made public by the War and Navy Departments, and the numerous books and magazine articles written by participants in the war. On the Spanish side comparatively little has been published, but there is interesting material in the works of Lieutenant Müller and Captain Severo Gomez Nuñez, which have been translated and printed by the Bureau of Naval Intelligence, and in a few letters and reports by Admirals Cervera and Montojo and other officers. This narrative appeared serially in Munsey's Magazine, and has since been revised in the light of recently published evidence and of letters received by the writer. RICHARD H. TITHERINGTON. NEW YORK, December, 1899. THE war of 1898 between the United States and Spain was the logical and inevitable ending of a long chapter of history. The conditions that caused it began with the earliest settlements of the English and the Latin peoples in the new world. The race that was to dominate the wide continent of North America came into conflict with its French rivals two centuries ago, and their struggle was decided by Wolfe at Quebec in 1759. While Spain held Florida and Louisiana, hostilities with the English colonies, which had now become the United States, were a constant probability, and were averted only by the timely cession of both those great provinces. The possession of Texas and California was the prize of victory in the war of 1846 and 1847 against the Spaniards of Mexico-a war that seems to have finally settled the southwestern frontier of the Union. Cuba, lying scarcely more than a hundred miles from the shores of the great republic, facing its southern seaports, and commanding the Gulf of Mexico, is geographically as necessary an appanage of its territory as Florida. Under Spanish rule the so-called Pearl of the Antilles has been an unfailing source of anxiety in the foreign relations of the United States, a perpetual problem to American statesmen-a problem to which there could be but one ultimate solution. The unhappy island has long been a running sore in the body politic of the northern half of the new world. It is extraordinary that the nineteenth century should almost have ended before the great power to which Nature has set her in such close relation found itself compelled to draw the sword against the government responsible for her intolerable condition. Discovery of It was the first westward voyage of Columbus that made Cuba known to European civilization. Sixteen days after the Italian navigator's landing on the island that he christened San Salvador-which was probably Watling's Island-he sighted the Cuban coast at a point near the present site of Nuevitas. This was on the 28th of October, old style, or the 7th of November, new style, in the year 1492. Here was no low-lying islet, such as he had seen in the Bahamas; it was a land of forests and rivers and noble mountains-a part, doubtless, of the Asiatic mainland of which Columbus was in search. In the discoverer's optimistic way he described it in his diary as "the most beautiful land that human eyes ever beheld." The natives received him with wondering hospitality, but, naturally enough, could give him little information. Hearing them mention a village or district called Cubanacan, Columbus concluded that he had reached the dominions of Kublai Khan, the great Tartar sovereign whose court Marco Polo visited two hundred years before. He sent some of his men inland, as ambassadors to the reigning prince; but after travelling a dozen leagues they came back, reporting that they could find no prince, no cities, no roads-nothing but the same primitive villages of naked, harmless Indians. Columbus spent two months on the northern coast of Cuba; then he sailed from Cape Maysi— |