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Updated: May 9, 2025
There he made good friends with his jailer, an old man-of-warsman named "Mike." He will be remembered by many naval officers who as midshipmen served on the Santee. McGiffin so won over Mike that when he left the ship he carried with him six charges of gunpowder.
Or, I would be willing to do without pay only to be kept on the register in my rank. "I will write more about this. Love to all." It is characteristic of McGiffin that in the very same letter in which he announces he has entered foreign service he plans to return to that of his own country. This hope never left him.
You find the same homesickness for the quarterdeck of an American man-of-war all through his later letters. At one time a bill to reinstate the midshipmen who had been cheated of their commissions was introduced into Congress. Of this McGiffin writes frequently as "our bill." "It may pass," he writes, "but I am tired hoping. I have hoped so long.
For instance, when McGiffin called for volunteers to extinguish a fire on the Chen-yuen's forecastle, swept by enemy shells, "men responded heartily and went to what seemed to them certain death."
McGiffin was not one of the chosen twelve. In the final examinations on the list he was well toward the tail. But without having studied many things, and without remembering the greater part of them, no one graduates from Annapolis, even last on the list; and with his one thousand dollars in cash, McGiffin had also this six years of education at what was then the best naval college in the world.
But in 1885 it was no such light undertaking, certainly not for a young man who had been brought up in the quiet atmosphere of an inland town, where generations of his family and other families had lived and intermarried, content with their surroundings. With very few of his thousand dollars left him, McGiffin arrived in February, 1885, in San Francisco.
On board the flagship Ting-yuen was Major von Hannekin, China's military adviser, and an ex-petty officer of the British navy named Nichols. Philo N. McGiffin, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, commanded the Chen-yuen. The Japanese advanced in column, or line ahead, in two divisions.
The Congressman liked the letter, and wrote Colonel McGiffin to ask if the application of his son had his approval. Colonel McGiffin was willing, and in 1877 his son received his commission as cadet midshipman. I knew McGiffin only as a boy with whom in vacation time I went coon hunting in the woods outside of Washington.
McGiffin won great praise for the military arrangements and disposition of his men, but, in the same report, he went on to describe how he armed them with a new gun known as Baines's Rhetoric and told of the havoc he wrought in the enemy's ranks when he fired these guns loaded with similes and metaphors and hyperboles.
He was not always on mischief bent. On one occasion, when the house of a professor caught fire, McGiffin ran into the flames and carried out two children, for which act he was commended by the Secretary of the Navy. It was an act of Congress that determined that the career of McGiffin should be that of a soldier of fortune.
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