The circumstances in which this fever first made its appearance were as follows: When the army landed at Siboney it found there a dirty little Cuban village of from twelve to twenty deserted houses, situated at the bottom of a wedge-shaped cleft in the long, rocky rampart which forms the coast-line between Siboney and Morro Castle, and at the mouth of a low, swampy, malarious ravine or valley extending back into the foot-hills, and opening upon the sea through the notch. The site of the village, from a sanitary point of view, was a very bad one, not only because it was low and confined, but because in the valley immediately back of it there were a number of stagnant, foul-smelling ponds and pools, half overgrown with rank tropical vegetation, and so full of decaying organic matter that when I passed them for the first time on my way to the front I instinctively held my breath as much as possible because the very air from them seemed poisonous. The houses of the village, as a result of long neglect, had become as objectionable from a sanitary point of view as the location in which they stood. They were rather large, well-built, one-story frame houses with zinc roofs, and were erected, if I mistake not, by the Spanish-American Iron Company for the accommodation of its native employees. Originally they must have been very commodious and comfortable buildings, but through theneglect and untidiness of their later occupants they had become so dirty that no self-respecting human being would be willing to live in them.
Such were the village and the houses of Siboney when the army landed there on June 23. In view of the nature of the Cuban climate during the rainy season, and the danger of infection from abandoned houses whose history was entirely unknown, and within whose walls there might have been yellow fever, it was obviously somebody's duty not only to clean up the place as far as possible, but to decide whether the houses should be burned to the ground as probable sources of infection, or, on the other hand, washed out, fumigated, and used. The surgeons of the blockading fleet recommended that the buildings be destroyed, for the reason that if Siboney were to be the army's base of supplies it would be imprudent to run the risk of infection by allowing them to be used. Instead of acting upon this advice, however, the army officers in command at Siboney not only allowed the houses to be occupied from the very first, but put men into them without either disinfecting them or cleaning their dirty floors. Chlorid of lime was not used anywhere, and the foul privies immediately back of and adjoining the houses were permitted to stand in the condition in which they were found, so that the daily rains washed the excrement from them down under the floors to saturate further the already contaminated soil.
When we returned from the front on July 9, we found the condition of the village worse than ever. No attempt, apparently, had been made to clean or disinfect it; no sanitary precautions had been taken or health regulations enforced; hundreds of incredibly dirty and ragged Cubans—some of them employed in discharging the government transports and some of them merely loafers, camp-followers, and thieves—thronged the beach, evacuating their bowels inthe bushes and throwing remnants of food about on the ground to rot in the hot sunshine; there was a dead and decomposing mule in one of the stagnant pools behind the village, and the whole place stank. If, under such conditions, an epidemic of fever had not broken out, it would have been so strange as to border on the miraculous. Nature alone would probably have brought it about, but when nature and man coöperated the result was certain. On July 8 the army surgeons reported three cases of yellow fever among the sick in the abandoned Spanish houses on shore. On the 10th the number of cases had increased to thirty, and included Dr. Lesser, chief surgeon of the Red Cross, and his wife, two Red Cross nurses, and Mrs. Trumbull White, wife of the correspondent of the Chicago "Record," who had been working as a nurse in the Red Cross hospital.
On the 11th General Miles arrived from Washington, and on ascertaining the state of affairs ordered the burning of every house in the village. I doubt very much whether this step was necessary or judicious, for the reason that it was taken too late. If there was any reason to believe, when the army first began to disembark at Siboney, that the houses of the village were likely to become sources of infection, they should have been burned or fumigated at once. To burn them after they had set yellow fever afloat in that malarious and polluted atmosphere was like locking the stable door after the horse has been stolen. But it is very questionable whether they should have been burned at any time. In a country like eastern Cuba, where at intervals of two or three days throughout the wet season there is a tropical downpour of rain which deluges the ground and beats through the most closely woven tent, a house with a tight zinc roof and a dry floor is a most valuable possession, and it should not be destroyed if there is any way of disinfecting it and making it a safe place of human habitation. All the evidence obtainable in Santiago was to the effect that these houses were not infected with yellow fever; but even if they had been, it was quite possible, I think, to save them and make them useful. If, when the army landed, the best of the buildings had been thoroughly cleaned and then fumigated by shutting them up tightly and burning sulphur and other suitable chemical substances in them, the disease-germs that they contained might have been destroyed. Convict barges saturated with the germs of smallpox, typhus, dysentery, and all sorts of infectious and contagious diseases are treated in this way in Siberia, and there is no reason why houses should not be so purified in Cuba. General Miles and his chief surgeon decided, however, that the whole village should be burned, and burned it was. The postal, telegraph, and signal-service officers were turned out of their quarters and put into tents; a yellow-fever camp was established in the hills about two miles north of Siboney; more hospital tents and tent-flies were pitched along the sea-coast west of the notch; and as fast as sick and wounded soldiers could be removed from the condemned houses and put under canvas or sent to the yellow-fever camp, the houses were destroyed.
In view of the fact that yellow fever had made its appearance in the army before Santiago as well as at Siboney, Miss Barton, acting under the advice and direction of Major Wood, chief surgeon of the First Division hospital, abandoned the Red Cross station at the front, brought all its equipment and supplies back to the sea-coast, and put them again on board theState of Texas. She also decided not to allow fever-stricken employees of the Red Cross to be cared for on board the steamer, and Dr. and Mrs. Lesser and two nurses were therefore carried on their cots to a railroad-train and transported to the yellow-fever camp two miles away. I went through the fever hospital where they lay just before they were removed, and made up my mind—very ignorantlyand presumptuously, perhaps—that neither they nor any of the patients whom I saw had yellow fever, either in a mild form or in any form whatever. They seemed to me to have nothing more than calenture, brought on by overwork, a malarious atmosphere, and a bad sanitary environment. Mrs. White, who was also said to have yellow fever, recovered in three days, just in time to escape being sent to the yellow-fever camp with Dr. and Mrs. Lesser. I have no doubt that there were some yellow-fever cases among the sick who were sent to the camp at the time when the village of Siboney was burned, but I did not happen to see any of them, and it is the opinion of many persons who are far better qualified to judge than I, that yellow-fever cases and calenture cases were lumped together without much discrimination, and that the latter greatly outnumbered the former.
On July 15 the number of so-called yellow-fever cases exceeded one hundred, and the most energetic measures were being taken by the medical authorities on shore to prevent the further spread of the disease. Everything that could possibly hold or transmit infection was burned, including my blankets, mackintosh-cape, etc., which I had accidentally left in the post-office overnight, as well as all the baggage and personal effects of the postal clerks. Mr. Brewer, the postmaster, died of the fever, Mr. Kempner, the assistant postmaster, was reduced to sleeping in a camp-chair out of doors without overcoat or blanket, and the telegraph and telephone operators worked night and day in a damp, badly ventilated tent, with their feet literally in pools of mud and water.
