[3] The ship's keel was laid down in 1843 at the New York Navy Yard; she was launched on 27 June 1846, and commissioned on 6 November, with Captain Samuel Livingston Breese in command.

[5] The sloop put to sea for her first cruise on 26 November 1846 and joined the Home Squadron—then engaged in operations against Mexican forces—on 8 January 1847 at Anton Lizardo.

Upon her return to the east coast of Mexico early in March, Albany guarded the transport anchorage at Isla Verde in preparation for General Winfield Scott's operations against Veracruz.

The Mexican forces, however, had already abandoned that port; and Lieutenant Charles G. Hunter, commanding Scourge, which arrived first, took possession of the town.

When the American warships dispersed to various blockade stations along the eastern coast of Mexico, Albany and Reefer remained off the mouth of the Tuxpan River.

On 10 October, the sloop of war put to sea to return to the Gulf of Mexico; she resumed blockade duty along the Mexican coast until March 1848, when she was sent to Venezuela to protect American citizens there during a highly volatile constitutional crisis.

The commander, Victor M. Randolph, brought them up on charges, of which they were convicted and released from the Navy in November 1849, although all were reinstated a year later.

[6] Between 15 November 1848 and the latter part of 1853, the sloop made three more extended deployments in the Caribbean-West Indies area as a unit of the Home Squadron.

[9] Initially, Gerry had instructions to sail to San Juan, Cartagena, and Aspinwall (now Colón, Panama), and Albany set out on 29 June.

By 11 August, instructions ordered Gerry to pass along the coast and to investigate a suspicious ship lurking near Saint Thomas.

[1] By the November, reports circulated through coastal cities that there was much "uneasiness felt in Washington in relation to the sloop-of-war Albany," which had not been heard from since 28 September, when she left Aspinwall for New York.

[11] By early December, the steamer USS Princeton had returned from searching for the missing sloop, which had not been seen or heard from on any of the channels frequented by ship traffic of the British West Indies.

[17] A second craft, USS Porpoise, had been lost in a typhoon while conducting an exploratory cruise of the Bonins, the Ladrones, and the Mariana islands.

Furthermore, the appropriate wages were paid to the families (including parents, brothers, or sisters) of the men lost, despite the loss of the account books of purser Nixon White.

[19] In the case of Rowland Leach, the ship's carpenter, this amounted to $1559, including $779 for a year's gratuitous pay ordered by the Department of the Navy.