George L. Watson designed her, and the Ailsa Shipbuilding Company of Troon, Scotland, launched her on 4 February 1904. Frederick William Vanderbilt reportedly paid about a hundred thousand pounds for her, the equivalent of nearly half a million dollars at the time. A Parisian decorating firm worked over her interior in historicist French styles. The dining saloon was paneled in Spanish walnut, furnished in Louis XV. Mrs Vanderbilt's adjoining boudoir held a piano. Mr Vanderbilt's cabin, aft of the engine room, was done in Louis XVI. The drawing room was Louis XIV. Six guest cabins plus accommodations for a personal physician, a private secretary, and a maid. Her painted-white bow carried a figurehead of a warrior with drawn sword held at an aggressive angle. Twin triple-expansion engines built by A. and J. Inglis of Glasgow gave her 15.7 knots on her sea trials.

In December 1913, Warrior left New York for a Caribbean cruise with the Vanderbilts and their guests, including the Duke and Duchess of Manchester. After Charleston and Palm Beach and Bermuda, she ran aground off the Colombian coast in heavy weather. Her wireless distress signal reached the Marconi station at Santa Marta. The Norwegian steamship Frutera came out and stood by overnight, the sea too rough to launch lifeboats. The American steamer Almirante hurried to her aid. A hurricane drove Warrior deeper onto the mudbank, smashed the windlass of the salvage tug Relief, and tore away both her anchors. It took until April for Relief to finally tow the damaged yacht to Kingston and from there back to New York. Frederick Vanderbilt had had enough of yachting. He turned the boat over to her underwriters.

By November 1914 the yacht had passed to Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, a cousin of Frederick and an heir to the Vanderbilt railroad fortune. He renamed her Wayfarer, fitted out a nursery for his children, and sailed her to Los Angeles through the just-opened Panama Canal. By March 1915 he was aboard her in Havana watching Jess Willard beat Jack Johnson for the world heavyweight championship. Two months later, on 7 May 1915, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was killed in the sinking of RMS Lusitania. He was last seen helping women and children into lifeboats and reportedly gave his own life vest to a young mother. His estate sold the yacht in 1916 to Alexander Smith Cochran, who restored her name to Warrior.

In February 1917 the British Admiralty took her, fitted her with two twelve-pounder guns, and commissioned her as HMS Warrior with pennant number 090. She patrolled the West Indies through 1917 and into 1918, calling at Kingston, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts, Antigua, Barbados, Trinidad, Grenada, Dominica, and Belize. In February 1918 Vice-Admiral William Grant raised his flag aboard her, making her the flagship of the North America and West Indies Station. From April 1918 she lay at anchor in the Potomac, where Lady Grant hosted receptions for Washington society. In October the Spanish flu reached the ship. Four of her men died and were buried in Arlington National Cemetery, two Royal Marines, a deck hand, and a clerk. On 30 December 1918 her flag lieutenant, Charles Fellowes-Gordon, married a New York socialite at St. John's Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square; Franklin Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, gave the bride away.

Cochran got her back in 1919. By May 1920 he had sold her to Ramon de la Sota y Llano, the Bilbao industrialist and Basque nationalist, who renamed her Goizeko-Izarra, Basque for Morning Star. She flew the Spanish flag through the 1920s and the early 1930s. When civil war came to Spain in 1936, the de la Sota family used her to evacuate Republican civilians and Basque children from the Nationalist advance. On one voyage Nationalist aircraft were reported to have set her on fire, though those aboard denied it; she reached Le Verdon-sur-Mer with three to four hundred refugees safe. There were also rumors, denied by Republican sources, that she had carried Basque government gold and jewels into exile.

Before the end of 1937 the yacht returned to British registry, owned by Rex Morley Hoyes of Marwell Hall in Hampshire and operating again as Warrior. In 1940 the Admiralty requisitioned her a second time, converted her for anti-submarine warfare, and commissioned her as HMS Warrior II. On 11 July 1940 German aircraft caught her in the Channel and bombed her until she sank. One of her ratings was killed. The rest of her crew were rescued. She lies now off Portland Bill at fifty to fifty-four meters, broken but recognizable, a popular wreck-diving site. Her bell, recovered from the seabed, still carries the name Goizeko-Izarra cast into its metal, the Basque morning star spelled with a small typo on the foundry's part as Goizejo. It broke in two during the recovery. Even her bell could not survive in one piece.