UNDER THE RED CROSS
When Miss Barton joined the State
of Texas at Key West on April 29 there seemed
to be no immediate prospect of an invasion of Cuba
by the United States army, and, consequently, no prospect
of an opportunity to relieve the distress of the starving
Cuban people. Knowing that such distress must
necessarily have been greatly intensified by the blockade,
and anxious to do something to mitigate it, or,
at least, to show the readiness of the Red Cross to
undertake its mitigation, Miss Barton wrote
and sent to Admiral Sampson, commander of the naval
forces on the North Atlantic Station, the following
letter:
S. S.
“STATE OF TEXAS,” May 2, 1898.
Admiral W. T. Sampson,
U. S. N., Commanding Fleet before
Havana.
ADMIRAL: But for the introduction
kindly proffered by our mutual acquaintance Captain
Harrington, I should scarcely presume to address
you. He will have made known to you the subject
which I desire to bring to your gracious consideration.
Papers forwarded by direction of our
government will have shown the charge intrusted
to me, viz., to get food to the starving people
of Cuba. I have with me a cargo of fourteen
hundred tons, under the flag of the Red Cross,
the one international emblem of neutrality and
humanity known to civilization. Spain knows and
regards it.
Fourteen months ago the entire Spanish
government at Madrid cabled me permission to
take and distribute food to the suffering people in
Cuba. This official permission was broadly published.
If read by our people, no response was made and
no action taken until two months ago, when, under
the humane and gracious call of our honored President,
I did go and distribute food, unmolested anywhere on
the island, until arrangements were made by our
government for all American citizens to leave
Cuba. Persons must now be dying there by hundreds,
if not thousands, daily, for want of the food we are
shutting out. Will not the world hold us
accountable? Will history write us blameless?
Will it not be said of us that we completed the scheme
of extermination commenced by Weyler?
Fortunately, I know the Spanish authorities
in Cuba, Captain-General Blanco and his assistants.
We parted with perfect friendliness. They
do not regard me as an American merely, but as the
national representative of an international treaty
to which they themselves are signatory and under
which they act. I believe they would receive
and confer with me if such a thing were made possible.
I should like to ask Spanish permission
and protection to land and distribute food now
on the State of Texas. Could I be permitted
to ask to see them under flag of truce? If
we make the effort and are refused, the blame
rests with them; if we fail to make it, it rests
with us. I hold it good statesmanship at least
to divide the responsibility. I am told
that some days must elapse before our troops
can be in position to reach and feed these starving
people. Our food and our forces are here,
ready to commence at once.
With assurances of
highest regard,
I am, Admiral,
very respectfully yours,
[Signed]
CLARA BARTON.
At the time when the above letter
was written, the American National Red Cross was acting
under the advice and direction of the State and Navy
departments, the War Department having no force in
the field.
Admiral Sampson replied as follows:
U. S. FLAGSHIP
“NEW YORK,” FIRST-RATE,
KEY WEST, FLORIDA,
May 2, 1898.
Miss Clara Barton,
President American National Red Cross:
1. I have received through the
senior naval officer present a copy of a letter
from the State Department to the Secretary of the Navy;
a copy of a letter from the Secretary of the Navy
to the commander-in-chief of the naval force
on this station; and also a copy of a letter
from the Secretary of the Navy to the commandant of
the naval station at Key West.
2. From these communications
it appears that the destination of the
steamship State of
Texas, loaded with supplies for the starving
reconcentrados in Cuba,
is left, in a measure, to my judgment.
3. At present I am acting under
instructions from the Navy Department to blockade
the coast of Cuba for the purpose of preventing,
among other things, any food-supply from reaching the
Spanish forces in Cuba. Under these circumstances
it seems to me unwise to let a ship-load of such
supplies be sent to the reconcentrados, for,
in my opinion, they would be distributed to the
Spanish army. Until some point be occupied in
Cuba by our forces, from which such distribution
can be made to those for whom the supplies are
intended, I am unwilling that they should be landed
on Cuban soil.
