Martin's Must-Reads: 'The Oceans and the Stars'

“Stephen Rensselaer was named after the famous and sometimes infamous Hudson Valley Stephen Van Rensselaers of earlier times. But years before Annapolis, and perhaps why he chose the Naval Academy, he came to associate his first name with that of Stephen Decatur, the youngest captain in the Navy’s history and the hero of the Barbary Wars, whose life was heroic but whose death was not. Neither the Barbary pirates nor the British were able to killStephen Decatur.”