumed duty at Guantánamo Bay on the 16th.
On the 18th, she received orders to help capture Nipe Bay located about up the northeastern coast from Baracoa. Following , , and into the bay on the 21st, Annapolis successfully passed through a known minefield. Inside, the four American ships discovered the lying at anchor inside the bay. After a brisk exchange of fire, the Americans bested the Spanish warship in the resulting Battle of Nipe Bay, and she began to sink. Annapolis and the three other ships set about the tasks of completing the capture of the Nipe Bay littoral and removing the mines from the bay itself. The gunboat departed Nipe Bay on 22 July and set a course for Puerto Rico where she assisted the Army in the capture of the city of Ponce on the 30th. For the remainder of the war, she served at Puerto Rico, making one voyage from that island to St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies at the end of the first week in August just before the armistice of 12 August.
Post-war deployment
On 24 August, she departed Puerto Rico and proceeded—via Key West—to the New England coast where she visited Newport, Rhode Island; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and New York City. Late in October, the gunboat headed back to the West Indies where she cruised for the next six months. Annapolis returned to the New England coast late in April 1899 and operated along the eastern seaboard for the next four months. On 5 September, she was placed out of commission at Norfolk, Virginia.
She was recommissioned on 14 November 1900, Lieutenant Commander Karl Rohrer in command. At the end of December 1900, she departed Hampton Roads, bound for the Far East. Steaming via the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal, and the Indian Ocean, the warship arrived at Cavite in the Philippines on 24 April 1901. She remained in the Far East for the next three years. For the most part, the Philippine Islands constituted her sphere of operations. She conducted patrols, carried passengers and mail among the islands, and supported the Army during the first stage of the Philippine–American War. She also participated extensively in the hydrographic surveys made of the islands.
In the summer and fall of 1903, she joined American's Far Eastern fleet for a cruise to Chinese and Japanese waters. During that voyage, she visited Chefoo and Shanghai in China, Kobe and Yokohama in Japan and Tamsui on the island of Formosa before returning to Cavite on 19 November.