Yours very
respectfully,
[Signed]
W. T. SAMPSON,
Rear-Admiral
U. S. N.,
Commander-in-Chief U. S. Naval Force,
North Atlantic Station.
After this exchange of letters Miss
Barton had a conference with Admiral Sampson, in the
course of which the latter explained more fully his
reasons for declining to allow the State of Texas
to enter any Cuban port until such port had been occupied
by American troops.
On May 3 Miss Barton sent the following
telegram to Stephen E. Barton, chairman of the Central
Cuban Relief Committee in New York:
KEY
WEST, May 3, 1898.
Stephen E. Barton,
Chairman, etc.:
Herewith I transmit copies of letters
passed between Admiral Sampson and myself.
I think it important that you should present immediately
this correspondence personally to the government, as
it will place before them the exact situation
here. The utmost cordiality exists between
Admiral Sampson and myself. The admiral feels
it his duty, as chief of the blockading squadron, to
keep food out of Cuba, but recognizes that, from
my standpoint, my duty is to try to get food
into Cuba. If I insist, Admiral Sampson will
try to open communication under a flag of truce;
but his letter expresses his opinion regarding
the best method. Advices from the government
would enable us to reach a decision. Unless there
is objection at Washington, you are at liberty
to publish this correspondence if you wish.
[Signed]
CLARA BARTON.
On May 6 the chairman of the Central
Cuban Relief Committee replied as follows:
WASHINGTON,
D. C., May 6, 1898.
Clara Barton, Key West, Florida:
Submitted your message to President
and cabinet, and it was read with moistened eyes.
Considered serious and pathetic. Admiral Sampson’s
views regarded as wisest at present. Hope to land
you soon. President, Long, and Moore send
highest regards.
[Signed]
BARTON.
Under these circumstances, of course,
there was nothing for the Red Cross steamer to do
but wait patiently in Key West until the army of invasion
should leave Tampa for the Cuban coast.
Meanwhile, however, Miss Barton had
discovered a field of beneficent activity for the
Red Cross nearer home. In Tampa, on her way south,
she learned that in that city, and at various other
points on the coast of southern Florida, there were
large numbers of destitute Cuban refugees and escaped
reconcentrados, who were in urgent need of help.
A local committee in Tampa, composed of representatives
from the various churches, had been doing everything
in its power to relieve the distress of these unfortunate
people, but the burden was getting to be beyond its
strength, and it asked the Red Cross for assistance.
The desired aid was promptly given, and the committee
was supplied with provisions enough to support the
Cuban refugees in Tampa until the middle of June.
Upon her arrival at Key West Miss
Barton found a similar, but even worse, state of affairs,
inasmuch as the number of destitute refugees and reconcentrados
there exceeded fifteen hundred. A local Cuban
relief society had established a soup-kitchen in which
they were feeding about three hundred, and Mr. G.
W. Hyatt, chairman of the Key West Red Cross Committee,
was trying to take care of the rest; but both organizations
were nearly at the end of their resources, and the
local committee had nothing left in the shape of food-stuffs
except corn-meal. Miss Barton at once telegraphed
the Central Red Cross Committee in New York to forward
thirty tons of assorted stores by first steamer, and
pending the arrival of these stores she fed the Key
West refugees from the State of Texas and from
such local sources of food-supply as were available.
But Cuban refugees and reconcentrados
were not the only hungry and destitute victims of
the war to be found in Key West. On May 9 Miss
Barton received the following letter from the United
States marshal for the southern district of Florida:
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE,
OFFICE OF U. S. MARSHAL,
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF FLORIDA,
KEY WEST, FLORIDA, May 9, 1898.
Miss Clara Barton, President
American National Red Cross.
DEAR MISS BARTON: On board the
captured vessels we find quite a number of aliens
among the crews, mostly Cubans, and some American
citizens, and their detention here and inability
to get away for want of funds has exhausted their
supply of food, and some of them will soon be
entirely out. As there is no appropriation available
from which food could be purchased, would you
kindly provide for them until I can get definite
instructions from the department at Washington?