On July 15 we heard at Siboney that Santiago had surrendered, and on the following day we steamed down to the mouth of Santiago harbor, with a faint hope that we might be permitted to enter. Admiral Sampson, however, informedus that the surrender, although agreed upon, had not yet taken place, and that it would be impossible for us to enter the harbor until after Morro Castle and the shore batteries had been evacuated. We then sailed for Guantanamo Bay, with the intention of landing more supplies for the refugees in that district; but inasmuch as we had been lying in the fever-infected port of Siboney, Captain McCalla, who came out to the mouth of the bay in a steam-launch to meet us, refused to take the supplies, and would not let us communicate with the shore. On the night of July 16, therefore, we returned to Siboney, and at noon on the 17th we were again off Morro Castle, waiting for an opportunity to enter the harbor.
ENTERING SANTIAGO HARBOR
Assoon as possible after our return from Guantanamo, Miss Barton sent a note to Admiral Sampson, on board the flagshipNew 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 theState 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 theNew Yorkhad 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 theState of Texasexcept the narrowness of the unobstructed part of the channel. The collierMerrimac, 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-shipReina Mercedesin such a position that she would close the channel at a point where it is very narrow, between theMerrimacand 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 theMerrimac.
At four o'clock Admiral Sampson sent Lieutenant Capehart on board theState of Texasto 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 sucha 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 sawthe 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 theReina 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-collierMerrimac. 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. TheReina Mercedesreached it, but was disabled before she could get into position.[5]
Beyond theMerrimacthe 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 theflamboyam, 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 thrillof patriotic pride; and to this music theState of Texasglided 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 theState of Texasearly 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.
THE CAPTURED CITY
Welay at anchor all Sunday night off the foot of the street known as Calle Baja de la Marina, and early on Monday morning steamed up to the most spacious and convenient pier in the city, made fast our lines, and began to discharge cargo. The dock and warehouse facilities of Santiago are fairly good. They are not so extensive as those of an American seaport of equal importance, but so far as they go they leave little to be desired. The pier at which theState of Texaslay was spacious and well built; an iron tramway ran from it to the customs warehouse, and, with the help of one hundred stevedores, Mr. Warner, of Miss Barton's staff, found it possible to unload and store from three hundred and twenty-five to three hundred and fifty tons of foodstuffs per day. As soon as the steamer had made fast her lines a great crowd of forlorn-looking men and children, clothed in the loose, dirty white-cotton shirts and trousers and battered straw hats which make up the costume of the lower classes, assembled on the pier to stare at the newcomers and watch the unloading of the ship. They were of all ages and complexions, from coal-black, grizzle-headed old negroes leaning on canes to half-starved and half-naked Cuban children, whose tallowy faces and distended abdomens were unmistakable evidences of fever and famine. They were not, asa rule, emaciated, nor did they seem to be in the last stages of starvation; but the eagerness with which they crowded about the open ports of the steamer, and watched the bags of beans, rice, and corn-meal as they were brought out by the stevedores and placed on the little flat-cars of the tramway, showed that at least they were desperately hungry. Now and then a few beans, or a few grains of rice, would escape from one of the bags through a small rip or tear, and in an instant half a dozen little children would be scrambling for them, collecting them carefully one by one, and putting them into their hats or tying them up in their shirt-tails and the hems of their tattered frocks. In one instance half a bushel or more of corn-meal escaped from a torn bag and lay in a heap on the dirty pier. One of the prowling Cuban boys espied it, gathered up a hatful of it, and then looked around for something in which he could put the remainder. Failing to see anything that could be utilized as a receptacle, he seemed for a moment to be in despair; but presently a bright thought flashed into his mind, and was reflected in his thin, eager, street-Arab face. Taking out of his pocket two bits of dirty string, he tied his loose cotton trousers tightly around his ankles, and then, unbuttoning his waist-band, he began scooping up the corn-meal from the filthy planks and shoveling it into his baggy breeches. Five minutes later he waddled off the pier in triumph, looking, so far as his legs were concerned, like a big, badly stuffed sawdust doll, or a half-starved gamin suffering from elephantiasis.
As the day advanced, the number of men and children who crowded about the steamer watching for opportunities to pilfer or pick up food became so great that it was necessary to clear the pier and put a guard of soldiers there to exclude the public altogether. Then the hungry people formed in a dense mass in the street opposite the steamer, and stood there in the blazing sunshine for hours, watching the little flat-carsloaded with provisions as they were rolled past to the warehouse. From an English cable-operator, who came down to the pier, we learned that for weeks there had been nothing in the city to eat except rice, and that the supply even of that was limited. Hard-bread crackers had sold as high as one dollar apiece and canned meat at four dollars a can, and many well-to-do families had not tasted bread, meat, or milk in more than a month.
Although there was said to be little or no yellow fever in Santiago, the captain of theState of Texasdecided to quarantine the steamer against the shore, and gave notice to all on board that if any person left the ship he could not return to it. This made going ashore a serious matter, because there was virtually nothing to eat in the city, and no place for a stranger to stay, and if one cut loose from the steamer he might find himself without shelter and without any means whatever of subsistence. We had on board, fortunately, a young American named Elwell, who had lived several years in Santiago, and was well acquainted not only with its resources, but with a large number of its citizens. He said that there was a club there known as the Anglo-American Club, organized and supported by the foreign merchants of the city and the English cable-operators. Of this club he was one of the organizers and charter members, and although it had been closed during the blockade and siege, it would probably be reopened at once, and with an introduction from him I could get a room in it. He doubted whether the steward could give me anything to eat, but I could take food enough with me to last for a day or two, and as soon as possible arrangements would be made to supply the club with provisions from theState of Texas. Encouraged by this statement of the possibilities, I decided on Tuesday morning to abandon the steamer and trust myself to the tender mercies of the city and the Anglo-American Club. Hastily packing up acouple of hand-bags, and hiring a ragged, dirty Cuban to carry them and act in the capacity of guide, I left the ship, elbowed my way through the crowd of people at the head of the pier, and entered one of the narrow, ill-paved, and incredibly dirty streets which lead upward from the water-front to the higher part of the city.
