Читать книгу Seven League Boots - Richard Halliburton - Страница 10

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The most joyously acclaimed Fourth of July in American history was that of 1898.

In comparison, the original Fourth in 1776 was a very mild affair, for few people then knew that such a document as the Declaration of Independence had been signed.

The news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, arriving on the Fourth in 1863, thrilled half the nation, and plunged the other half in gloom.

But on the great day in ’98 the entire population of America went half-crazy with excitement because, early that morning, the newspapers announced that, on the day before, a great and long-awaited naval battle had been fought between the Spanish and American fleets off Santiago de Cuba, in which every Spanish ship had been destroyed and Admiral Cervera himself had been taken prisoner.

There was certainly good reason for rejoicing. This decisive victory practically ended the Spanish-American War.

Interesting as the international consequences of this engagement were, even more interesting, to me, is the battle itself. The American Navy had not given us as dramatic a story since the Monitor fought the Merrimac (the original Merrimac) at Hampton Roads in ’62—nor ever one with as much grimly eloquent evidence to verify it. We can go today and see the wrecks of the Spanish ships still piled up on the southern coast of Cuba, right where they were burned to death on that fateful morning.

To examine them closely, to get this further acquaintance with the reality of the now dim and far-off Spanish War, on the day after my visit to Morro Castle I once more hired my launch and set out for the scene of the sea-battle.

Throughout the entire month of June, 1898, Cervera with his four fast armed cruisers had been bottled up in Santiago Harbor by the American fleet. The Americans waiting outside were becoming increasingly impatient. But they did not dare try to force their way into Cervera’s lair. The terrific fire that Hobson had drawn from the Spanish batteries made clear to Admiral Sampson what would be the fate of any ship that attempted to pass the fortifications.

Cervera, on the other hand, found himself in a dilemma that was daily becoming more uncomfortable. The American Army had invested Santiago from the landward side, and the city was on the point of surrender. If it fell, and the Spanish ships had not withdrawn, they would be captured without firing a shot.

But could they withdraw? Cervera had previously planned to wait for a dark and rainy night, and then, with all lights out, make a sudden sortie from the harbor, dash through the American battle line, order his ships to scatter, and hope that some of them at least would get away.

But Hobson had upset that plan with his cursed Merrimac. The hulk, though it did not block the channel entirely, still lay in wait to rip the bottom out of any ship steering ten feet off its course. To try to rush past in the darkness would be to invite sure disaster.

And yet, to try to escape by day would be just as fatal. Cruising up and down in a semicircle before the entrance of the harbor, never sleeping, were five first-class and (for those days) extremely powerful American battleships, the Iowa, Oregon, Indiana, Texas and Massachusetts, and the heavy cruisers Brooklyn and New York. Together they carried twenty-four twelve-inch guns. Against this formidable array the Spaniards had only four cruisers, the Vizcaya, Cristobal Colon, Almirante Oquendo and the Maria Teresa, the flagship.

Cervera knew what to expect from a clash between such unequal forces. By cable he explained his hopeless position to the ministers in Madrid and suggested that he be allowed to scuttle his ships right where they were and surrender his crews. He declared that if the War Ministry forced him to try to run the American blockade it could result only in a horrible and useless slaughter of his men.

But the ministers, safe from the twelve-inch guns, had reputations at stake. To sink the fleet without a fight, when the American Army took Santiago, would drive them from office. They curtly ordered Cervera to be brave and make a break for liberty. Maybe one of the ships might escape in the confusion.

So Cervera, helpless and resigned, prepared to perish.

But he chose his hour well. The Massachusetts had departed for Guantánamo Bay to coal. And the New York, with Admiral Sampson aboard, was eight miles to the east conferring with the Army. Also it was Sunday. About nine o’clock all the American crews, so Cervera believed, would be “at church.”

Now was the time!

The Spaniards got up steam and moved down the harbor. But as they approached the entrance, just as they had anticipated, they had to come almost to a standstill in order to slide past the Merrimac—in full view of the Americans.

The Americans were at church. But somebody wasn’t paying much attention to his prayers, for he noticed the leading Spanish ship trying to work past the sunken hulk two thousand feet up in the channel, and gave the alarm.

There was pandemonium for a moment ... little or no pressure in the boilers ... the flagship and the Admiral almost out of sight. This confusion, however, did not last long. The American crews knew their duties, and leaped to do them. In five minutes the smokestacks were spouting forth dense clouds of smoke and the guns began to take their deadly aim.

The Maria Teresa, leading the Spanish line, was the first to meet the American onslaught. To escape, she turned sharply to starboard and hugged the coast, steaming with all the desperate speed her boilers could provide.

In the launch in which I was retracing the battle-route, having once more passed the hulk of the Merrimac and reached the open sea, I likewise headed west along the spectacular southern shore of Cuba, in the track of the flying flagship.

On board, Admiral Cervera, having cleared his decks for action, ordered a bugle call from the bridge, the signal to begin firing—the signal, wrote her Captain later, that the history of four centuries of Spain’s greatness was ended.