Very
respectfully yours,
[Signed] JOHN F.
HORR,
U. S.
Marshal.
Appended to the above letter was a
list of fifteen Spanish vessels whose crews were believed
by the marshal to be in need of food.
In less than three hours after the
receipt of this communication two large ships’
boats, loaded with provisions for the sailors on the
Spanish prizes, left the State of Texas in tow
of the steam-launch of the troop-ship Panther.
Before dark that night, Mr. Cobb and Dr. Egan, of
Miss Barton’s staff, who were in charge of the
relief-boats, had visited every captured Spanish vessel
in the harbor. Two or three of them, including
the great liners Miguel Jover and Argonauta,
had provisions enough, and were not in need of relief,
but most of the others particularly the
fishing-smacks were in even worse straits
than the marshal supposed. The large transatlantic
steamer Pedro, of Bilbao, had no flour, bread,
coffee, tea, sugar, beans, rice, vegetables, or lard
for cooking, and her crew had lived for fifteen days
exclusively upon fish. The schooner Severito
had wholly exhausted her supplies, and had on board
nothing to eat of any kind. Of the others, some
had no matches or oil for lights, some were nearly
out of water, and all were reduced to an unrelieved
fish diet, of which the men were beginning to sicken.
The Red Cross relief-boats made a complete and accurate
list of the Spanish prizes in the harbor, twenty-two
in all, with the numerical strength of
every crew, the amount of provisions, if any, on every
vessel, and the quantity and kind of food that each
would require.
Finding that one of the prizes had
a cargo of plantains and bananas, and that most
of the fishing-smacks were provided with salt-water
tanks in which they had thousands of pounds of living
fish, Miss Barton and her staff determined to purchase
from them such quantities of these perishable commodities
as they were willing to sell at a low nominal price,
and use such food to increase and diversify the rations
furnished to the fifteen hundred Cuban refugees and
reconcentrados on shore. This would give the
latter a change of diet, and at the same time lessen
the amount of more expensive food-stuffs to be taken
from the cargo of the Red Cross steamer or brought
from New York. With the approval of the United
States marshal, this plan was immediately carried into
effect, and it worked admirably. The captains
of the Spanish prizes were glad to give to the Red
Cross perishable commodities for which they had no
accessible market, and ten thousand pounds of fish
and large quantities of plantains and bananas
were soon obtained for distribution among the Cuban
refugees and reconcentrados in Key West. I refer
to this incident of the relief-work, not because it
has, intrinsically, any particular importance, but
because it shows that the means adopted by the Red
Cross to relieve distress in Key West were intelligent
and businesslike.
On the day after our arrival Mr. Cobb,
of Miss Barton’s staff, called at the hotel
to tell us that the Red Cross relief-boats were about
to make another visit to the Spanish prizes in the
harbor, and to ask us if we would like to go with
them and see the work.
In half an hour Miss Barton and her
staff, Mrs. Kennan and I, started in the steam-launch
of the monitor Puritan to make the round of
the captured Spanish ships, towing behind us two large
boats loaded with assorted stores for the destitute
crews. The first vessel we visited was a small
black brigantine from Barcelona, named Frascito,
which had been captured eight miles off Havana by
the United States cruiser Montgomery.
The swarthy, scantily clad Spanish sailors crowded
to the bulwarks with beaming faces as we approached,
and the hurried, almost frenzied eagerness with which
they threw us a line, hung a ladder over the side,
and helped us on board, showed that although we were
incidentally Americans, and therefore enemies, we were
primarily Red Cross people, and consequently friends
to be greeted and welcomed with every possible manifestation
of respect, gratitude, and affection.