The first impression made by Santiago upon the newcomer in July, 1898, was one of dirt, disorder, and neglect. It always had the reputation of being the dirtiest city in Cuba, and at the time of the surrender it was at its worst. I hardly know how to give an adequate idea of it to one who is not familiar with Spanish-American cities and architecture, but I will try. In the first place, the site of the city is the slope of a hill which falls rather steeply to the water on the eastern side of the bay. The most important streets, such as Enramadas and Calle Baja de la Marina, extend up and down the slope at right angles to the water-front, and are crossed at fairly regular intervals by narrower streets or alleys running horizontally along the hillside, following its contour and dipping down here and there into the gullies or ravines which stretch from the crest of the hill to the shore of the bay. As a result of the natural configuration of the ground there is hardly a street in the city that is even approximately level except the wide boulevard which forms the water-front. The east and west streets climb a rather steep grade from this boulevard to the crest of the elevation, and the north and south streets run up and down over the ridges and into the gullies of the undulating slope, so that wherever one goes one finds one's self either ascending or descending a hill. The widest streets in the city—exclusive of the Cristina Boulevard—are hardly more than thirty feet from curb to curb, and the narrowest do not exceed fifteen. The pavements at the time of my visit were made of unbroken stones and rocks from the size of one's fist to the size of abushel-basket; the sidewalks averaged from two to three and a half feet in width, and the gutters were open drains, broken here and there by holes and pockets filled with decaying garbage and dirty, foul-smelling water. Piles of mango-skins, ashes, old bones, filthy rags, dung, and kitchen refuse of all sorts lay here and there on the broken and neglected pavements, poisoning the air with foul exhalations and affording sustenance to hundreds of buzzards and myriads of flies; little rills of foul, discolored water trickled into the open gutters at intervals from the kitchens and cesspools of the adjoining houses; every hole and crevice in the uneven pavement was filled with rotting organic matter washed down from the higher levels by the frequent rains, and when the sea-breeze died away at night the whole atmosphere of the city seemed to be pervaded by a sickly, indescribable odor of corruption and decay. I had expected, as a matter of course, to find Santiago in bad sanitary condition, but I must confess that I felt a little sinking of the heart when I first breathed that polluted air and realized that for me there was no return to the ship and that I must henceforth eat, work, and sleep in that fever-breeding environment. In a long and tolerably varied experience in Russia, the Caucasus, Asia Minor, and European Turkey, I have never seen streets so filthy as in some parts of this Cuban city, nor have I ever encountered such a variety of abominable stenches as I met with in the course of my short walk from the steamer to the Anglo-American Club.
The houses and shops which stood along these narrow, dirty streets were generally one story in height, with red-tiled roofs, high, blank walls of stuccoed or plastered brick covered with a calcimine wash of pale blue or dirty yellow, large, heavy plank doors, and equally large, unglazed windows protected by prison gratings of iron bars and closed with tight inner shutters. There were no trees in the streets,—atleast, in the business part of the city,—no yards in front of the houses, no shop-windows for the display of goods, and no windows of glass even in the best private houses. I cannot remember to have seen a pane of window-glass in this part of Cuba. The windows of both shops and houses were mere rectangular openings in the wall, six feet by ten or twelve feet in size, filled with heavy iron gratings or protected by ornamental metal scrollwork embedded all around in the solid masonry. These barred windows, with the heavy plank doors, thick stuccoed walls, and complete absence of architectural ornament, made the narrow, muddy streets look almost as gloomy and forbidding as if they were shut in by long rows of Russian prisons. The natural gloominess of the city, due to the narrowness of the streets and the character of the architecture, was heightened at the time of the surrender by the absence of a large part of the population and the consequent shutting up of more than half the houses. Thousands of men, women, and children had fled to Caney and other suburban villages to escape the bombardment, and the long rows of closed and empty houses in some of the streets suggested a city stricken by pestilence and abandoned. At the time when we landed there was not a shop or a store open in any part of Santiago. Here and there one might see a colored woman peering out through the grated window of a private house, or two or three naked children with tallowy complexions and swollen abdomens playing in the muddy gutter, but as a rule the houses were shut and barred and the streets deserted.
The first pleasant impression that I received in Santiago was made by the Anglo-American Club. It was situated on a narrow, dirty street behind the Spanish theater, in a very low, disreputable part of the city, and did not impress me, at first sight, as being likely to afford even the ordinary necessaries and comforts of life, much less the luxuries andconveniences suggested to the mind of a city man by the word "club." But external appearance in a Spanish-American city is often deceptive, and it was so in this case. Opposite the rear or stage entrance of the theater, where half a dozen soldiers of the Ninth Infantry were cooking breakfast in the street, my ragged Cuban guide turned into a dark vaulted passage which looked as if it might be one of the approaches to a jail. "It can't be possible," I said to myself, "that this damp, gloomy tunnel is the entrance to a club; the guide must have misunderstood the directions given him."
But the guide was right. At a distance of thirty-five or forty feet from the street the vaulted passage opened into a paved patio, or court,—a sort of large, square well,—in the center of which stood a green, thrifty, broad-leaved banana-tree, fifteen or twenty feet in height. From the corners of this court, on the side opposite the street entrance, two broad flights of steps led up to what seemed to be a hanging garden of greenery and flowers, shut in on all sides by piazzas and galleries. Climbing one of these flights of steps, I found myself in a second and higher patio, shaded by large mango-and mamonilla-trees, brightened by borders of flowering shrubs and plants, and filled with the fragrance of roses, geraniums, and pomegranate blossoms. The transition from the heat, filth, and sickening odors of the narrow street to the seclusion and shady coolness of this flower-scented patio was as delightful as it was sudden and unexpected. I could hardly have been more surprised if I had entered what I supposed to be a Siberian forwarding prison, and found myself in a conservatory of tropical plants and flowers. Around three sides of the patio were spacious piazzas in two tiers, and upon these piazzas opened the living-rooms of the club,—about twenty in number,—like the boxes or stalls in the galleries of a European theater. On the southern sideof the patio was a large dining-room, and beyond this, occupying the whole width of the building and overlooking the street from a projecting balcony, was the reading-room. This was a high, cool, spacious apartment comfortably furnished with easy-chairs, pictures, maps, hanging book-cases, a big library table covered with periodicals, and an American piano. The periodicals were not of very recent date, and the piano was somewhat out of tune, but I was so delighted with the shady, flower-bordered courtyard and the comfort and apparent cleanliness of the club as a whole that I felt no disposition to be hypercritical. To find such a haven of refuge at all in a city like Santiago was unexpected good fortune.
