Josephine was a steel-hulled, schooner-rigged, steam yacht built at Crescent Shipyard, Elizabethport, New Jersey, by Lewis Nixon as hull number 16 for Philadelphia financier Peter Arrell Brown Widener.

Renamed Vixen, the erstwhile pleasure craft was armed and fitted out for naval service at the Philadelphia Navy Yard where she was commissioned on 11 April 1898.

[5][1] Assigned to the North Atlantic Station, Vixen sailed for Cuban waters on 7 May and arrived off the coast of Cuba nine days later.

For the duration of the "splendid little war", the graceful armed yacht performed a variety of duties, blockading and patrolling, carrying mail and flags of truce, ferrying prisoners, establishing communications with Cuban insurgents ashore, and landing reconnaissance parties.

On the latter occasion, the highlight of the ship's operations during the Spanish–American War, Vixen was patrolling off Santiago between 0935 and 0945 and was at a point some four miles[vague] to the westward of the distinctive landmark, the Morro Castle.

Sharp ordered full speed ahead and hard-a-port, a move taken in the nick of time because shells from his own ships—alerted to the sortie of Admiral Cervera's fleet—splashed in the water astern in the yacht's frothing wake.

After the conclusion of hostilities with Spain later that summer, Vixen returned to the United States, reaching Staten Island, New York, on 22 September.

[1] For the next seven years, Vixen operated in waters off Puerto Rico, conducting surveys, carrying mail, stores, and passengers for the fleet, interspersing those miscellaneous duties with annual voyages to Norfolk for overhauls.

[1] Decommissioned at Pensacola, Florida, on 30 March 1906, Vixen remained there until 6 December 1907, when she was turned over on loan to the New Jersey Naval Militia.

She patrolled off the eastern seaboard and, following the establishment of United States naval activities in the recently acquired Virgin Islands (purchased from Denmark), served as station ship at St.