Part 4 (1/2)
Unfortunately,--or perhaps fortunately,--the object for which Lieutenant Hobson and his men risked their lives was not attained. The _Merrimac_ failed to swing around so as to lie transversely across the channel, but sank in such a way as to place her hull parallel with the middle of it and near its eastern edge. This left plenty of water and plenty of room for vessels to pa.s.s on the western, or Smith Cay, side.
Egress, however, although still possible, was extremely difficult and dangerous, on account of the strictness and closeness of the blockade which was established when Admiral Sampson arrived and took command of the combined fleets. The battle-s.h.i.+ps and larger vessels, which formed the outer line of the blockade, were disposed in a semicircle around the mouth of the harbor, at a distance of four or five miles, with the flags.h.i.+p _New York_ at one end of the line and the _Brooklyn_ at the other. Inside of this semicircle, and much nearer the entrance, were stationed two or three small cruisers or gunboats, whose duty it was to watch the mouth of the harbor incessantly and give instant warning of the appearance of any hostile vessel. At night, when the danger from the Spanish torpedo-boats was greatest and when Cervera's fleet was most likely to escape, a powerful and piercing search-light was held constantly on the mouth of the narrow canon between Morro and Socapa; the battle-s.h.i.+ps closed in so as to diminish the radius of their semicircle by nearly one half; the cruisers and gunboats, under cover of the blinding radiance of the search-light, moved a mile nearer to the mouth of the harbor; and three steam-launches patrolled the coast all night within pistol-shot of the enemy's batteries. In the face of such a blockade it was virtually impossible for Cervera to escape, and almost equally impossible for his torpedo-boats to come out of the harbor un.o.bserved, or to reach any of our larger vessels even if they should venture out. Long before they could get across the mile and a half or two miles of water that separated the harbor entrance from the nearest battles.h.i.+p, they would be riddled with projectiles from perhaps a hundred rapid-fire guns. Torpedo-boats, however, did not play an important part on either side. Our own were prevented from entering the harbor by a strong log boom stretched across the channel just north of the Estrella battery, and those of the Spaniards never even attempted to make an aggressive movement in the period covered by the blockade.
Admiral Cervera evidently thought that the chance of accomplis.h.i.+ng anything by means of a torpedo-boat attack was too remote to justify the risk.
On the 6th of June Admiral Sampson bombarded the sh.o.r.e batteries and the mouth of the harbor for two hours and a half, destroying a number of houses on Smith Cay, setting fire to the Spanish cruiser _Reina Mercedes_, which was moored near the end of the Socapa promontory, and killing or wounding twenty-five or thirty officers and men on the cruiser, in the batteries, and in Morro Castle. The earthwork batteries east and west of the entrance did not prove to be very formidable and were quickly silenced; but the submarine mines in the narrow channel leading to the upper harbor, which prevented our fleet from forcing an entrance, could not be removed without the cooperation of a land force.
All that Admiral Sampson could do, therefore, was to bombard the harbor fortifications now and then, so as to prevent further work on them; occupy the lower part of Guantanamo Bay, forty miles east of Santiago, as a coaling-station; and urge the government in Was.h.i.+ngton, by telegraph, to send the army forward as speedily as possible.
The fleet of transports which conveyed General Shafter's command to the southern coast of Cuba arrived off the entrance to Santiago harbor at midday on the 20th of June, after a tedious and uneventful voyage of five days from the Dry Tortugas around the eastern end of the island.
General Shafter at once held a conference with Admiral Sampson and with the Cuban general Garcia, who had come to the coast to meet the fleet, and, after considering every possible line of attack, decided to land his force at two points, within supporting distance of each other, ten or fifteen miles east of the entrance to Santiago harbor, and then march toward the city through the interior. The points selected for debarkation were Siboney, a small village about ten miles east of Morro Castle, and Daiquiri,[3] another similar village five miles farther away, which, before the war, was the s.h.i.+pping-port of the Spanish-American Iron Company. From Daiquiri there was a rough wagon-road to Siboney, and the latter place was connected with Santiago by a narrow-gage railroad along the coast and up the Aguadores ravine, as well as by a trail or wagon-road over the foot-hills and through the marshy, jungle-skirted valleys of the interior.
