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 glass, 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-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 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 Volapuek. 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
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--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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 harbor and 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 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 spacious 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 assault 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 butterflies 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 shell 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
No. 2. VO[~I]E ABET FECIT
SEVILLE ANO D
1724
No. 3. EL COMETA
1737
No. 4. 1780
No. 5. 1781
From the above inscriptions and dates it appears that the most modern
piece of ordnance in the Morro Castle battery was cast one hundred and
seventeen years ago, and the oldest one hundred and seventy-four years
ago. It would be interesting to know the history of the two French
cannon which, in obedience to the order of Louis XIV, were marked
"ULTIMO RATIO REGUM." Iean Maritz, their founder, doubtless regarded
them, a century ago, with as much pride as Herr Krupp feels now when he
turns out a fifteen-inch steel breech-loader at Essen; but the _ultimo
ratio regum_ does not carry as much weight on this side of the Atlantic
in the nineteenth century as it carried on the other side in the
eighteenth, and the recent discussions between Morro Castle and Admiral
Sampson's fleet proved conclusively that the "last argument of kings" is
much less cogent and convincing than the first argument of battle-ships.
It is doubtful, however, whether these antiquated guns were ever fired
at Admiral Sampson's fleet. They were not pointed toward the sea when
the castle was evacuated; I could not find any ammunition for them,
either on the bastion roof where they stood or in the vaults of the
castle below; there were no rammers or spongers on or about the
gun-platforms, where they would naturally have been left when the guns
were abandoned; and there was nothing whatever to show that they had
been fired in fifty years. But it could have made little difference to
the blockading fleet whether they were fired or not. They were hardly
more formidable than the "crakys of war" used by Edward III against the
French at the battle of Crecy. As for the mortars, they were fit only
for a museum of antiquities, or a collection of obsolete implements of
war like that in the Tower of London. I hope that Secretary Alger or
Secretary Long will have "El Manticora" and "El Cometa" brought to the
United States and placed at the main entrance of the War Department or
the Navy Department as curiosities, as fine specimens of artistic bronze
casting, and as trophies of the Santiago campaign.
When I had finished copying the inscriptions on the cannon and the
mortars, I went down into the interior of the castle to examine some
pictures and inscriptions that I had noticed on the walls of a chamber
in the second story, which had been used, apparently, as a guard-room
or barrack. It was a large, rectangular, windowless apartment, with a
wide door, a vaulted ceiling, and smooth stone walls which had been
covered with plaster and whitewashed. Among the Spanish soldiers who had
occupied this room there was evidently an amateur artist of no mean
ability, who had amused himself in his hours of leisure by drawing
pictures and caricatures on the whitewashed walls. On the left of the
door, at a height of five or six feet, was a life-sized and very
cleverly executed sketch of a Spaniard in a wide sombrero, reading a
Havana newspaper. His eyes and mouth were wide open, as if he were
amazed and shocked beyond measure by the news of some terrible calamity,
and his attitude, as well as the horror-stricken expression of his
elongated face, seemed to indicate that, at the very least, he had just
found in the paper an announcement of the sudden and violent death of
all his family. Below, in quotation-marks, were the words:!!! Que
BARBARIDAD.!!! Han apresado UN VIVERO." ("What BARBARITY!!! They have
captured A FISHING-SMACK!!!")
This is evidently a humorous sneer at the trifling value of the prizes
taken by the vessels of our blockading fleet off Havana in the early
days of the war. But there is more in the Spanish words than can well be
brought out in a translation, for the reason that _vivero_ means a
vessel in which fish are brought from the Yucatan banks _alive_, in
large salt-water tanks. We had been accusing the Spaniards of cruelty
and barbarity in their treatment of the insurgents. The artist "gets
back at us," to use a slang phrase, by exclaiming, in pretended horror,
"What barbarous cruelty! They have captured a boat-load of _living_
fish!"
For a Spanish soldier, that is not bad; and the touch is as delicate in
the sneer of the legend as in the technic of the cartoon.
A little farther along and higher up, on the same wall, was a carefully
executed and beautifully finished life-sized portrait of a tonsured
Roman Catholic monk--a sketch that I should have been glad to frame and
hang in my library, if it had only been possible to get it off the wall
without breaking the plaster upon which it had been drawn. I thought of
trying to photograph it; but the light in the chamber was not strong
enough for a snap shot, and I had no tripod to support my camera during
a time-exposure.
