Porto Rico, on May 12, but, finding no Spanish ships there, returned westward after a futile bombardment of the forts of the port. The captains of the Harvard and the St. Louis abandoned their patrol on the tenth as ordered. The next day the Spanish fleet slowly approached the island of Martinique, and, hearing of Sampson's expedition, abandoned the voyage to Porto Rico and turned to the Dutch island of Curaçao for coal. On the thirteenth the Navy Department, hearing of the arrival of the Spaniards at Martinique, ordered Commodore Schley to leave Hampton Roads for Charleston, there to await instructions for the movements of the flying squadron in coöperation with Sampson's operations against Cervera. On the fifteenth Sampson, on his way back from Porto Rico to the Havana station, was informed that the Spanish fleet was at Curaçao and that Schley had been ordered to Key West. He immediately proceeded himself to Key West to plan the strategy of the campaign against Cervera.1

It was believed that Havana or Cienfuegos (on the southern shore of Cuba with rail connections with Havana, a hundred miles distant) would be Cervera's objective. Therefore Schley was ordered on May 19 to blockade Cienfuegos with a strong fleet composed of the cruiser Brooklyn and the battleships Massachusetts, Texas, and Iowa. Cervera had actually slipped into the harbor of Santiago, more than three hundred miles to the eastward of Cienfuegos, on the same morning, but his movements had not been observed by any American vessel. Rumors of his true location, however, came from the Cuban insurgents, and Sampson ordered Schley to transfer his blockade to Santiago "if satisfied that the enemy is not at Cienfuegos." Without

1 A dramatic incident of the concentration of the American fleet was furnished by the voyage of the battleship Oregon (Captain Clark), which was at Bremerton, Washington, when the war became imminent. She left San Francisco on March 19 for her trip of fourteen thousand miles around Cape Horn to Jupiter Inlet, Florida, where she arrived on May 24 in perfect condition for immediate service. "Her performance," says Chadwick, "was one unprecedented in battleship history, and was one which will probably long preserve its unique distinction" ("The Relations of the United States and Spain," Vol. II, p. 16). The voyage of the Oregon was a potent argument for the construction of the Panama Canal.

taking pains to ascertain positively whether the Spanish fleet was at Cienfuegos, Schley was "satisfied" by smoke in the harbor that it was. Definite orders came to him the next day to sail eastward, but he stopped within twenty-seven miles of Santiago and began a "retrograde movement" toward Key West on the plea that his bunkers were low and that he could not coal from the colliers in the heavy sea. It was not until the twentyninth that Schley arrived before the harbor of Santiago.1 On June 1 he was joined by Admiral Sampson with the New York (flagship), the Oregon, and several supporting vessels. The eleven American warships now gathered off Santiago formed a semicircle of six miles' radius from the mouth of the harbor as a center and maintained a vigorous blockade night and day for more than a month.

2

As soon as Cervera's fleet was securely bottled up in Santiago harbor, preparations were made to send land forces to Cuba. President McKinley had called for 125,000 volunteers on April 25 and for 75,000 more a month later. But the work of mobilization was slow. May was more than half over before the regular troops were gathered at Tampa, Florida, and but three regiments of volunteers were ready to take part in the expedition to Cuba in June. A navy, if it is kept in existence at all, must necessarily be kept in fair condition; but an army in

1 On the very day that Schley started his retrograde movement (May 25) Cervera decided to leave the harbor of Santiago and make for San Juan in Porto Rico. He reconsidered, however, on the report of a pilot that there was doubt whether the Colón could clear a flat rock near the entrance of the harbor. His two ablest captains urged him to take out the fleet even at the risk of the injury or loss of one of the ships, since to remain in the harbor would mean the eventual destruction of them all. But Cervera held to his counsel of prudence. Had he gone out he would have found no American ships to hinder him.