When we reached the entrance to Santiago harbor in the Red Cross steamer _State of Texas_ on the 25th of June, the Fifth Army-Corps--or most of it--had already landed, and was marching toward Santiago along the interior road by way of Guasimas and Sevilla. The landing had been made, Admiral Sampson told me, without the least opposition from the Spaniards, but there had been a fight, on the day before our arrival, between General Wheeler's advance and a body of troops supposed to be the rear-guard of the retiring enemy, at a place called Guasimas, three or four miles from Siboney, on the Santiago road. Details of the fight, he said, had not been received, but it was thought to be nothing more than an unimportant skirmish.
In reply to my question whether he had any orders for us, or any suggestions to make with regard to our movements, he said that, as there seemed to be nothing for the Red Cross to do in the vicinity of Santiago, he should advise us to go to Guantanamo Bay, where Captain McCalla had opened communications with the insurgents under General Perez, and where we should probably find Cuban refugees suffering for food. Acting upon this suggestion, we got under way promptly, steamed into the little cove of Siboney to take a look at the place and to land Mr. Louis Kempner of the Post-Office Department, whom we had brought from Key West, and then proceeded eastward to Guantanamo Bay.
CHAPTER VII
THE FIGHT AT GUANTANAMO
As the southeastern coast of Cuba is high and bold, with deep water extending close up to the line of surf, vessels going back and forth between Santiago and Guantanamo run very near to the land; and the ever-changing panorama of tropical forest and cloud-capped mountain which presents itself to the eye as the steamer glides swiftly past, within a mile of the rock-terraced bluffs and headlands, is a constant source of surprise and delight, even to the most experienced voyager. It is an extremely beautiful and varied coast. In the foreground, only a rifle-shot away across the blue undulating floor of the Caribbean, rises a long terraced mesa, fronting on the sea, with its rocky base in a white smother of foaming surf, and its level summit half hidden by a drooping fringe of dark-green chaparral and vines. Over the cyclopean wall of this mesa appear the rounded tops of higher and more distant foot-hills, densely clad in robes of perennial verdure, while beyond and above them all, at a distance of five or six miles, rise the aerial peaks of the splendid Sierra del Cobre, with a few summer clouds drifting across their higher slopes and casting soft violet shadows into the misty blue of their intervening valleys. Here and there the terraced mesa, which forms the coast-line, is cut into picturesque castle-like bluffs by a series of wedge-shaped clefts, or notches, and through the openings thus made in the rocky wall one may catch brief glimpses of deep, wild ravines down which mountain torrents from the higher peaks tumble to the sea under the dense concealing shade of mango-and mimosa-trees, vines, flowering shrubs, and the feathery foliage of cocoanut and royal palms.
Wild, beautiful, and picturesque, however, as the coast appears to be, not a sign does it anywhere show of a bay, an inlet, or a safe sheltered harbor. For miles together the surf breaks almost directly against the base of the terraced rampart which forms the coast-line, and even where streams have cut deep V-shaped notches in the rocky wall, the strips of beach formed at their mouths are wholly unsheltered and afford safe places of landing only when the sea is smooth and the wind at rest.
Often, for days at a time, they are lashed by a heavy and dangerous surf, which makes landing upon them in small boats extremely difficult, if not absolutely impracticable.
About thirty-five miles from Santiago harbor, as one sails eastward, the wall-like mesa on the left sinks from a height of two or three hundred feet to a height of only twenty or thirty; the mountains of the Sierra del Cobre come to an end or recede from the coast, leaving only a few insignificant hills; and through a blue, tremulous heat-haze one looks far inland over the broad, shallow valley of the Guantanamo River.
We entered the beautiful Bay of Guantanamo about half-past five o'clock on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and found it full of war-s.h.i.+ps and transports.
The white hospital steamer _Solace_ lay at anchor over toward the western side of the harbor, and between her and the eastern sh.o.r.e were the _Dolphin_, the _Eagle_, the _Resolute_, the _Marblehead_, and three or four large black colliers from Key West. As we rounded the long, low point on the western side of the entrance and steamed slowly into the s.p.a.cious bay, a small steam-launch came puffing out to meet us, and, as soon as she was within hailing distance, an officer in the white uniform of the navy rose in the stern-sheets, put his hands to his mouth, and shouted: ”Captain McCalla presents his compliments to the captain of the _State of Texas_, and requests that you follow me and anchor between the _Marblehead_ and the Haitian cable-steamer.”
