ENTERING SANTIAGO HARBOR
As soon as possible after our return
from Guantanamo, Miss Barton sent a note to Admiral
Sampson, on board the flagship New York, saying
that, as the inhabitants of the city were reported
to be in a starving condition, she hoped that food
would be allowed to go in with the forces. The
admiral promptly replied: “The food shall
enter in advance of the forces; you may go in this
afternoon.” Almost any other naval commander,
after destroying a hostile fleet and reducing all the
batteries that defended a hostile city, would have
wished to crown his victory and enjoy his triumph
by entering the harbor in advance of all other vessels
and on one of his own ships of war; but Admiral Sampson,
with the modesty and generosity characteristic of a
great and noble nature, waived his right to be the
first to enter the city, and sent in the State
of Texas, flying the flag of the Red Cross and
carrying food and relief for the wounded, the starving,
and the dying.
An officer from the New York
had been at work all day locating and removing the
submarine mines in the narrow part of the channel just
north of Morro Castle; but there were still four that
had not been exploded. As they were electrical
mines, however, and as the cables connecting them
with the shore had been cut, they were no longer dangerous,
and there was nothing to prevent the entrance of the
State of Texas except the narrowness of the
unobstructed part of the channel. The collier
Merrimac, sunk by Lieutenant Hobson and his
men, was not in a position to interfere seriously
with navigation. Cervera’s fleet ran out
without any serious trouble on the western side of
her, and there was no reason why Admiral Sampson,
if he decided to force an entrance, should not run
in, following the same course. In order to prevent
this, the Spaniards, on the night of July 4, attempted
to sink the old war-ship Reina Mercedes in
such a position that she would close the channel at
a point where it is very narrow, between the Merrimac
and the entrance to the harbor. The ships of the
blockading fleet, however, saw her coming out about
midnight, turned their big guns upon her, and sank
her with six-and eight-inch projectiles before she
could get into position. She drifted around parallel
with the shore, and lay half submerged on the eastern
side of the channel, about one hundred and fifty yards
from the entrance and three hundred or three hundred
and fifty yards from the Merrimac.
At four o’clock Admiral Sampson
sent Lieutenant Capehart on board the State of
Texas to give Captain Young all necessary information
with regard to the channel and the mines, and a few
moments later, under the guidance of a Cuban pilot,
we steamed slowly in under the gray, frowning battlements
of Morro Castle. As we approached it I had an
opportunity to see, for the first time, the nature
and extent of the damage done to it by the guns of
Admiral Sampson’s fleet, and I was glad to find
that, although it had been somewhat battered on its
southern or sea face, its architectural picturesqueness
had not been destroyed or even seriously impaired.
To an observer looking at it from the south, it has,
in general outline, the appearance of three huge cubes
or rectangular masses of gray masonry, put together
in such a way that the largest cube occupies the crest
of the bold, almost precipitous bluff which forms
the eastern side of the entrance to the harbor, while
the other two descend from it in colossal steps of
diminishing size toward an escarpment in the hillside
seventy-five or a hundred feet below, where appear
five or six square, grated doors, leading, apparently,
to a row of subterranean ammunition-vaults. Underneath
the escarpment is a zigzag flight of steps, screened
at exposed points by what seem to be comparatively
recent walls, or curtains of masonry, much lighter
in color than the walls of the castle itself.
Still lower down, at the base of the bluff, are two
or three huge, dark caves into which the swell of
the Caribbean Sea rolls with a dull, reverberating
roar. The height of the castle above the water
appears to be one hundred and fifty or two hundred
feet. There are very few embrasures, or port-holes,
in the gray, lichen-stained walls of the old fortification,
and, so far as I could see, it had no armament whatever
except two or three guns mounted en barbette on the
parapet of the uppermost cube, or bastion.
As a defensive work the Morro Castle
of Santiago has no importance or significance whatever,
and its complete destruction would not have made it
any easier for Admiral Sampson to force an entrance
to the harbor. It is the oldest Morro, however,
in Cuba; and as a relic of the past, and an interesting
and attractive feature in a landscape already picturesque,
it has the highest possible value, and I am more than
glad that it was not destroyed. There was no
reason, really, for bombarding it at all, because
it was perfectly harmless. The defenses of Santiago
that were really dangerous and effective were the submarine
mines in the channel and the earthwork batteries east
and west of the entrance to the harbor. Morro
was huge, formidable-looking, and impressive to the
eye and the imagination, but the horizontal reddish
streaks of freshly turned earth along the crests of
the hills east and west of it had ten times its offensive
power. I saw the last Spanish soldier leave the
castle at noon on Sunday, and when we passed it, soon
after four o’clock, its flag was gone, its walls
were deserted, and buzzards were soaring in circles
about its little corner turrets.
About one hundred and fifty yards
inside the entrance to the harbor we passed the wreck
of the Reina Mercedes, lying close to the shore,
on the right-hand side of the channel, with her port
rail under water and her masts sloping at an angle
of forty-five degrees to the westward. Two brass-bound
sea-chests and a pile of signal-flags were lying on
her deck aft, and she had not been touched, apparently,
since she was sunk by the guns of our battle-ships
on the night of July 4.
Three hundred or three hundred and
fifty yards farther in we passed what the sailors
of the fleet call “Hobson’s choice,”
the steam-collier Merrimac. She lay in
deep water, about midway from shore to shore, and
all that could be seen of her were the tops of her
masts and about two feet of her smoke-stack.