To one who is unfamiliar with the distinctive peculiarities of Spanish-American architecture, nothing, at first, is more surprising than the contrast between the gloomy and unpromising exterior of a Cuban residence and the luxury and architectural beauty which one often finds hidden behind its grated windows and thick stuccoed walls. It is more surprising and striking in Santiago, perhaps, than in most Spanish-American cities, on account of the narrowness and filthiness of the streets on which the houses even of the wealthiest citizens stand. In the course of the first week that I spent in the city I had occasion to enter a number of Spanish houses of the better class, and I never failed to experience a little shock of surprise when I went from what looked like a dirty and neglected back alley into what seemed to be a jail, and found myself suddenly in a beautiful Moorish court, paved with marble, shaded by graceful, feathery palms, cooled by a fountain set in an oasis of greenery and flowers, and surrounded by rows of slender stone columns, and piazzas twenty-five feet in width. The wealthy Spaniard or Cuban wastes no money in beautifying the outside of his house, because, standing as it does on a narrow, dirty street, it cannot be made attractive or imposing by any possiblemethod of architectural treatment; but upon the ornamentation and embellishment of the patio, or interior court, he lavishes all his taste and skill. The patio of the Anglo-American Club was not nearly as large and attractive as the courtyards of private residences on Heredia Street, to which I gained access later, but as it was the first house of the kind that I had seen in Cuba, it made a very pleasant impression upon me.
Upon presentation of my introduction from Mr. Elwell, the steward gave me one of the best rooms in the club, but said that it would be impossible to furnish me with food until he could get a cook and servants. The club had been closed for weeks; all of its employees had fled from the city, and he had been left entirely alone. I told him that I would try to forage for myself,—at least, for the present,—and that, if worst should come to worst, I could live two or three days on the hard bread and baked beans that I had brought with me from the ship. Refreshing myself with a bath, a cracker of hard bread, and a drink of lukewarm tea from my canteen, I left my baggage in the steward's care and set out to explore the city.
The only part of Santiago which then presented anything like a clean and civilized appearance is that which adjoins the so-called "palace" of the Spanish governor, on the crest of the hill at the head of Marina Street. There, around a small, dusty, bush-planted plaza, or park, stand the governor's residence, the old twin-belfried cathedral, the San Carlos or Cuban Club, the "Venus" restaurant, the post-office, and a few other public or semi-public buildings which make some pretensions to architectural dignity. With the exception of the massive stone cathedral, however, they are all low, one-story or two-story brick houses covered with dirty white stucco, and would be regarded anywhere except in Santiago as cheap, ugly, and insignificant.
In the course of my walk from the club to the plaza I meta few Cuban negroes in dirty white-cotton shirts and trousers, and half a dozen or more pale-faced Spanish soldiers, but the streets in that part of the city seemed to be almost wholly deserted. Beyond the plaza, however, on Enramadas Street, I began to meet the stream of destitute refugees returning to the city from Caney, and a more dirty, hungry, sick, and dejected-looking horde of people I had never seen. When General Shafter gave notice to the Spanish military authorities that if Santiago were not surrendered it would be bombarded, fifteen thousand men, women, and children abandoned their homes and fled, most of them on foot, to various suburban villages north of the city. Most of these fugitives went to Caney, where, for nearly two weeks, they camped out in the streets, suffering everything that human beings can suffer from hunger, sickness, and exposure. Both General Shafter and the Red Cross made every possible effort to relieve them by sending provisions to them from Siboney; but the distance from that base of supplies was fifteen miles or more over a terrible road, the number of horses and mules available for transportation was hardly adequate to supply even our own army with ammunition and food, and the most that could be done for the refugees at Caney was to keep them from actually starving to death. Hundreds of them perished, but they died from exposure, exhaustion, and sickness, rather than from starvation. As soon as Santiago surrendered, these fugitives began to stream back into the city, and it was the advance-guard of them that I met on Enramadas Street on Tuesday morning. They represented both sexes, all ages, all complexions, and all classes of the population, from poor Cuban or negro women carrying huge bundles on their heads and leading three or four half-naked children, to cultivated, delicately nurtured, English-speaking ladies, wading through the mud in bedraggled white gowns, carrying nothing, perhaps, except a kitten or a cage of pet birds.Many of them were so ill and weak from dysentery or malarial fever that they could hardly limp along, even with the support of a cane, and all of them looked worn, exhausted, and emaciated to the last degree. Hundreds of these refugees died, after their return to Santiago, from diseases contracted in Caney, and if it had not been for the prompt relief given them by the Red Cross as soon as they reached the city, they would have perished by the thousand. With the aid and coöperation of Mr. Ramsden, son of the British consul, Mr. Michelson, a wealthy resident merchant, and two or three other foreign residents of Santiago, Miss Barton opened a soup-kitchen on shore, as soon as provisions enough had been landed from theState of Texasto make a beginning, and before Tuesday night the representatives of the Red Cross had given bread and hot soup to more than ten thousand sick and half-starved people, most of them returned refugees from Caney, who could not get a mouthful to eat elsewhere in the city, and who were literally perishing from hunger and exhaustion.
THE FEEDING OF THE HUNGRY
Theproblem of supplying myself with food and drink in the half-starved city of Santiago, after the steamer had been quarantined against me, proved to be even more serious than I had anticipated. In my walk up Marina and Enramadas streets and out to the Caney road on Tuesday forenoon I passed two or three restaurants bearing such seductive and tantalizing names as "Venus," "Nectar," and "Delicias," etc., but they were all closed, and in a stroll of two miles through the heart of the city I failed to discover any food more "delicious" than a few half-ripe mangoes in the dirty basket of a Cuban fruit-peddler, or any "nectar" more drinkable than the water which ran into the gutter, here and there, from the broken or leaky pipes of the city water-works. Hot, tired, and dispirited, I returned about noon to the Anglo-American Club, took another drink of lukewarm tea from my canteen, nibbled a piece of hard bread, and opened a can of baked beans. The beans proved to be flavored with tomato sauce, which I dislike; the hard bread was stale and tasted of the haversack in which I had brought it ashore; and the tea was neither strong enough to inebriate nor yet cool enough to cheer. There did not seem to be any encouraging probability that I should be fed by Cuban ravens or nourished by manna from the blazing Cuban skies, and in the absenceof some such miraculous interposition of Providence I should evidently have either to go with a tin cup to the Red Cross soup-kitchen and beg for a portion of soup on the ground that I was a destitute and starving reconcentrado, or else return to the pier where theState of Texaslay, hail somebody on deck, and ask to have food lowered to me over the ship's side. I could certainly drink a cup of coffee and eat a plate of corned-beef hash on the dock without serious danger of infecting the ship with yellow fever, typhus, cholera, or smallpox; and if the captain should object to my being fed in that way on the ground that the ship's dishes might be contaminated by my feverish touch, I was fully prepared to put my pride in my pocket and meekly receive my rations in an old tomato-can or a paper bag tied to the end of a string.