The interior of the little brigantine
presented an appearance of slovenly but picturesque
dirt, confusion, and disorder, as if the crew, overwhelmed
by the misfortune that had come upon them, had abandoned
the routine of daily duty and given themselves up
to apathy and despair. The main-deck, between
the low after-cabin and the high forecastle, had not
been washed down, apparently, in a week; piles of dirty
dishes and cooking-utensils of strange, unfamiliar
shapes lay here and there around the little galley
forward; coils of running rigging were kicking about
under-foot instead of hanging on the belaying-pins;
a pig-pen, which had apparently gone adrift in a gale,
blocked up the gangway to the forecastle on the port
side between the high bulwark and a big boat which
had been lashed in V-shaped supports amidships; and
a large part of the space between the cabin and the
forecastle on the starboard side was a chaos of chain-cable,
lumber, spare spars, pots, pans, earthen water-jars,
and chicken-coops.
The captain of the little vessel was
a round-faced, boyish-looking man, of an English rather
than a Spanish type, with clear gray honest eyes and
a winning expression of friendliness and rustic bonhomie,
like that of an amiable, intelligent young peasant.
He greeted us cordially, but with a slight trace of
shy awkwardness, and invited us into the small, dark
cabin, where we drank one another’s health in
a bottle of sweet, strong liqueur, and he told us
the rather pathetic story of his misfortune.
The brigantine Frascito ("Little Flask"), he
said, belonged in part to him and in part to a company
in Barcelona. The cargo, consisting chiefly of
South American jerked beef, was owned by his father
and himself, and ship and cargo represented all that
he and his family had in the world. He left Montevideo
for Havana about the middle of March, and had no intimation
whatever that Spain and the United States were at
war, until a round shot was fired across his bow by
the cruiser Montgomery, about eight miles off
Morro Castle. The officers of the cruiser treated
him very kindly “I couldn’t;
and below] have done it better,” he said, with
simple sincerity, “if I had done it myself;
but it was very hard to lose everything just because
I didn’t know. Of course I shouldn’t
have tried to get into Havana if I had known there
was war; but I left Montevideo in March, and had no
thought of such a thing.” We tried to cheer
him up by telling him that the prize-court would hardly
condemn and confiscate his vessel under such circumstances,
but he was still sad and troubled. He thanked
us with simple, unaffected earnestness for the provisions
we had put on board his ship, and said that the unexpected
kindness of the Red Cross to him and his crew had
cheered and encouraged them all. He seemed anxious
to do something to show us his gratitude and appreciation,
and when a member of our party manifested interest
in a large cage of red-crested tropical birds which
hung beside the cabin door, he promptly took it down
and presented it “to the senorita for the Red
Cross steamer, with the compliments and thanks of
the Frascito.”
After putting on board the little
brigantine such supplies, in the shape of bread, beans,
rice, canned meats, etc., as the crew required,
we bade the captain and mate good-by, and left them
apparently somewhat cheered up by our visit.
From the Frascito we went successively
to the Oriente, the Espana, the Santiago
Apostol, the Poder de Dios, and fifteen
or sixteen other vessels of the prize-fleet, ascertaining
their wants, furnishing them with such food-supplies
as they needed, and listening to the stories of their
captains.
Among the sailors on the fishing-smacks
were many unfamiliar and wild-looking Cuban and Spanish
types men with hard, dark faces, lighted
up by fierce, brilliant black eyes, who looked as if
they would have been in their proper sphere fighting
under a black flag, on the Spanish Main, in the good
old days of the bucaneers. But hard and fierce
as many of them looked, they were not wholly insensible
to kindness. On the schooner Power of God,
where there seemed to be more wild, cruel, piratical
types than on any other vessel except, perhaps, St.
James the Apostle, I noticed a sailor with a stern,
hard, almost black face and fierce, dark eyes, who had
such a thing been possible might have stepped,
just as he stood, out of the pages of “Amyas
Leigh.” He was regarding me with an expression
in which, if there was no actual malevolence, there
was at least not the slightest indication of friendliness
or good will. Taking from my haversack a box of
the cigarettes with which I had provided myself in
anticipation of a tobacco famine among the Spanish
sailors, I sprang over the bulwark, and, with as cordial
a smile of comradeship as I could give him, I placed
it in his hand. For an instant he stared at it
as if stupefied with amazement. Then his hard,
set face relaxed a little, and, throwing his head forward
and raising his fierce black eyes to mine, he gave
me a long look of surprise and intense, passionate
gratitude, which seemed to say, “I don’t
know your language, and I can’t tell you
how grateful I am, but I can look it” and
he did. He had evidently been out of tobacco many
days, and in a moment he went below where he could
light a match out of the wind, and presently reappeared,
breathing smoke and exhaling it through his nostrils
with infinite satisfaction and pleasure.
