From 1891 to 1893, he served aboard the schoolship USS "Monongahela", built as a barkentine–rigged screw sloop-of-war, at the Naval Training Station, Newport, Rhode Island, then on USS "Kearsarge" in 1894, and was aboard when she was wrecked on a reef off of Roncador Cay in the Caribbean Sea on 2 February of that year.