If the channel were narrow and were in the middle
of the passage, she would have blocked it completely;
but apparently it is wider than her length, and vessels
drawing twenty feet or more of water could go around
her without touching bottom. It is a little remarkable
that both combatants should have tried to obstruct
this channel and that neither should have succeeded.
The location chosen by the Spaniards seemed to me
to be a better one than that selected by Hobson; but
it is so near the mouth of the harbor that the chance
of reaching it with a vessel in the glare of our search-lights
and under the fire of our guns was a very slight one.
The Reina Mercedes reached it, but was disabled
before she could get into position.
Beyond the Merrimac the entrance
to the harbor widens a little, but the shores continue
high and steep for a distance of a mile or more.
At intervals of a few hundred yards, however, beautiful
deep coves run back into the high land on either side,
and at the head of every one the eye catches a glimpse
of a little settlement of half a dozen houses with
red-tiled roofs, or a country villa shaded by palms
and half hidden in shrubbery and flowers. One
does not often see, in the tropics or elsewhere, a
harbor entrance that is more striking and picturesque
than the watery gateway which leads from the ocean
to the spacious upper bay of Santiago. It does
not look like an inlet of the sea, but suggests rather
a tranquil, winding river, shut in by high, steep ramparts
of greenery, with here and there an opening to a beautiful
lateral cove, where the dark masses of chaparral are
relieved by clumps of graceful, white-stemmed palms
and lighted up by the solid sheets of bright-red flowers
which hide the foliage of the flamboyam, or
flame-tree.
As ours was the first vessel that
had entered the harbor in nearly two months, and as
we were flying the Red Cross flag, our arrival naturally
caused great excitement in all the little settlements
and at all the villas along the shores. Men,
women, and children ran down to the water’s
edge, waving their hats and handkerchiefs or brandishing
their arms in joyous welcome, and even old, gray-haired,
and feeble women, who could not get as far as the
shore, stood in front of their little houses, now
gazing at us in half-incredulous amazement, and then
crossing themselves devoutly with bowed heads, as if
thanking God that siege and starvation were over and
help and food at hand.
About half-way between Morro Castle
and Santiago there is a high, bare, flat-topped hill,
or mesa, called the Behia, on which there is a signal-station
with a mast for the display of flags. Just before
this hill is reached the channel widens, and, as the
steamer rounds a high, bold promontory, the beautiful
upper bay comes into view, like a great placid lake
framed in a magnificent amphitheater of mountains,
with a fringe of cocoanut-palms here and there to
break the level shore-line, and a few splashes of
vivid red where flame-trees stand out in brilliant
relief against the varied green of the mountain background.
Two miles away, on the eastern side of the harbor,
appeared the city of Santiago a sloping
expanse of red-tiled roofs, green mango-trees, and
twin-belfried Spanish churches, rising from the water’s
edge to the crest of a range of low hills which bound
the bay on that side. A week or ten days earlier
I had seen the town from the rifle-pits of the Rough
Riders at the front of our army; but its appearance
from the harbor was so different that I could hardly
recognize it as the same place. Seen from the
intrenched hill occupied by General Wheeler’s
brigade, it appeared to consist mainly of barracks,
hospitals, and shed-like buildings flying the flag
of the Red Cross, and had no beauty or picturesqueness
whatever; but from the water it seemed to be rather
an interesting and attractive Spanish-American town.
As we entered the upper bay and caught
sight of the city, some of our Red Cross nurses who
were standing with Miss Barton in a little group at
the bow of the steamer felt impelled to give expression
to their feelings in some way, and, acting upon a
sudden impulse and without premeditation, they began
to sing in unison “Praise God, from whom all
blessings flow.” Never before, probably,
had the doxology been heard on the waters of Santiago
harbor, and it must have been more welcome music to
the crowds assembling on shore than the thunder of
Admiral Sampson’s cannon and the jarring rattle
of machine-guns from the advance line of our army.
The doxology was followed by “My country, ’tis
of thee,” in which the whole ship’s company
joined with a thrill of patriotic pride; and to this
music the State of Texas glided swiftly up the
harbor to her anchorage. It was then about half-past
five. The daily afternoon thunder-shower had
just passed over the city, and its shadow still lay
heavy on the splendid group of peaks west of the bay;
but the light-green slopes of the grassy mountains
to the eastward, as well as the red roofs and gray
church steeples of the city, were bathed in the warm
yellow light of the sinking sun.
Before we had fairly come to anchor,
a great crowd had assembled on the pier nearest to
us, and in less than five minutes half a dozen small
boats were alongside, filled with people anxious to
know whether we had brought food and when we would
begin to distribute it. Many of them said that
they had not tasted bread in weeks, and all agreed
that there was nothing to eat in the city except rice,
and very little of that. We told them that we
should begin discharging the cargo of the State
of Texas early on the following morning and should
be in a position to feed ten thousand people within
the next twenty-four hours. The normal population
of the city at that time was about fifty thousand,
but a large part of it had fled to Caney and other
suburban villages to escape the bombardment, and more
than half the houses were closed and deserted.
General Shafter had entered the city with a single
regiment the Ninth Infantry at
noon, and had raised the American flag over the palace
of the Spanish governor.