There were several other sketches and caricatures on the left-hand wall;
but none of them was as good as were the two that I have described, and,
after examining them all carefully, I cast my eyes about the room to see
what I could find in the shape of "loot" that would be worth carrying
away as a memento of the place. Apart from old shoes, a modern
kerosene-lamp of glass, a dirty blanket or two, and a cot-bed, there
seemed to be nothing worth confiscating except a couple of Spanish
newspapers hanging against the right-hand wall on a nail. One was "El
Imparcial," a sheet as large as the New York "Sun"; and the other, "La
Saeta," an illustrated comic paper about the size of "Punch." They had
no intrinsic value, of course, and as "relics" they were not
particularly characteristic; but "newspapers from a bastion in Morro
Castle" would be interesting, I thought, to some of my journalistic
friends at home, so I decided to take them. I put up my hand to lift
them off the nail without tearing them, and was amazed to discover that
neither nail nor newspapers had any tangible existence. They had been
drawn on the plaster, by that confounded soldier-artist, with a
lead-pencil I felt worse deceived and more chagrined than the Greek pony
that neighed at the painted horse of Apelles! But I need not have felt
so humiliated. Those newspapers would have deceived the elect; and I am
not sure that the keenest-sighted proof-reader of the "Imparcial" would
not have read and corrected a whole column before he discovered that
the paper was plaster and that the letters had been made with a pencil.
Major Greene of the United States Signal-Service, to whom I described
these counterfeit newspapers, went to the castle a few days later, and,
notwithstanding the fact that he had been forewarned, he tried to take
"La Saeta" off the nail. He trusted me enough to believe that one of the
papers was deceptive; but he felt sure that a real copy of "La Saeta"
had been hung over a counterfeit "Imparcial" in order to make the latter
look more natural. If the soldier who drew the caricatures, portraits,
and newspapers in that guard-room escaped shot, shell, and calenture,
and returned in safety to Spain, I hope that he may sometime find in a
Spanish journal a translation of this chapter, and thus be made aware of
the respectful admiration that I shall always entertain for him and his
artistic talents.
In all the rooms of the castle that had been occupied by soldiers I
found, scratched or penciled on the walls, checker-board calendars on
which the days had been successively crossed off; rude pictures and
caricatures of persons or things; individual names; and brief
reflections or remarks in doggerel rhyme or badly spelled prose, which
had been suggested to the writers, apparently, by their unsatisfactory
environment. One man, for example, has left on record this valuable
piece of advice:
"Unless you have a good, strong 'pull' [_mucha influencia_], don't
complain that your rations are bad. If you do, you may have to come and
live in Morro Castle, where they will be much worse."
Another, addressing a girl named "Petenera," who seems to have gotten
him into trouble, exclaims:
Petenera, my life! Petenera, my heart!
It is all your fault.
That I lie here in Morro
Suffering pain and writing my name
On the plastered wall.
JOSE.
Probably "Jose" went to see "Petenera" without first obtaining leave of
absence, and was shut up in one of the gloomy guard-rooms of Morro
Castle as a punishment.
Another wall-writer, in a philosophic, reflective, and rather melancholy
mood, says:
Tu me sobreviviras.
Que vale el ser del hombres
Cuando un escrito vale mas!
You [my writing] will survive me.
What avails it to be a man, when a scrap of writing is worth more!
It is a fact which, perhaps, may not be wholly unworthy of notice that,
among the sketches I saw and the mural inscriptions I copied in all
parts of Morro Castle, there was not an indecent picture nor an improper
word, sentence, or line. Spanish soldiers may be cruel, but they do not
appear to be vicious or corrupt in the way that soldiers often are.
In wandering through the corridors and gloomy chambers of the castle,
copying inscriptions on walls and cannon, and exploring out-of-the-way
nooks and corners, I spent a large part of the day. I found that the
masonry of the fortress had suffered even less from the guns of Admiral
Sampson's fleet than I had supposed. The eastern and southeastern faces
of the upper cube had been damaged a little; the parapet, or battlement,
of the gun-floor had been shattered in one place, and the debris from it
had fallen over and partly blocked up the steps leading to that floor
from the second story; two or three of the corner turrets had been
injured by small shells; and there was a deep scar, or circular pit, in
the face of the eastern wall, over the moat, where the masonry had been
struck squarely by a heavy projectile; but, with the exception of these
comparatively trifling injuries, the old fortress remained intact.
Newspaper men described it as "in ruins" or "almost destroyed" half a
dozen times in the course of the summer; and the correspondent of a
prominent metropolitan journal, who entered the harbor on his
despatch-boat just behind the _State of Texas_ the day that Santiago
surrendered, did not hesitate to say: "The old fort is a mass of ruins.
The stone foundation has been weakened by the shells from the fleet,
causing a portion of the castle to settle from ten to twenty feet. Only
the walls on the inner side remain. The terraces have been obliterated
and the guns dismounted and buried in the debris. There are great
crevices in the supporting walls, and the fort is in a general state of
collapse."
How any intelligent man, with eyes and a field-glass, could get such an
erroneous impression, or make such wild and reckless statements, I am
utterly unable to imagine. As a matter of fact, the fleet never tried or
intended to injure the castle, and all the damage done to it was
probably accidental. I have no doubt that Admiral Sampson might have
reduced the fortress to the condition that the correspondent so
graphically describes,--I saw him destroy the stone fort of Aguadores in
a few hours, with only three ships,--but he discovered, almost as soon
as he reached Santiago, that the old castle was perfectly harmless, and,
with the cool self-restraint of a thoughtful and level-headed naval
officer, he determined to save it as a picturesque and interesting relic
of the past. Most of the projectiles that struck it were aimed at the
eastern battery, the lighthouse, or the barracks on the crest of the
bluff behind it; and all the damage accidentally done to it by these
shots might easily be repaired in two or three days. If Cuba ever
becomes a part of the United States, the people of this country will owe
a debt of gratitude to Admiral Sampson for resisting the temptation to
show what his guns could do, and for preserving almost intact one of the
most interesting and striking old castles in the world.