With all due respect for Red Cross soup, and the most implicit confidence in Red Cross soup-kitchens, I inclined to the belief that I should fare better if I got my nourishment from theState of Texas—even at the end of a string—than if I went to the Cuban soup-kitchen and claimed food as a reconcentrado, a refugee, or a repentant prodigal son. In the greasy, weather-stained suit of brown canvas and mud-bespattered pith helmet that I had worn at the front, I might play any one of these roles with success, and my forlorn and disreputable appearance would doubtless secure for me at least two tincupfuls of soup; but what I longed for most was coffee, and that beverage was not to be had in the Cuban soup-kitchen. I resolved, therefore, to go to the pier, affirm with uplifted hand that I was not suffering from yellow fever, typhus fever, remittent fever, malarial fever, pernicious fever, cholera, or smallpox, and beg somebody to lower to me over the ship's side a cup of coffee in an old tomato-can and a mutton-chop at the end of a fishing-line. I was ready to promise that I would immediately fumigate the fishing-line and throw the empty tomato-can into the bay, so that theState of Texasshould not run the slightest risk of becoming infected with the diseases that I did not have.
About half-past one, when I thought Miss Barton and her staff would have finished their luncheon, I walked down Gallo Street to the pier where the steamer was discharging her cargo, hailed a sailor on deck, and asked him if he would please tell Mrs. Porter (wife of the Hon. J. Addison Porter, secretary to the President) that a Cuban refugee in distress would like to speak to her at the ship's side. In two or three minutes Mrs. Porter's surprised but sympathetic face appeared over the steamer's rail twenty-five or thirty feet above my head. Raising my voice so as to make it audible above the shouting of the stevedores, the snorting of the donkey-engine, and the rattle of the hoisting-tackle, I told her that I had not been able to find anything to eat in the city, and asked her if she would not please get my table-steward "Tommy" to lower to me over the ship's side a few slices of bread and butter and a cup of coffee. A half-shocked and half-indignant expression came into her face as she mentally grasped the situation, and she replied with emphasis: "Certainly! just wait a minute." She rushed back into the cabin to call Tommy, while I sat down on a bag of beans with the comforting assurance that if I did not get something to eat that afternoon there would be a fracas on theState of Texas. Mrs. Porter evidently regarded it as an extraordinary state of affairs which forced the vice-president of the Red Cross to go hungry in a starving city because a ship flying the Red Cross flag refused to allow him on board.
In five minutes more Tommy appeared in the starboard gangway of the main-deck, and lowered down to me on a tray a most appetizing lunch of bread and butter, cold meats, fried potatoes, preserved peaches, ice-water, and coffee. I resumed my seat on the bag of beans, holding the tray on my knees, and gave myself up to the enjoymentof the first meal I had had in Santiago, and the best one, it seemed to me, that ever gladdened the heart of a hungry human being in any city. The temperature in the fierce sunshine which beat down on my back was at least 130° F.; the cold meats were immediately warmed up, the butter turned to a yellowish fluid which could have been applied to bread only with a paint-brush, and perspiration ran off my nose into my coffee-cup as I drank; but the coffee and the fried potatoes kept hot without the aid of artificial appliances, and I emptied the glass of ice-water in two or three thirsty gulps before it had time to come to a boil. Mrs. Porter watched me with sympathetic interest, as if she were enjoying my lunch even more than she had enjoyed her own, and when I had finished she said: "It is absurd that you should have to take your meals on that hot, dirty pier; but if you'll come down every day and call for me, I'll see that you get enough to eat, even if they don't allow you on board."
All the rest of that week I slept in the Anglo-American Club and took my meals on the pier of the Juragua Iron Company, Mrs. Porter keeping me abundantly supplied with food, while I tried to make my society an equivalent for my board by furnishing her, three times a day, with the news of the city. Getting my meals in a basket or on a tray over the ship's side and eating them alone on the pier was rather humiliating at first, and made me feel, for a day or two, like a homeless tramp subsisting on charity; but when General Wood, the military governor of the city, and Dr. Van De Water, chaplain of the Seventy-first New York, came down to theState of Texasone afternoon to see Mrs. Porter and were not allowed to go on board, even for a drink of water, my self-respect was measurably restored. Dr. Van De Water had walked into the city from the camp of his regiment, a distance of two or three miles, in the fierce tropical sunshine, and was evidently suffering acutely from fatigue and thirst;but theState of Texas, where, under the Red Cross flag, he naturally expected to find rest and refreshment, was barred against him, and he had to get his drink of water, as I got my daily bread, over the ship's side. The quarantine of the steamer against the shore would perhaps have been a little more consistent, as well as more effective, if the officers who superintended the unloading and storing of the cargo had not been permitted to visit every day the lowest and dirtiest part of the city and then return to the steamer to eat and sleep, and if the crew had not been allowed to roam about the streets in search of adventures at night; but I suppose it was found impracticable to enforce the quarantine against everybody, and the most serious and threatening source of infection was removed, of course, when General Wood, Dr. Van De Water, and the vice-president of the Red Cross were rigidly excluded from the ship.
While I was living at the Anglo-American Club and boarding on the pier of the Juragua Iron Company the deserted and half-dead city of Santiago was slowly awakening to life and activity. The empty streets filled gradually with American soldiers, paroled Spanish prisoners, and returning fugitives from Caney; shops that had long been shut and barred were thrown open under the assurance of protection given by the American flag; kerosene-lamps on brackets fastened to the walls of houses at the corners of the narrow streets were lighted at night so that pedestrians could get about without danger of tumbling into holes or falling over garbage-heaps; government transports suddenly made their appearance in the bay, and as many of them as could find accommodation at the piers began to discharge cargo; six-mule army wagons rumbled and rattled over the rough cobblestone pavements as they came in from the camps after supplies; hundreds of hungry and destitute Cubans were set at work cleaning the filthy streets; and in less than a week Santiagohad assumed something like the appearance that it must have presented before the siege and capture. The thing that it needed most in the first fortnight after the surrender was a hotel, and a hotel it did not have. Newspaper correspondents, officers who had come into the city from the camps, and passengers landed from the steamers had no place to go for food or shelter, and many of them were forced to bivouac in the streets. Captain William Astor Chanler, for example, tied his saddle-horse to his leg one night and lay down to sleep on the pavement of the plaza in front of the old cathedral.