But Cervera meant to go on, game to the end. The Teresa’s guns roared forth, but missed their mark. The Iowa and Texas roared back, with appalling results. One of the Iowa’s twelve-inch shells tore through a gun room on the Teresa and killed sixty men. Another set her on fire. A third destroyed the water-supply pipes. In a few minutes she was a mass of towering flames. In vain did the officers threaten the tortured and blistered gunners, for it was soon impossible to fight. The guns were being blown from their foundations. Nearly half the crew were dead. Crazed by the conflagration and the insupportable pain, the Teresa had veered straight in to the shore, struck the rocks and exploded.

Having come up in my launch, I landed at this spot on the beach where the flagship had grounded—seven miles west of Morro Castle.

It was here that Cervera, half-suffocated from smoke, jumped overboard, to be followed by as many of his men as were still alive. The risk of being drowned was better than the certainty of being burned to death. Two sailors pulled Cervera onto a raft and towed him to shore.

But though I knew that this was the exact place where the Teresa hit the beach, there is not the smallest fragment of the hulk left to verify the fact. Today the hulk is five hundred miles away. The astonishing story of how it managed to travel so far I’ll presently relate.

Back in my launch, and on down the mountainous coast. After a ride of less than a mile I found the Oquendo which had followed the flagship in the line of battle. As in the case of the Teresa, the first American shells set ablaze her wooden decks and cabins. She rolled and staggered under the avalanche of steel. But all the time she was continuing to fire what guns could still be worked or still had crews to work them, until the draft made by her own motion turned her into an inferno.

Half hidden in flames, she too lunged for the shore. A hundred of her crew were dead. The fire swept away her royal flag. Her Captain shot himself.

For all these years the Oquendo has lain there. For a decade the whole superstructure of her burned and twisted hulk remained entirely clear of the waves. But about 1908, Cubans dynamited her for scrap metal, and storms have helped the wreck to dig a grave for itself in the sand. Today only the two heavy-battery turrets extend above water, sticking their single eleven-inch guns reproachfully at the sky.

I climbed up on one of these guns from the launch and looked down at the demolished hull, clearly visible though submerged. And I recalled extracts from a vivid description of the Oquendo I had recently read in an old copy of Harper’s Weekly, written the day after the destruction, by a reporter who was on hand:

“Smoke still pours from the hulk even though the surf surges back and forth through the huge gashes in her side.... The scorched paint hangs in folds. Guns are knocked about in every wry position, and the tackle streams down in wild disorder.... Piled about the guns, half-concealed in the curling smoke, are charred and mutilated bodies that have begun to decompose.... The masts have fallen. The exploding magazines have torn great holes in her decks.... There are fifty dead Spaniards beneath the forward turret, killed by one shell. But the metal there is still too hot to admit investigation. Even so, American sailors are swarming over her, looking for souvenirs. One sailor has a hat full of melted money—another a bottle of Spanish wine.”^[1]

Of all this the storms have left but little trace. A few more years and perhaps even the two guns and the turrets, the last above-water evidence of a once-proud ship, will vanish.

The Vizcaya and the Colon had likewise come out of the harbor behind the Teresa. The Colon, the fastest of the Spanish ships, began to forge ahead of her pursuers. But the Vizcaya was not so fortunate. Blown to pieces and in flames, she also soon turned toward shore, fifteen miles from Santiago.

Still in my launch I easily found the Vizcaya’s grave, for her one turret and gun, extending like the Oquendo’s above water, can be seen a mile away. As I jumped from the launch to the rust-encrusted side of the turret, a sea-swallow flew out of the gun’s stark muzzle. I crawled up the gun to examine it and found, inside the mouth, a nest with three chicks just learning to fly.

The Vizcaya, commanded by Captain Eulate, was well known in America, for she had come to New York with a show of defiant courtesy when the Maine was sent to Havana. But that visit had gained her no privilege in the battle. She received the worst punishment of any Spanish ship. Her gunners, too, were all killed (but not until one of her shells had decapitated a seaman on the Brooklyn, the only American casualty). Of her crew of five hundred and fifty, over two hundred perished.

Eulate himself reached shore, badly wounded and covered with blood, with some three hundred and fifty of the crew. Captain Evans of the Iowa sent out his boats to pick them up. As Eulate was brought aboard he unbuckled his sword, kissed the hilt and presented it to Evans as a token of surrender. But the American Captain handed it back, saying Eulate had fought four ships and deserved to keep it. Just before being escorted below to have his wounds dressed, Eulate turned toward the wreck of his ship, now a wild-burning furnace on the rocks, saluted and exclaimed, “Adios, Vizcaya.” At that moment as if by prearrangement the Vizcaya exploded with an earth-shaking roar, sending up a flaming geyser of steel and burning decks and mangled bodies.

Shortly after, Cervera himself, in his dripping uniform, was brought aboard the Iowa. On seeing him the American crew burst into spontaneous cheering for the brave old Admiral.

Meanwhile the Colon was fifty miles away. But the Brooklyn, the speed-queen of the American fleet, was forty-eight. It had become a contest of boilers rather than guns. The Spanish officers, determined to keep ahead at any cost, pushed back into the stokehole the firemen and engineers who, unable to endure the horrible heat, were trying to escape on deck. Even this did not suffice. The Colon’s coal gave out just when she was on the verge of escape. It is reported that in an insane fury over this new disaster, the officers, as they headed for the beach, poured coal-oil on the stokehole hatch and ignited it, so that no man came alive out of that hell under the water-line.