Nearly all the sailors on the fishing-smacks
were barefooted, many were bareheaded, and all had
been tanned a dark mahogany color by weeks of exposure
to the rays of a tropical sun. Their dress consisted,
generally, of a shirt and a pair of loose trousers
of coarse gray cotton, like the dress worn in summer
by Siberian convicts. Dr. Egan prescribed and
furnished medicines for the sick wherever they were
found, and on one vessel performed a rather difficult
and delicate surgical operation for the relief of
a man who was suffering from a badly swollen neck,
with necrosis of the lower jawbone.
At half-past six o’clock we
returned to the State of Texas, having attended
to all the sick that were found, relieved all the distress
that was brought to our attention, and furnished food
enough for a week’s consumption to the crews
of nineteen vessels.
Two days later, at the suggestion
of Miss Barton, Mr. Cobb purchased a quantity of smoking-and
chewing-tobacco for the Spanish sailors, and we made
another double round of the prize-ships, in the steam-launch
of the New York “Sun,” which was courteously
placed at the disposal of the Red Cross for the whole
afternoon. On our outward trip we left on every
vessel tobacco and matches enough to last the crew
for a week, and Mr. Cobb notified all the captains
that if they or their crews wished to write open letters
to their relatives and friends in Cuba or Spain, the
Red Cross would collect them, submit them to the United
States prize-court for approval, and undertake to
forward them.
The tobacco and the offer to forward
letters seemed to excite more enthusiastic gratitude
in the hearts of the Spanish prisoners than even the
distribution of food. On one schooner my attention
was attracted to a ragged sailor who was saying something
very earnestly in Spanish, and pointing, in a rather
dramatic manner, to the sky. “What is he
saying?” I inquired of Mr. Cobb. “He
says,” replied the latter, with a smile, “that
if they were prisoners up in heaven, they couldn’t
be better treated than they have been here.”
I was touched and gratified to see
the interest and sympathy excited by the work of the
Red Cross in all who came in contact with it, from
the commodore of the fleet to the poorest fisherman.
The captains of the monitor Puritan and the
auxiliary cruiser Panther offered us the use
of their swift steam-launches in the work of distributing
food; the representative of the New York “Sun”
followed their example; the marines on the Panther
doffed their caps to our boats as we passed, and even
a poor Key West fisherman pulled over to us in his
skiff, as we lay alongside a Spanish vessel, and gave
us two large, lobster-like crawfish, merely to show
us, in the only way he could, his affectionate sympathy
and good will. Mr. Cobb offered him some of the
tobacco that we were distributing among the Spanish
sailors, but he refused to take it, saying: “I
didn’t bring the fish to you to beg tobacco,
or for money, but just because I wanted to help a
little. I hoped to get more, but these were all
I could catch.”
One touch of kindness makes all the
world kin. Even the engineer of the New York
“Sun’s” naphtha-launch gave his cherished
pipe to a sailor on a Spanish vessel who had none,
and when one of his mates remonstrated with him, saying,
“You’re not going to give him your own
brier-wood pipe!” he replied, with a shamefaced
smile: “Yes, poor devil! he can’t
get one away out here. I can buy another ashore.”
Late in the afternoon we made a second
round of all the Spanish ships to collect their letters,
and then returned to the State of Texas.
Mr. Cobb that same evening submitted the open letters
to the United States prize-court for approval, and
I made an arrangement with Mr. E. F. Knight, war correspondent
of the London “Times,” who was just starting
for Havana, to take the Cuban letters with him and
mail them there. The letters for Spain were sent
to the National Red Cross of Portugal.