President Roosevelt, who was then engaged in an informal inspection of the Canal Zone's defenses. Underway soon thereafter, Williams arrived at the Naval Operating Base (NOB), Key West, Florida, on 27 February. In the following months, Williams operated with the Atlantic Squadron of the fleet, conducting neutrality patrols as well as training cruises consisting of short-range battle practices and ship-handling drills in March, she conducted an astronomical survey in the Bahamas. On 9 April, Williams transported a survey party to Palmetto Island in the British West Indies before shifting to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. After moving back to Key West for a time, Williams departed Florida's waters on 2 June and arrived at New York on 4 June. She conducted two training cruises for embarked Naval Reserve contingents, which kept her busy into mid-1940. After a final refit at the Boston Navy Yard, she departed Charlestown, Massachusetts, on 18 September, bound for Canadian waters; and reached Halifax, Nova Scotia, two days later. As one of the 50 destroyers transferred to the British under lend-lease in return for leases on important base sites in the Western Hemisphere— Williams was selected as one of the six units slated for the Royal Canadian Navy. Soon after her arrival at Halifax on 20 September 1940, she got underway for a brief familiarization cruise for the Canadian crewmen. Williams was decommissioned and turned over to the Canadian government on 24 September; her name was subsequently struck from the Navy list on 8 January 1941. Royal Canadian Navy Renamed HMCS St. Clair with the pennant number I65—following the Canadian practice of naming destroyers after Canadian rivers (but with deference to the U.S. origin), her name commemorates the St. Clair River which forms the boundary between Michigan and Ontario—the destroyer was fitted out for convoy escort duties and sailed for the British Isles on 30 November, in company with (ex-) and (ex-). Operating with the Clyde Escort force, St. Clair escorted convoys in and out of the heavily travelled Western Approaches to the British Isles in the spring of 1941. Late in May, when the powerful German battleship and the heavy cruiser slipped through the Denmark Straits, the "flush decker" became involved in the intensive and widespread effort to destroy the German dreadnought. Eventually, a British force located and sank Bismarck on 27 May, but not before the tragic loss of the battlecruiser on 24 May. The search