THE FEEDING OF THE HUNGRY
The problem 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 antic.i.p.ated. In my walk up Marina and Enramadas streets and out to the Caney road on Tuesday forenoon I pa.s.sed 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 ash.o.r.e; 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 absence of 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 dest.i.tute and starving reconcentrado, or else return to the pier where the _State of Texas_ lay, 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 the _State 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 the _State of Texas_ should 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 b.u.t.ter 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 a.s.surance that if I did not get something to eat that afternoon there would be a fracas on the _State 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 enjoyment of 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 b.u.t.ter 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 gla.s.s 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 the _State of Texas_ one 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 the _State 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 sh.o.r.e 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 a.s.surance 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 dest.i.tute Cubans were set at work cleaning the filthy streets; and in less than a week Santiago had a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sengers 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 the habitable 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. c.o.x, resident manager of the Spanish-American iron-mines, would take Cobleigh"s place at the instrument and lead the whole a.s.sembled 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 dest.i.tute and homeless Cubans dying of fever in the streets.
Miss Barton began the work of relieving the wide-spread distress and dest.i.tution 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 cooperation 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 a.s.sistants 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 ent.i.tled 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 of organization 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 pet.i.tioners named therein were known to him and that he believed they were really in need of the quant.i.ties 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 a.s.serted 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 quant.i.ties to suburban villages and sold there; but I doubt very much the truth of this a.s.sertion. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 to thirty-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 s.p.a.ce 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 quant.i.ties 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 schooner _Morse_ to 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.
CHAPTER XVII
MORRO CASTLE
In the 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 gla.s.s, the blockhouses and rifle-pits which defended the city on the land side; and from the bridge of the _State 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 and the fortifications at the entrance to the harbor. It was my intention to start at 4 A.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-gla.s.s 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 4 A.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 have no 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 Volapuk. 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 gla.s.sy as an expanse of oil; and although my negro boatman whistled persuasively for a breeze, after the manner of sailors, and even e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed something that sounded suspiciously like "Come up "leven!" as he bent to his clumsy oars, he could not coax the Cuban aeolus 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 was _zharko_ (hot). Encouraged by what he took for sympathetic and responsive profanity on my side, he scowled fiercely and exclaimed, "Mucha sol--d.a.m.n!" 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 collier _Merrimac_. 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 ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sing Cayo Smith, the sunken collier _Merrimac_, and the dismantled wreck of the _Reina Mercedes_, we turned abruptly to the left, opposite the Estrella battery, and entered a deep, sheltered cove, directly behind the Morro promontory and almost under the ma.s.sive 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 b.u.t.tress 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 a.s.sortment of rammers and spongers for muzzle-loading cannon, and a few wooden boxes of bra.s.s-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 pitted by 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 of _Cleome pungens_), the so-called "Cuban rose" (a flower that flaunts the scarlet and yellow of the Spanish flag and looks a little like _Potentilla la Vesuve_), and a beautiful climbing vine with large violet blossoms which resembled in shape and color the b.u.t.terfly-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 cla.s.sed 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 crest of 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 b.u.t.tress situated almost perpendicularly over the point where the southern sh.o.r.e of the cove intersects the eastern margin of the harbor channel. Turning to the left around this b.u.t.tress, it runs horizontally southward along a shelf-like cornice in the face of the precipice until it reaches a s.p.a.cious 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-b.a.l.l.s, 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 pa.s.s 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 ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sages 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 harbor and the white walls of the Estrella battery hundreds of feet below; but as soon as I went back into the maze of pa.s.sages, 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 ma.s.sive stone walls gave it, of course, a certain capacity for endurance, and even for resistance of a pa.s.sive 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 the interior of it and taken stock of its antiquated, not to say obsolete and useless, armament.
After wandering about for half an hour in the two lower stories, I climbed a crooked flight of stone steps, half blocked up with debris from a shattered parapet above, and came out on the flat roof of the highest and largest of the three cubes that together make up the fortress. It was a s.p.a.cious battlemented floor, of rectangular but irregular outline, having an extreme length of perhaps one hundred and fifty feet, with an average width of seventy-five to one hundred.[7] On its eastern side it overlooked a deep, wide moat, intended to protect the wall from an a.s.sault made along the crest of the promontory, while on the other three sides one might look down hundreds of feet to the wide blue plain of the ocean, the narrow mouth of the harbor, and the deep sheltered cove of the Estrella battery. The city of Santiago was hidden behind the flat-topped hill on which the signal-station stands; but I could see a part of the beautiful bay, with the bare green mountains behind it, while eastward and westward I could follow the surf-whitened coast-line to the distant blue capes formed by the forest-clad slopes of Turquino on one side and the billowy foot-hills of the Gran Piedra on the other. The fleet of Admiral Sampson had disappeared; but its place had already been taken by a little fleet of fishing-smacks from Santiago, whose sun-illumined sails looked no larger, on the dark-blue expanse of the Caribbean, than the wings of white Cuban b.u.t.terflies that had fallen into the sea.
For ten minutes after I reached the aerial platform of the bastion roof I had no eyes for anything except the magnificent natural cyclorama of blue water, rolling foot-hills, deep secluded valleys, and palm-fringed mountains that surrounded me; but, withdrawing my gaze reluctantly at last from the enchanting scenery, I turned my attention again to the castle and its armament. Scattered about here and there on the flat roof of the bastion were five short bronze mortars of various calibers and two muzzle-loading smooth-bore cannon, mounted, like field-pieces, on clumsy wooden carriages with long "trails" and big, heavy wheels. It was evident at a glance that neither of the cannon would be likely to hit a battle-ship at a distance of five hundred yards without a special interposition of Providence; and as the mortars had no elevating, training, or sighting gear, and could be discharged only at a certain fixed angle, it is doubtful whether they could drop a sh.e.l.l upon a floating target a mile in diameter--and yet these five mortars and two eighteen-pounder muzzle-loading guns were all the armament that Morro Castle had.
After looking the pieces over superficially and forming from mere inspection a judgment as to their value, I proceeded to examine them closely for dates. The larger of the two cannon, which was trained over the northern parapet as if to bombard the city of Santiago, bore the following inscription:
MARS PLURIBUS NEC IMPAR[8]
12 Jun 1748 PAR JEAN MARITZ
ULTIMO RATIO REGUM[9]
LOUIS CHARLES DE BOURBON COMPTE D"EU DUC D"AUMALE
The other cannon, which was trained over the western parapet and aimed at the place where Socapa Castle ought to have been, was inscribed:
LE COMPTE DE PROVENCE
ULTIMO RATIO REGUM
LOUIS CHARLES DE BOURBON COMPTE D"EU DUC D"AUMALE 1755
The mortars, which were embellished with Gorgons" heads and were fine specimens of bronze casting, bore inscriptions or dates as follows:
No. 1. EL MANTICORA 1733
STRVXITDVCTOREXERC ITM REGISBEN[q*]VE (_sic_) [* enlarged small letter q. (note of transcriber)]
------------------ PHIL II HISPAN REX[10]
ELISA FAR HIS REGINA