”All right,” replied Captain Young, from the bridge.
”That sounds well,” I said to one of the Red Cross men who was standing near me. ”It shows that things are not allowed to go helter-skelter here.”
We followed the little launch into the harbor and dropped anchor in the place indicated, which was about one hundred yards from sh.o.r.e on the eastern side of the channel, and just opposite the intrenched camp of Colonel Huntington's marines. I was impatient to land and see the place where the American flag had first been raised on Cuban soil; but darkness came on soon, and it did not seem worth while to leave the s.h.i.+p that night.
After breakfast on the following morning, I took a small boat and went off to the _Marblehead_ to call upon Captain McCalla, who was in command of the station. I had made his acquaintance in Was.h.i.+ngton, when he was one of the members of a board appointed to consider means of sending relief to the Greely arctic expedition; but I had not seen him in many years, and it is not surprising, perhaps, that I almost failed to recognize him in his Cuban costume. The morning was hot and oppressive, and I found him clad in what was, in the strictest sense of the words, an undress uniform, consisting of unders.h.i.+rt, canvas trousers, and an old pair of slippers. Like the sensible man I knew him to be, he made no apology for his dress, but welcomed me heartily and introduced me to Captain Philip of the battle-s.h.i.+p _Texas_, who had just come into the harbor after a fresh supply of coal. As I entered, Captain McCalla was telling Captain Philip, with great glee, the story of his experience off the Cuban coast between Morro Castle and Aguadores, when his vessel, the _Marblehead_, was suddenly attacked one night by the whole blockading fleet.
”They saw a railroad-train,” he said, ”running along the water's edge toward Siboney, and in the darkness mistook it for a Spanish torpedo-boat. The train, of course, soon disappeared; but I happened to be cruising close insh.o.r.e, just there, as it pa.s.sed, and they all turned their search-lights on me and opened fire.”
”All except the _Iowa_,” corrected Captain Philip, with a smile.
”Yes, all except the Iowa,” a.s.sented Captain McCalla, laughing heartily, as if it were the funniest of jokes. ”Even the _Texas_ didn't show me any mercy; but Bob Evans knew the difference between a railroad-train and a torpedo-boat, and didn't shoot. I told him, the last time I saw him, that he was clearly ent.i.tled to take a crack at me. Every other s.h.i.+p in the fleet had had the privilege, and it was his turn. I'm the only man in the navy,” he said, with renewed laughter, ”who has ever sustained the fire of a whole fleet of battle-s.h.i.+ps and cruisers and got away alive.”
After Captain Philip had made his call and taken his leave, I explained to Captain McCalla the object of our coming to Guantanamo Bay, and asked whether there were any Cuban refugees in the vicinity who needed food and could be reached. He replied unhesitatingly that there were. He was in almost daily communication, he said, with General Perez, an insurgent leader who was then besieging Guantanamo city, and through that officer he thought he could send food to a large number of people who had taken refuge in the woods north of the bay and were in a dest.i.tute and starving condition. He had already sent to them all the food he himself could spare, but it was not half enough to meet their wants. With characteristic promptness and energy he called his stenographer and dictated a letter to General Perez, in which he said that Miss Clara Barton, president of the American National Red Cross, had just reached Guantanamo Bay in the steamer _State of Texas_, with fourteen hundred tons of food intended for Cuban reconcentrados, and asked whether he (Perez) could furnish pack-animals and an escort for, say, five thousand rations, if they could be landed on the western side of the lower bay.
This letter he sent to General Perez by a special courier from the detachment of Cubans then serving with the marines, and said that he should probably receive a reply in the course of two or three days. As nothing more could be done at that time, I returned to the _State of Texas_, reported progress to Miss Barton, and then went on sh.o.r.e to send a telegram to Was.h.i.+ngton by the Haitian cable, which had just been recovered and repaired, and to take a look at the camp of the marines.
When, on May 26, Commodore Schley, with the Flying Squadron, arrived off the entrance to Santiago harbor, and began the blockade of that port, the great need of his vessels was a safe and sheltered coaling-station.