Journeys of the U.S.S. Mercury

The Cross-Atlantic Journeys of the U.S.S. Mercury

One of my favorite things about collecting, buying and selling antique paper is the thrill of a truly great find. Too often, antique paper is thrown away by people who have no idea about its historical and monetary value. Fortunately, many items are rescued by those with a keen eye. When I saw this album online, I was skeptical because of the scant photos provided by the person listing it. They must have been in a hurry, because there were only a handful of blurry images. A gut feeling told me I should take a chance and buy the album, and so into my shopping cart it went. My instinct (full disclosure: my instinct is often wrong, just ask my wife about the piles of paper in my office) turned out to be spot on, and I was astounded when I opened the package to find an album stuffed full of over 100 photo postcards from the U.S.S. Mercury. Many are typical photos of distant boats, but some were truly incredible, a real glimpse into what it was like to be a sailor in a convoy crossing the Atlantic during World War One. 

This is most likely the owner of the album, looks like he made it through World War One unscathed!

 The ship was originally the Barbarossa, a German cruise ship, but was seized by the US Navy when we entered the war in 1917. In typical American fashion, the first thing we did was load it with guns. Sailors passed the time with boxing matches and games of tug-of-war on the deck.

 The German crew tried to sabotage the engines before the ship was seized, and repairs took quite a while.

Incredible view of soldiers loading onto the ship for one of its seven wartime journeys from the United States to Europe.

 Despite attempts to identify which group of African-American soldiers this is, I was unsuccessful. This is certainly a rare photo, though, and one of the best in the album. These troops were likely returning from service in France. America continued to struggle with racism during World War One, in fact there were race riots in many U.S, cities in 1919 as whites grew fearful that black soldiers returning home would demand equality.

Many of the photos don't have a caption, and I am still doing more research to try to better explain the photos, but this appears to be a submarine at the surface.

Returning home from one of many voyages across the Atlantic.

 Soldiers often collected postcards from the places they spent time on leave. "How are you going to keep them down on the farm, now that they've seen Paris?"

Source: http://freepages.military.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cacunithistories/USS_Mercury.htm