The urgent need of a hotel finally compelled the steward of the Anglo-American Club to throw open its twenty or more rooms to army officers, cable-operators, and newspaper correspondents who had no other place to stay, and to make an attempt, at least, to supply them with food. A few cases of canned meat and beans and a barrel of hard bread were obtained from the storehouse of the Red Cross; a cook and three or four negro waiters were hired; and before the end of the first week after the capture of the city the club was furnishing two meals a day to as many guests as its rooms would accommodate, and had become the most interesting and attractive place of social and intellectual entertainment to be found on the island. One might meet there, almost any night, English war correspondents who had campaigned in India, Egypt, and the Sudan; Cuban sympathizers from the United States who had served in the armies of Gomez and Garcia; old Indian fighters and ranch-men from our Western plains and mountains; wealthy New York club-men in the brown-linen uniform of Roosevelt's Rough Riders; naval officers from the fleet of Admiral Sampson; and speculators, coffee-planters, and merchant adventurers from all parts of the western hemisphere. One could hardly ask a question with regard to any part of thehabitable globe or any event of modern times that somebody in the club could not answer with all the fullness of personal knowledge, and the conversation around the big library table in the evening was more interesting and entertaining than any talk that I had heard in months. But the evenings were not always given up wholly to conversation. Sometimes Mr. Cobleigh of the New York "World," who had a very good tenor voice, would seat himself at the piano and sing "White Wings," "Say au revoir, but not good-by," or "The Banks of the Wabash," and then Mr. Cox, resident manager of the Spanish-American iron-mines, would take Cobleigh's place at the instrument and lead the whole assembled company in "John Brown's Body," "My country, 't is of thee," and "The Star-Spangled Banner," until the soldiers of the Ninth Infantry, quartered in the old theater across the way, would join in the chorus, and a great wave of patriotic melody would roll down Gallo Street to the bay, and out over the tranquil water to the transports lying at anchor half a mile away. Sitting in that cheerful, comfortably furnished club-room under the soft glow of incandescent electric lights, and listening to the bright, animated conversation, the laughter, and the old familiar music, I found it almost impossible to realize that I was in the desperately defended and recently captured city of Santiago, where the whole population was in a state of semi-starvation, where thousands of sick or wounded were languishing in crowded hospitals and barracks, and where, within a few days, I had seen destitute and homeless Cubans dying of fever in the streets.
Miss Barton began the work of relieving the wide-spread distress and destitution in Santiago with characteristic promptness and energy. To feed twenty or thirty thousand people at once, with the limited facilities and the small working force at her command, and to do it systematically and economically, without wastefulness and without confusion, was a herculean task; but it was a task with which experience and training in many fields had made her familiar, and she set about it intelligently and met the difficulties of the situation with admirable tact and judgment. Her first step was to ask the ablest, most influential, and most respected citizens of Santiago to consult with her with regard to ways and means and to give her the benefit of their local knowledge and experience. The object of this was to secure the coöperation and support of the best elements of the population, and strengthen the working force of the Red Cross by adding to it a local contingent of volunteer assistants who were thoroughly acquainted with the city and its inhabitants and who would be able to detect and prevent fraud or imposition. There was danger, of course, that people who did not need food, or were not entitled to it, would seek to obtain it on false pretenses, and that others, who perhaps were really in distress, would try to get more food than they actually required in order that they might make a little money by selling the surplus. In anticipation of this danger, Miss Barton decided to put the distribution of food largely under local control. In the first place, a central committee of three was appointed to exercise general supervision over the whole work. The members of this committee were Mr. Ramsden, son of the British consul; Mr. Michelson, a wealthy and philanthropic merchant engaged in business in Santiago; and a prominent Cuban gentleman whose name I cannot now recall. This committee divided the city into thirty districts, and notified the residents of each district that they would be expected to elect or appoint a commissioner who should represent them in all dealings with the Red Cross, who should make all applications for relief in their behalf, and who should personally superintend the distribution of all food allotted to them on requisitions approved by the central committee. This scheme oforganization and distribution was intelligently and judiciously devised, and it worked to the satisfaction of all. Every commissioner was instructed to make a requisition for food in writing, according to a prescribed form, stating the number and the names of heads of families needing relief in his district, the number of persons in each family, and the amount of food required for the district as a whole and for each family or individual in detail. The commissioner then appended to the requisition a certificate to the effect that the petitioners named therein were known to him and that he believed they were really in need of the quantities of food for which they respectively made application. The requisition then went to the central committee, and when approved by it was filled at the Red Cross warehouse and retained there as a voucher.
I heard it asserted in Santiago more than once that food issued by the Red Cross to people who were supposed to be starving had afterward been sold openly on the street by hucksters, and had even been carried on pack-mules in comparatively large quantities to suburban villages and sold there; but I doubt very much the truth of this assertion. Miss Barton caused an investigation to be made of several such cases of alleged fraud, and found in every instance that the food said to have been obtained from the Red Cross had really come from some other source, chiefly from soldiers and government transports, whose provisions, of course, could not be distinguished from ours after they had been taken out of the original packages. Be this, however, as it may, the checks upon fraud and imposition in the Red Cross scheme of distribution were as efficient as the nature of the circumstances would allow, and I doubt whether the loss through fraudulent applications or through collusion between commissioners and applicants amounted to one tenth of one per cent. The Red Cross furnished food in bulk tothirty-two thousand half-starved people in the first five days after Santiago surrendered, and in addition thereto fed ten thousand people every day in the soup-kitchens managed by Mr. Michelson. I do not wish to make any unjust or invidious comparisons, but I cannot refrain from saying, nevertheless, that I did not happen to see any United States quartermaster in Cuba who, in the short space of five days, had unloaded and stored fourteen hundred tons of cargo, given hot soup daily to ten thousand soldiers, and supplied an army of thirty-two thousand men with ten days' rations. It is a record, I think, of which Miss Barton has every reason to be proud.
But her beneficent work was not confined to the mere feeding of the hungry in Santiago. She sent large quantities of cereals, canned goods, and hospital supplies to our own soldiers in the camps on the adjacent hills; she furnished medicines and food for sick and wounded to the Spanish prison camp as well as to the Spanish army hospital, the civil hospital, and the children's hospital in the city; she directed Dr. Soyoso of her medical staff to open a clinic and dispensary, where five surgeons and two nurses gave medical or surgical aid to more than three thousand sick or sickening people every day; she sent hundreds of tons of ice from the schoonerMorseto the hospitals, the camps, and the transports going North with sick and wounded soldiers; she put up tents to shelter fever-stricken Spanish prisoners from the tropical sunshine while they were waiting to be taken on board the vessels that were to carry them back to Spain; and in every way possible, and with all the facilities that she had, she tried to alleviate the suffering caused by neglect, incompetence, famine, and war.