2 Sampson planned to make a sortie impossible by sinking the collier Merrimac in the narrowest part of the channel. A young naval constructor, Lieutenant Richmond P. Hobson, was intrusted with the daring mission. With a crew of seven volunteers he ran the Merrimac into the harbor's mouth on the night of June 3; but shots from the batteries disabled her steering-gear, and before she could be exploded she had drifted to a broader and deeper part of the channel where her sunken hull offered no obstacle. Hobson and his men escaped death only by miracle. They were found clinging to a raft and picked up by the knightly Cervera, who sent word of their rescue to the American commander.

time of long-continued peace may become practically useless by the dry rot of futile routine and the fussy punctiliousness of superannuated officers. The delays, cross-purposes, neglects, and blunders attendant on getting an army of seventeen thousand men embarked for Cuba were unpardonable. The singletrack railroad to Tampa was crowded with trainloads of men, clothing, food, and ammunition in higgledy-piggledy fashion. Cars of meat were spoiling at one point because cars of ice were melting at another point perhaps only a few miles away. Heavy woolen clothing, fit for a winter's campaign in Montana, was sent to men going to fight in a tropical island in midsummer. Officers seized what they could, where they could, for their men to eat and wear. Men broke into the waiting cars, which were sealed with red tape, and helped themselves. No regiment knew to what transport it had been assigned, and some were divided in their scramble to get aboard. When the transports were finally loaded and crowded to suffocation, they were held for six days in Tampa harbor under a withering tropical sun because of a false report that two Spanish warships had been seen in the neighborhood. The blame for all these true charges of inefficiency, as well as for many false accusations (such as furnishing the soldiers with "embalmed beef," or canned meat preserved with harmful chemicals), was visited upon the head of the Secretary of War, General Russell A. Alger, ex-governor of Michigan. Alger was said to be more interested in distributing the patronage of his office than in administering its duties. The popular censure which he incurred for his poor management of the department forced the President to ask for his resignation the following summer. Yet Alger was rather the victim than the author of the demoralization of the department. His fault lay in the fact that his amiable nature lacked the vigor to cope with the evils and remedy them.

The troops were landed at Daiquirí, some fifteen miles to the east of Santiago, on the twenty-second of June. They found themselves in a totally unaccustomed country, amid dense growths of chaparral and underbrush, where the roads were scarcely more than trails. Proceeding a few miles westward

to the village of Siboney as his base, General W. R. Shafter, who was in command of the expedition, made his plans for the advance on Santiago. A desperate fight at Las Guásimas on June 24 proved the valor of the American regulars and volunteers alike to drive the enemy from a superior position on high ground, and brought our army to the foot of the fortified hills of El Caney and San Juan, which protect the city of Santiago on the east. On June 30 General Shafter notified Admiral Sampson that he would attack the Spanish positions on the morrow, asking the American fleet to coöperate by a bombardment of the city.

The story of the magnificent assaults of the American troops on the first of July cannot be told in detail.1 There were three separate actions. On the right Generals Lawton, Chaffee, and Ludlow carried the heights crowned by the village of El Caney, after a desperate engagement in which they lost a tenth of their men. Hawkins, Kent, Sumner, and Wikoff (who was slain) stormed the still more important hill of San Juan to the left. Between the two assaulting columns of regulars, the First Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, popularly known as the "Rough Riders," led by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, charged on foot, in the

2

1 For the best account see Chadwick's "The Relations of the United States and Spain," Vol. II, pp. 48-113.

2 Roosevelt, after serving six years (1889-1895) as Civil Service Commissioner under Harrison and Cleveland and two years (1895-1897) as president of the New York police board, had been appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by McKinley. He had been from the beginning an ardent advocate of the forcible ejection of Spain from Cuba. It was he who secured the appointment of Dewey to the command of the Asiatic squadron. Ten days after the destruction of the Maine he had sent Dewey the famous cable to make ready for war. When the war broke out, Roosevelt resigned his position in the Navy Department and secured from his friend Secretary Alger permission to raise a volunteer regiment of cavalry, insisting, however, on account of his inexperience in commanding troops in the field, upon taking the subordinate commission of lieutenant-colonel under the superior command of Leonard Wood. The regiment, recruited at San Antonio, Texas, was unique in the history of the United States army. It consisted for the most part of cow-punchers, hunters, and mining prospectors from our territory in the southwest, "tall and sinewy men with resolute, weather-beaten faces, and eyes that looked a man straight in the face without flinching." Mingled with these were crack athletes from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and Cherokees and Chick