Duke Riley has long been captivated by the sea. When I reached the Brooklyn-based artist over the phone, he was sailing off Rhode Island on his boat, on which he lives for months out of the year. He attempted to boil his feelings for seafaring and maritime history down into a neat one-liner—and failed. “It’s the kind of thing that I could write a thesis on,” he told me.
Not long ago, while reading up on Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, a group of 16 battleships the U.S. president sent on a 1907–09 world tour to showcase the nation’s military might, he stumbled on a curious fact. In the early 1900s, the USS Vermont was once home to a goat named Skellig Mór, which lived on the battleship as a sort of mascot. Just as intriguing was the creature’s back story and its fate, now long forgotten.
