[Vernacular Photo Album with Almost 220 Images Chronicling the 1920s Cruises of the USS Milwaukee]

[Various places, including Hawaii, Pacific Islands, Central America, & Greenland, 1928. Overall, very good.. 216 original photographs, plus approximately sixty commercial prints and photo postcards, with [14]pp. manuscript log tipped in. Most images measuring 2.5 x 4.25 or 3.5 x 5.75 inches. Oblong quarto album, limp leatherette covers, string-tied. Photographs in corner mounts, with manuscript captions on album leaves or in negatives. Some wear and scuffing to covers. A couple of photos removed or with tears and light wear. An interesting and extensive album of well over 200 original photographs and sixty commercial images that documents the tours of the USS Milwaukee during the mid-1920s, compiled by Edward Hoffman, one of its crew members. The ship was a light cruiser ordered by the U.S. Government during World War I and commissioned in 1923. The first part of this album records its "shakedown cruise" from San Francisco to Honolulu to Sydney, by way of Fiji and Samoa, arriving to Australia in time to be displayed at the Pan-Pacific Scientific Congress.

During its return voyage across the Pacific in 1924, the Milwaukee was called to Honduras as a part of an effort to protect "American interests" during a violent internal power struggle that killed fifty Americans among hundreds of Honduran casualties and rampant destruction and looting in Tegucigapla. Sailors from the Milwaukee were part of the landing party that went inland to the Honduran capital, and there is an extensive series of images from this episode of political crisis in Central America. The negotiations that eventually ended the conflict were held aboard the Milwaukee while anchored at Amapala in April 1924.

Following this involvement in Honduras, the Milwaukee travelled through the Panama Canal and stopped in the Canal Zone, of which there are several images, before steaming to Greenland in July 1924 to meet and to resupply the Army Air Service pilots making the first around-the-world flight. This shorter series of photographs also includes several images and portraits of Greenland natives. The photographs that document these three principal experiences in the first two years of the Milwaukee's activity are augmented by numerous photographs of the ship under sail and otherwise in service and of the crew both at work and at leisure.

At the rear of the album is a fourteen-page log that records data and points of interest relating to the cruises of the Milwaukee through 1928, including the ones documented here. The commercial prints also collected in this album mainly depict California, Hawaii, and the Canal Zone. All together, a fascinating photographic chronicle of this American cruiser in the 1920s.