exercise while flying the new flag of the Naval Reserve. Navy purchase and service Due to the impending war with Spain El Toro was purchased by the Navy on 26 March 1898 and commissioned on 2 April 1898 with the name USS Algonquin, Ensign Walter S. Crosley in command. Ensign Crosley described his reporting to the New York Navy Yard on 1 April 1898 with orders to report as a watch standing officer aboard and, upon being redirected to "fit out and command" Algonquin to be ready for sea immediately only to find the old Morgan tug as an "April Fool's joke." Crosley found there was no crew and that fitting out meant acquiring nearly everything from hawsers to stores, which he had to load aboard himself from a commandeered horse cart. With six men sent from on 2 April the tug was put into commission at two p.m. with final crew, including a sixty-one-year-old that had not been to sea in twenty-five years reporting to assist the captain in getting to Key West, Florida, still assembling on the evening of 3 April. Algonquin departed the Navy Yard on the afternoon of 4 April for Key West, Florida with a quickly assembled crew, only two of which had been in the Navy and only four had been to sea, in company with the tug commanded by Lieutenant York Noble. Nezinscot turned back while still in Buttermilk Channel with Algonquin continuing alone, reaching Scotland Lightship at about eight in the evening, until suffering weather damage to a hatch cover and having to seek shelter behind the Delaware Breakwater for pumping out. After a delay of nearly a day the tug got underway for Port Royal, South Carolina where Nezinscot caught up and, on meeting more poor weather on the way south, took the smaller and slower Algonquin in tow until breaking down and then being towed by Algonquin until reaching the fleet at Key West on 13 April. Once with the fleet the tug made regular trips to Cuba towing captured vessels to Key West and making logistics runs that included dispatches and even laundry, the loss of which in an involved the tug almost sinking when seas swept over the ship taking boxes and the laundry from lashings on top of the deck house. The tug had left Key West overloaded and nearly sank off Cuba, being taken in tow