The 510-foot destroyer USS Sterett, which was christened at Bath Iron Works in Maine last month, is the fourth such vessel to carry the name of Baltimore-born Andrew Sterett.
The Sterett is the second ship to be named after a Baltimorean in a month.
In May, the Navy announced it had named a new guided-missile destroyer the USS Spruance, also to be built at the Maine shipyard, after World War II Adm. Raymond Ames Spruance, hero of the Battle of Midway.
I didn't know about the Sterett until Terry S. McCormick, an Ellicott City resident who is contract manager for the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, contacted me.
He is also researching and writing a book on David Stodder, who built the frigate USS Constellation at the Sterrett Shipyard in Baltimore.
"During my research, I have often felt that 18th- and 19th-century Baltimore has never gotten its fair due. It's as if Baltimore didn't exist until the British bombardment of Fort McHenry," McCormick said in an interview the other day. "It had been an important port with major shipbuilding activity."
The name of Andrew Sterett surfaced during his research.
"This is a Baltimore guy who no one knows. He lived his entire life here, except when he was away at sea," said McCormick, who contributed credited research for the souvenir launch booklet that was distributed to guests by Bath Iron Works at the Sterett's May 19 christening.
Sterett was born in Baltimore in 1778, the son of a wealthy shipping merchant, foundry owner and Revolutionary War veteran.
He was 20 when he joined the Navy in 1798 and was assigned as third lieutenant aboard the newly completed USS Constellation under the command of Capt. Thomas Truxton. The ship had been launched the year before.
Sterett was aboard the Constellation during what historians have called the Quasi-War with France, which resulted in the capture of the French frigate L'Insurgente in 1799.
While commanding a battery aboard the Constellation during the incident, Sterett "reacted to a panicking seaman by running him through with a cutlass: the only U.S. casualty of the action," according to the launch booklet.
When news of Sterett's actions reached shore, Anti-Federalists denounced what he had done as an "act of arrogance and coldbloodedness."
Not cowed by his critics, Sterett probably inflamed them more when he responded by saying, "We put men to death for even looking pale on this ship."
