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USS Karibou

patrol vessel of the United States Navy

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 5, 2026
Entity authorityQ7870683 ↗
Source-derived summary

USS Karibou (SP-200) was a United States Navy patrol vessel in commission from 1917 to 1919.

Karibou was built as the civilian motorboat Lebanon in either 1911 or 1913 by the Salisbury Marine Construction Company at Salibsury, Maryland. She later was renamed Karibou.

The U.S. Navy chartered Karibou from her owner, Harwood Spencer of Asheville, North Carolina, on 17 May 1917 for World War I service as a patrol vessel. She was commissioned as USS Karibou (SP-200) on 18 May 1917.

Assigned to the 5th Naval District at Norfolk, Virginia, Karibou served as an armed guard patrol craft in the harbors of Norfolk and Newport News, Virginia. She acted as a mail and dispatch boat along the lower reaches of the James River and the York River and patrolled Atlantic coastal waters from Norfolk to Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Karibou was decommissioned on 5 February 1919, and was returned to her former owner the same day.

Notes

References

This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. The entry can be found here.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “USS Karibou” is patrol vessel of the United States Navy. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Karibou, patrol and vessel, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1917, 1919, 1911, 1913—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Karibou, patrol and vessel is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “patrol vessel of the United States Navy” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7870683. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1917, 1919, 1911 and 1913.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “USS Karibou”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow USS Karibou primary sources, USS Karibou archive and Karibou research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “USS Karibou” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.