Leaving the fortress through the eastern gateway and crossing the dry
moat on a wooden trestle which had taken the place of the drawbridge, I
walked along the crest of the bluff toward the eastern battery. It was
evident, from the appearance of the lighthouse and the one-story,
tile-roofed buildings on the crest of the hill, that if Morro Castle
escaped serious injury it was not because the gunners of our fleet were
unable to hit it. Every other structure in its vicinity had been
shattered, riddled, or smashed. The lighthouse, which was a tapering
cylinder of three-quarter-inch iron twelve feet in diameter at the base
and perhaps thirty feet high, had been struck at least twenty or thirty
times. The western half of it, from top to bottom, had been carried away
bodily; there were eleven shot-holes in the other half; the lantern had
been completely demolished; and the ground everywhere in the vicinity
was strewn with fragments of iron and glass. The flagstaff of the
signal-station had been struck twice, slender and difficult to hit as it
was, and the walls and roofs of the barracks and ammunition storehouses
had been pierced and torn by shot and shell in a dozen different places.
It is not likely, of course, that all this damage was done at any one
time or in any single bombardment. The gunners of our fleet probably
used these buildings as targets, and fired at them, every time they got
a chance, just for amusement and practice. The white cylinder of the
lighthouse made a particularly good mark, and the eleven shot-holes in
the half of it that remained standing showed that Admiral Sampson's
gunners found no difficulty in hitting a target ten feet by thirty at a
distance of more than a mile. The captain of the Spanish cruiser
_Vizcaya_ told Lieutenant Van Duzer of the battle-ship _Iowa_ that, at
the height of the naval engagement off the mouth of the harbor on July
3, his vessel was struck by a shell, on an average, once a second. He
spoke as if he had been greatly surprised by the extraordinary accuracy
of our gunners' fire; but if he had taken one look at that Morro
lighthouse before he ran out of the harbor he would have known what to
expect.
After examining the shattered barracks and the half-demolished
lighthouse, I walked on to the so-called "eastern battery," a strong
earthwork on the crest of the ridge about one hundred and fifty yards
from the castle. Here, in a wide trench behind a rampart of earth
strengthened with barrels of cement, I found four muzzle-loading iron
siege-guns of the last century, two modern mortars like the one that I
had seen on the skids near the head of the Estrella cove, one
smooth-bore cannon dated 1859, and two three-inch breech-loading rifles.
The eighteenth-century guns were no more formidable than those on the
roof of Morro, but the mortars and three-inch rifles were useful and
effective. It was a shell from one of these mortars that killed or
wounded eight sailors on the battle-ship _Texas_. One gun had been
dismounted in this battery, but all other damage to it by the fleet had
been repaired. Owing to the fact that its guns were in a wide trench,
six or eight feet below the level of the hilltop, it was extremely
difficult to hit them; and although Admiral Sampson repeatedly silenced
this battery by shelling the gunners out of it, he was never able to
destroy it.
The only other fortifications that I was able to find in the vicinity of
Morro Castle were two earthworks known respectively as the "western
battery" and the "Punta Gorda battery." The western battery, which was
situated on the crest of the hill opposite Morro, on the other side of
the harbor entrance, contained seven guns of various sizes and dates,
but only two of them were modern. The Punta Gorda battery, which
occupied a strong position on a bluff inside the harbor and behind the
Estrella cove, had only two guns, but both were modern and of high
power. In the three batteries--eastern, western, and Punta Gorda--there
were only eight pieces of artillery that would be regarded as effective
or formidable in modern warfare, and two of these were so small that
their projectiles would have made no impression whatever upon a
battle-ship, and could hardly have done much damage even to a protected
cruiser. Six of these guns were so situated that, although they
commanded the outside approach to the bay, they could not possibly hit
an enemy that had once passed Morro and entered the channel. The neck of
the bottle-shaped harbor, or, in other words, the narrow strait between
Morro Castle and the upper bay, had absolutely no defensive intrenchment
except the Punta Gorda battery, consisting of two guns taken from the
old cruiser _Reina Mercedes_.
"Why," it may be asked, "did not Admiral Sampson fight his way into the
harbor, if its defenses were so weak?"
Simply because the channel was mined. He might have run past the
batteries without serious risk; but in so narrow a strip of water it was
impossible to avoid or escape the submarine mines, four of which were
very powerful and could be exploded by electricity. He offered to force
an entrance if General Shafter would seize the mine-station north of
Morro; but the general could not do this without changing his plan of
campaign. The cooeperation of the navy, therefore, was limited to the
destruction of Cervera's fleet and the bombardment of the city from the
mouth of Aguadores ravine.