MORRO CASTLE
Inthe course of the first week after I landed in Santiago, I made a number of interesting excursions to points in the vicinity of the harbor, for the purpose of ascertaining the real nature and strength of the Spanish fortifications and intrenchments. From the front of our army, after the battle of July 1-2, I had carefully examined, with a strong glass, the blockhouses and rifle-pits which defended the city on the land side; and from the bridge of theState of Texas, two weeks later, I had obtained a general idea of the appearance of Morro Castle and the batteries at the mouth of the harbor which protected the city from an attack by water; but I was not satisfied with this distant and superficial inspection. External appearances are often deceptive, and forts or earthworks that look very formidable and threatening from the front, and at a distance of half a mile, may prove to have little real strength when seen from the other side and at a distance of only a few yards. I wished, therefore, to get into these forts and batteries before any changes had been made in them, and before their guns had been removed or touched, so that I might see how strong they really were and how much damage had been done to them by the repeated bombardments to which they had been subjected.
The first excursion that I made was to Morro Castle andthe fortifications at the entrance to the harbor. It was my intention to start at 4a.m., so as to reach the castle before it should get uncomfortably hot; but as I had no alarm-clock, and as no one in the club ever thought of getting up before six, I very naturally overslept myself, and by the time I had dressed, eaten a hasty breakfast of oatmeal, hard bread, and tea, and filled my canteen with boiled water, it was after seven. The air ought to have been fresh and cool even then; but on the southeastern coast of Cuba the change from the damp chilliness of night to the torrid heat of the tropical day is very rapid, and if there is no land-breeze, the rays of the unclouded sun, even as early as seven o'clock in the morning, have a fierce, scorching intensity that is hardly less trying than the heat of noon. The only really cool part of the day is from four to six o'clock in the morning.
I put a can of baked beans and a-few crackers of hard bread into my haversack for lunch, threw the strap of my field-glass over my shoulder, took my canteen in my hand, and hurried down Gallo Street to the pier of the Juragua Iron Company, where I had engaged a colored Cuban fisherman to meet me with a sail-boat at 4a.m.He had been waiting for me, patiently or impatiently, more than three hours; but he merely looked at me reproachfully, and pointed to the sun, as if to say, "You agreed to be here at daybreak, and now see where the sun is." I laid my head down sidewise on the palm of my hand, shut my eyes, snored vociferously, and explained to him in Russian that I had overslept myself. I was gratified to see that he understood my Russian perfectly. In communicating with Cubans and Spaniards I have always made it a practice to address them in Russian, for the obvious reason that, as they are foreigners, and Russian is a foreign tongue, they must necessarily understand that language a little better than they could possibly understand English. It may seem like an absurd idea, but I haveno hesitation in saying that a skilful and judicious combination of Russian with the sign-language is a good deal more intelligible to a Cuban fisherman than either Pidgin-English or Volapük. Voltaire once cynically remarked that "paternosters will shave if said over a good razor." So Russian will convey a perfectly clear idea to a Cuban fisherman if accompanied by a sufficiently pictorial pantomime. I tried it repeatedly on my boatman, and became convinced that if I only spoke Russian a little more grammatically, and gesticulated the sign-language a little more fluently, I could explain to him the outlines of cosmic philosophy and instruct him in the doctrines of esoteric Buddhism. I never should have got to Morro Castle and back with him if I had not been able to draw diagrams in the air with both hands and my head simultaneously, and then explain them to him in colloquial Russian.
The surface of the bay, as we pushed off from the pier, was almost as smooth and glassy as an expanse of oil; and although my negro boatman whistled persuasively for a breeze, after the manner of sailors, and even ejaculated something that sounded suspiciously like "Come up 'leven!" as he bent to his clumsy oars, he could not coax the Cuban Æolus to unloose the faintest zephyr from the cave of the winds in the high blue mountains north of the city. He finally suspended his whistling to save his breath, wiped his sweaty face on his shirt-sleeve, and made a few cursory remarks in Spanish to relieve his mind and express his unfavorable opinion of the weather. I shared his feelings, even if I could not adopt his language, and, pantomimically wringing the perspiration out of my front hair, I remarked in Russian that it waszharko(hot). Encouraged by what he took for sympathetic and responsive profanity on my side, he scowled fiercely and exclaimed, "Mucha sol—damn!" whereupon we smiled reciprocally and felt much cooler.
We crept slowly down the eastern side of the bay, past the conical hill crowned with a cubical blockhouse which marks the southern boundary of the city, around the end of the long iron trestle of the Juragua Iron Company, past the flat-topped mesa on which stands the harbor signal-station, and finally into the narrow neck of the Santiago water-bottle which Hobson vainly tried to cork with the collierMerrimac. From this point of view we could see, between the steep bluffs which form the entrance to the bay, a narrow strip of blue, sunlit ocean, and on its left the massive gray bastions of Morro Castle, projecting in a series of huge steps, like ledges or terraces of natural rock, from the crest of the eastern promontory.
All the maps of Santiago harbor that I have seen show another castle, called Socapa, nearly opposite Morro on the western side of the channel; but I have never been able to discover it. If it still exists, it must be in ruins and so overgrown with vegetation as to be completely hidden. The only fortification I could find on that side of the bay is the so-called "western battery," a recently constructed earthwork situated on the crest of the long, flat-topped hill which forms the outer coast-line. This earthwork could never have been known as a "castle"; it is at least three hundred yards west of the point indicated on the map as the site of Socapa, and it cannot be seen at all from the channel, or even from the highest parapet of Morro. Unless Socapa Castle, therefore, is so small and inconspicuous as to have escaped my notice, it must have fallen into ruins or been destroyed. There is no castle on the western side of the entrance now that can be seen from the water, from the Estrella battery, or from Morro.
After passing Cayo Smith, the sunken collierMerrimac, and the dismantled wreck of theReina Mercedes, we turned abruptly to the left, opposite the Estrella battery, and entereda deep, sheltered cove, directly behind the Morro promontory and almost under the massive walls of the castle itself. Landing at a little wooden pier on the northern side of the miniature bay, I walked up to the road leading to the Estrella battery, and there stopped and looked about me. The cove was completely shut in by high hills, and the only road or path leading out of it, so far as I could see, was the one on which I stood. This began, apparently, at the Estrella battery, ran around the head of the cove, and then, turning to the right, climbed the almost precipitous side of the Morro promontory, in a long, steep slant, to a height of one hundred and fifty feet. There it made another turn which carried it out of sight behind a buttress of rock under the northwestern corner of the castle. Near the mouth of the cove, on my right, rose the white, crenellated, half-ruined wall of the Estrella battery—a dilapidated open stone fort of the eighteenth century, which contained no guns, and which, judging from its appearance, had long been abandoned. It occupied, however, a very strong position, and if the Spaniards had had any energy or enterprise they would have put it in repair and mounted in it a modern mortar which lay on a couple of skids near the pier, and two or three small rapid-fire guns which they might have obtained from one of Admiral Cervera's cruisers. Antiquated and obsolete as it was, it might then have been of some use.
