On April 14, 1908, sixteen battleships came up the coast from Mexico and stopped in open water off Coronado. Their hulls were painted white and their upperworks buff, the peacetime colors of the United States Navy. They did not enter San Diego Bay, because they could not. The channel over the bar and the bay behind it were too shallow for ships of their draft. So the most powerful fleet the country had ever sent to sea anchored in the ocean roadstead, and San Diego came out to meet it.
The fleet had left Hampton Roads, Virginia, in December 1907 under Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans. President Theodore Roosevelt had ordered it around the world. The voyage was a training cruise and a demonstration, meant to show other powers, and Japan in particular, that the United States could move a battle fleet from one ocean to the other and keep it at sea. The Panama Canal did not yet exist. To reach the Pacific, the battleships steamed south along the coast of South America, through the Strait of Magellan and north again, calling at ports including Rio de Janeiro and Callao, then held target practice at Magdalena Bay in Baja California before turning for the United States.
Newspapers called it the Great White Fleet, and the name stuck. Roosevelt wanted it noticed, and it was. By the time it reached California the cruise had been front-page news for four months, and every city on the coast wanted a visit.
San Diego in 1908 was a city of roughly 35,000 people. It had a fine natural harbor on the map and a shallow one in fact. Ships of modest size could use the bay, but a modern battleship could not cross the bar and swing at anchor inside with confidence. That was the plain lesson of the morning the fleet arrived: the ships were here, and the harbor could not take them.
The city made up for it on land. San Diego held four days of celebrations. Sailors came ashore in boats and were paraded through the streets of downtown, and crowds lined the route to watch them pass. At night the city was lit up for the visitors. For a town of San Diego's size, the arrival of thousands of sailors and officers was an event without precedent, and the city treated it as one.
Then the fleet weighed anchor and moved on up the coast, to Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco, before crossing the Pacific. It went on to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia and Japan, and home by way of the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. It returned to Hampton Roads in February 1909, having steamed around the world without a serious mishap.
The fleet spent only a few days off Coronado, but it left an argument behind. Civic leaders had seen the Navy's battle line anchored in the ocean because their harbor was too shallow to receive it. They drew the obvious conclusion. If San Diego wanted the Navy, and the payrolls and permanence the Navy brought, it needed a deep harbor.
That conclusion became a campaign. Over the decades that followed, San Diego pressed for federal money to dredge the bay and for the Navy to put down roots on its shores. The dredges came, and the channel was cut deeper. The bottom of the bay was moved and piled into new land. The Navy came too, and it stayed, building the air station, training center, piers and bases that now line the water from Point Loma to the South Bay. None of that followed from a single visit, and no single visit can claim it. But the visit of 1908 put the problem in front of the city in the plainest possible terms, sixteen white ships riding at anchor where they should have been tied up.
It is easy to forget, looking at San Diego now, how recently its harbor was built to its present depth. The bay that could not admit a 1908 battleship today berths aircraft carriers. Much of what a visitor takes for the natural shoreline was made by dredging, and some of it was made from nothing but the bay's own mud.
A sailor on the bay today crosses the water the fleet could not reach. Coming in past the Zuniga jetty and Point Loma, you pass North Island with its carriers on one hand and Ballast Point and the submarine base on the other. Farther in, Shelter Island and Harbor Island, both built from dredge spoil in the 1950s and 1960s, are the deep harbor's leftovers turned into land. JADA, a 65-foot wooden yacht launched in 1938, keeps her home port at Harbor Island, on ground that was underwater when the Great White Fleet lay off Coronado. A San Diego Bay history sail runs past the shoreline that the visit of 1908 helped set in motion.
Sources: Naval History and Heritage Command, records of the Great White Fleet cruise of 1907 to 1909; San Diego History Center, accounts of the 1908 fleet visit; Wikipedia, "Great White Fleet"; Wikipedia, "Naval Base San Diego"; Wikipedia, "San Diego Bay."
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