When the bow of the Colon struck the rocks, her stern was still in seventy-five feet of water. Consequently when wreckers tried to salvage her she turned over and sank completely out of sight. And there on the bottom of the ocean, fifty miles down the coast of Cuba, the Cristobal Colon remains today.

Of the four hulks only the Teresa’s has not been accounted for in my story.

When the Teresa exploded on the beach, Cervera and every living member of the crew, as I have explained, swam to shore—every living member of the crew but one, Cervera’s cat. In the panic she was forgotten and left behind.

And a fortnight later she was found still alive by Hobson himself, who had come aboard to salvage the flagship. Hobson gave her food and water, and she accompanied him everywhere as he went about his job.

Afloat once more after weeks of patching and pumping (afloat, though nothing but a corpse of a cruiser), the Teresa was towed out to sea by the repair ship Vulcan, and then on around the eastern end of Cuba and north toward the navy-yard at Charleston.

But a hurricane arose off the Bahamas, and the Captain of the Vulcan, in Hobson’s absence, became terrified that the seven-thousand-ton hulk he was towing would sink and pull him down with it. In fact, in the stormy darkness he saw her sinking and ordered her temporary crew to abandon her at once. Before casting off, the crew tried to rescue the cat. She refused to be rescued, and ran up the mast. So without her they moved hurriedly to the Vulcan, cut the hawser and struggled on through the storm unencumbered.

Reaching Charleston the Captain reported the total loss of the Teresa—and the cat.

But four days later an American freighter, likewise steaming off the Bahamas, saw a hideously charred, shell-ravaged battleship drifting along, apparently deserted. The officer on watch first thought he was seeing a ghost. Then he looked at her name:

Maria Teresa.

She had sunk only in the terrified imagination of the Vulcan’s Captain.

The freighter, via the Navy Department, rushed a report of the find to Hobson who had gone on ahead to America. Naturally, having devoted so much time and effort to raising the Teresa, he felt indignant that the Vulcan had been so lacking in courage and so ineffectual as to have abandoned, in a moment of panic, a still valuable ship. Hobson was also angry that they had left the companionable cat on board to die. Feeling that quick action was necessary he took passage on the wrecking ship himself and steamed back at full speed in the hope of finding the Teresa in time.

They did find her, but not in time. The currents had carried the hulk fifty miles to the west, and the waves had dropped her on a coral reef, breaking her back completely, just off the shore of one of the Bahamas.

Hobson, approaching from the sea, realized there was absolutely no hope of salvaging the Teresa now, for the two halves of the ship had fallen apart.

But the cat.

Young Lieutenant Simms was sent to search the twice-dead derelict, and told not to come back without the animal.

Simms was gone a long time. He found that the cat was still alive, having been taken from the ship by the island’s Negro natives and given to their chief, who in turn had given it to his little daughter. The child adored the cat and, not knowing or caring about its marvelous history, would not part with it for anything. Simms offered her five dollars—ten dollars. He finally offered her fifteen dollars, a fortune in the remote Bahamas. This was more than her father could resist. He took the famous puss from the weeping child and gave it over to Simms, who brought it back to Hobson in triumph.

But the story of the cat is by no means ended. Hardly had the Vulcan set sail again when the barometer began to drop and ominous clouds to gather in the sky ... another storm for sure.

The Captain of the Vulcan swore it was the cat. She was a witch, a demon and a curse. She had been aboard the Teresa at Santiago, and see what happened. The ship was wrecked and one hundred and fifty of the crew were killed. The cat had lived two weeks with no water, and no food except, he hinted, corpses. On the way to Charleston with the cat still on the helpless Teresa, the hurricane had almost sunk them both. He had cut the Teresa loose because he saw her sinking.

True, she hadn’t sunk, but she had gone to pieces on the reef.

And now that cat was back—and look at the barometer! The Captain swore he’d never get the Vulcan home with such a jinx aboard. And he seized her to throw her into the sea.

But Hobson leaped to the cat’s defense.

“If anybody goes overboard,” he said to the Captain, “it should be you. This cat has given us all an extraordinary example of fidelity. She clung to her ship when everybody else deserted it. She stood guard alone for two weeks while the sea swept over the hulk. She helped me raise the Teresa, and would have got her all the way to Charleston, if you hadn’t lost your nerve and set the cruiser adrift. Even adrift, all through the hurricane, that cat knew exactly where to go. Do you know the name of the coral key to which that brave little Captain laid her course? Look at your chart. It’s Cat Island!”

Hobson took the “witch” into his own arms and fed her apple-pie; and the wind went down, and the barometer went up, and nobody went overboard. In the summer twilight the two of them climbed to the top deck, where Hobson found a canvas chair. And there the heroine of the Teresa curled up on the lap of the hero of the Merrimac, and together they watched the moon rise out of the sea.

[1]	Quoted by permission of Harper & Brothers, publishers.