Near the head of the cove was an old ordnance storehouse, or magazine, which proved upon examination to contain nothing more interesting than a few ancient gun-carriages, a lot of solid six-inch projectiles, an assortment of rammers and spongers for muzzle-loading cannon, and a few wooden boxes of brass-jacketed cartridges for Remington rifles. Three long smooth-bore iron culverins lay on the ground between this magazine and the pier, but they had not been fired, apparently, in a century, and were so eaten and pittedby rust that I could not find on them any trace of inscription or date. There was nothing really useful, effective, or modern, either in the Estrella battery or in the magazine, except the Remington rifle-cartridges and the unmounted mortar.
Finding nothing else of interest in the vicinity of the cove, I started up the road that led to the front or western face of Morro Castle. I call it a "road" by courtesy, because it did show some signs of labor and engineering skill; but it was broken every few yards into rude steps by transverse ledges of tough, intractable rock, and how any wheeled vehicle could ever have been drawn up it I cannot imagine. The fringe of plants, bushes, and low trees that bordered this road was bright with flowers, among which I noticed the white spider-lily (apparently a variety ofCleome pungens), the so-called "Cuban rose" (a flower that flaunts the scarlet and yellow of the Spanish flag and looks a little likePotentilla la Vésuve), and a beautiful climbing vine with large violet blossoms which resembled in shape and color the butterfly-pea (Centrosema).
In and out among these plants and bushes ran nimble lizards of at least half a dozen different kinds: lizards that carried their tails curled up over their backs like pug-dogs; lizards that amused themselves by pushing out a whitish, crescent-shaped protuberance from under their throats and then drawing it in again; lizards that changed color while I watched them; and big gray iguanas, two or three feet in length, which, although perfectly harmless, looked ugly and malevolent enough to be classed with Cuban land-crabs and tarantulas. I saw no animals except these lizards, and no birds except the soaring vultures, which are never absent from Cuban skies, and which hang in clouds over every battle-field, fort, city, and village on the island.
The road from the head, of the Estrella cove to the crestof the Morro promontory forks at a distance of seventy-five or one hundred yards from the cable-house, one branch of it turning to the left and climbing a steep grade to the summit of the ridge east of the castle, where stand the lighthouse and the barracks, while the other branch goes straight on in a rising slant to a rocky buttress situated almost perpendicularly over the point where the southern shore of the cove intersects the eastern margin of the harbor channel. Turning to the left around this buttress, it runs horizontally southward along a shelf-like cornice in the face of the precipice until it reaches a spacious terrace, or esplanade, cut out of the solid rock, at a height of one hundred and fifty feet above the water. This terrace, which is on the western face of the castle and directly under its lower bastions, seems to have been intended originally for a gun-platform, but there is nothing there now to indicate that guns were ever mounted on it. It has no parapet, or battlement, and is merely a wide, empty shelf of rock, overhanging the narrow entrance to the harbor, and overhung, in turn, by the walls of the fortress. In the mountain-side back of it are four or five quadrangular apertures, which look from a distance like square port-holes, or embrasures, for heavy cannon, but which prove upon closer examination to be doors leading to huge subterranean chambers, designed, I presume, for the safekeeping of ammunition and explosives. At the time when I went through them they contained nothing more dangerous than condemned shovels and pickaxes, empty bottles, old tin cans, metal lamps, dirty straw hats, discarded hammocks, and cast-off shoes. I found nothing in the shape of ammunition except two or three dozen spherical iron cannon-balls, which lay scattered over the rocky floor of the esplanade, as if the soldiers of the garrison had been accustomed to play croquet with them there, just to pass away the time in the intervals between Admiral Sampson's bombardments.
After looking about the esplanade and exploring the dim recesses of the gloomy ammunition-vaults, I climbed a crooked flight of disintegrating stone steps and entered, between two massive quadrangular bastions,[6]the lower story—if I may so call it—of the castle proper. As seen from the ocean outside of the harbor, this ancient fortress appears to consist of three huge cubes of gray masonry, superimposed one upon another in such a manner as to present in profile the outline of three rocky terraces; but whether this profile view gives anything like a correct idea of the real shape of the building I am unable to say. From the time when I entered the gateway at the head of the flight of stone steps that led up from the esplanade, I was lost in a jumbled aggregation of intercommunicating corridors, bastions, grated cells, stairways, small interior courtyards, and huge, gloomy chambers, which I could not mentally group or combine so as to reduce them to intelligible order or bring them into anything like architectural harmony. The almost complete absence of windows made it impossible to orient one's self by glancing occasionally at some object of known position outside; the frequent turns in the passages and changes of level in the floors were very confusing; the small courtyards which admitted light to the interior afforded no outlook, and I simply roamed from bastion to bastion and from corridor to corridor, without knowing where I was, or what relation the place in which I stood bore to the castle as a whole. Now and then I would ascend a flight of stone steps at the side of a courtyard and come out unexpectedly upon what seemed to be a flat roof, from which I could see the entrance to the harborand the white walls of the Estrella battery hundreds of feet below; but as soon as I went back into the maze of passages, chambers, and bastions on that level, I lost all sense of direction, and five minutes later I could not tell whether I was on the northern side of the castle or the southern side, nor whether I was in the second of the three cubes of masonry or the third.
The most surprising thing about the castle, to me, was its lack of offensive power. Its massive stone walls gave it, of course, a certain capacity for endurance, and even for resistance of a passive kind; but it was almost as incapable of inflicting injury on an enemy as a Dutch dike or a hillock of the mound-builders would be. Until I reached what, for want of a better name, I shall have to call the roof of the uppermost cube, I did not find anywhere a single round of ammunition, nor a gun of any caliber, nor a casemate intended for a gun, nor an embrasure from which a gun could have been fired. So far as architectural adaptation to the conditions of modern warfare is concerned, it was as harmless as an old Norman keep, and might have been planned and built two centuries before guns were used or gunpowder invented. I have been unable to ascertain the date of its erection; but the city of Santiago was founded by Diego Velasquez in 1514, and all the evidence furnished by the castle itself would seem to indicate that it dates back to the sixteenth, or at latest to the seventeenth, century. There is certainly nothing in its plan or in its appearance to show that the engineers who designed it were acquainted even with the art of fortification as developed in the seventeenth century by Vauban. It is simply an old feudal castle, with moat, drawbridge, and portcullis, built after the model of medieval strongholds before heavy siege-ordnance came into general use. The idea that it could have done any serious damage to Admiral Sampson's fleet seems absolutely ludicrous when one has explored theinterior of it and taken stock of its antiquated, not to say obsolete and useless, armament.