He was perhaps the most celebrated naval historian of his era, an influential promoter of United States naval and commercial expansion during America's rise to world power in the late nineteenth century. As the author of numerous articles and books, including the landmark The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, Alfred Thayer Mahan was widely regarded as a brilliant naval theorist. From his writings, readers would never have guessed, however, that the renowned champion of the United States Navy hated the sea, and while an active-duty naval officer, lived in constant fear of ocean storms and colliding ships.

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Mahan's fear of accidents at sea was not unfounded. During a forty-year naval career that began as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1856, he was involved in numerous maritime mishaps. As a young first lieutenant in 1861, Mahan was named the executive officer of Captain Percival Drayton's 11-gun USS Pocahontas, and immediately set a dubious standard for his budding career. Captain Drayton was familiar with his new junior officer and noted in his diary that Mahan was 'young enough not to have too fixed ways and is quite clever.' Drayton, however, had never seen Mahan handle a ship.

On November 7, 1861, a small Union fleet assaulted Fort Walker at Port Royal, South Carolina, a Confederate stronghold on the edge of Drayton's hometown that was commanded, as chance would have it, by his brother Thomas. Delayed by a storm and mechanical problems, the Pocahontas arrived on the scene after the other ships had pounded the fort into submission. As his vessel moved through the water to join the rest of the flotilla in Port Royal Sound, Lieutenant Mahan became engrossed in observing his superior officer, who was deep in thought over the fate of his defeated brother inside the pulverized fort. Mahan enjoyed studying human emotions and expressions, but as the Pocahontas's deck officer that day, he should have been watching the direction in which his ship was drifting. Suddenly, the Pocahontas slammed into the anchored Union sloop Seminole. The vain executive officer deflected any blame for his slip-up by suggesting that the fault lay with his superior, Captain Drayton, who, he sarcastically noted, 'had done a good deal of staff duty; had less than the usual deck habit of his period.'

Following this incident, Mahan served ten months on blockade duty before the Navy Department assigned him to teach seamanship at the Naval Academy, which had been transferred from Annapolis, Maryland, to Newport, Rhode Island, as a wartime precaution. Mahan's effectiveness as a teacher of seamanship proved to be as questionable as his own ability to handle a ship; he later recalled the 'humiliation' and 'bad luck' of having to teach subjects such as knotting, which he considered unworthy of his time. Mahan, who rated himself intellectually superior to almost everyone, was not well liked by his students, and during his 13 months in Newport, he rapidly began to dislike his chosen profession.

Mahan reluctantly returned to sea duty and soon built upon the shaky record he had established while serving on the Pocahontas. His lack of confidence in handling ships was apparent from his reaction to a successful, routine maneuver in 1869. Returning from target practice in the Pacific Ocean aboard the USS Iroquois, Mahan managed to bring his ship back into Japan's Yokohama Harbor without hitting another vessel. 'Vanity excited,' he wrote of the experience on the Iroquois, which was, however, an exception, not the rule.

In 1874, Mahan ran the USS Wasp into a barge at the ship's anchorage in Montevideo, Uruguay. He also was responsible for 'doing slight damage' to an Argentinean warship during a storm off Buenos Aires on November 3, 1874. More embarrassing than these accidents, however, was the time that Mahan clumsily wedged the Wasp into a dry dock caisson at Montevideo, where it remained stuck for ten days. This absurd episode prompted Mahan-biographer Robert Seager II to comment that 'Alfred Thayer Mahan may be the only commanding officer in the history of the U.S. Navy rendered hors de combat by a dry dock.'

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