Yankee Come Home

by William Craig

  By 1913, when the Maine monument was unveiled in Central Park, Hearst and his fellow yellow journalists had put away childish things. Pulitzer had stopped trying to beat Hearst to the lowest common denominator and, before his death in 1911, had begun the rehabilitation of his World and his reputation; in time, the money he left Columbia University to establish a journalism school and prizes would make his name synonymous with excellence and integrity in news gathering.

  Hearst, inevitably, had gone into politics, serving as a Democratic representative to Congress from 1903 to 1907, but that was as far as his maverick rich-kid reputation would take him. He saw himself as president material, but Democrats gave his 1904 nomination bid no encouragement. In time he’d leave New York for his California castle, San Simeon, to spend the second half of his long life demonstrating the loneliness of riches, power, and celebrity. The dedication of the Columbus Circle Maine monument was one of his last triumphs as a popular figure.

  The United States paid tribute to the ship and her sailors by summoning every imaginable dignitary to Manhattan for prayers, speeches, parades, and the laying of mourning wreaths. President Woodrow Wilson couldn’t attend, but he sent a letter to be read aloud by celebrity author, monument committee chairman, and retired general James Grant Wilson (no relation). Former president William Howard Taft offered an address, as did Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, Mayor William J. Gaynor, Governor William Sulzer, and representatives of the Cuban government and the United Spanish War Veterans.

  The VIP whose appearance probably packed the most emotional punch was Charles Dwight Sigsbee, who had been the Maine’s captain on that terrible night in Havana Bay. Now a sixty-eight-year-old rear admiral, Sigsbee spoke after the governor. Finally, buglers from the fleet played “Taps.”

  “None can ever know the awful scenes of consternation, despair and suffering down in the forward compartments of the stricken ship; of men wounded, or drowning in the swirl of water, or confined in a closed compartment gradually filling with water,” wrote Captain Charles Sigsbee in his “Personal Narrative of the ‘Maine,’” printed in Century Magazine in the winter of 1898–99. “It is comforting to believe that most of those who were lost were killed instantly; and it is probably true, also, for many of the wounded who recovered had no knowledge of the explosion; they remembered no sensations, except that they awoke and found themselves wounded and in a strange place.”

  “Strange” seems an awfully bland word for the world into which the Maine’s sailors woke when their ship was destroyed at her mooring in Havana Bay at 9:40 P.M. on Tuesday, February 15, 1898. It’s more than strange to nod off in a canvas hammock, surrounded by hundreds of whispering, laughing, snoring shipmates, secure in the belly of an armored warship, and to wake up in pain, floating on dark water, below a night sky stabbed by rockets and flames. But Captain Sigsbee had great faith in the power of understatement.

  Charles Dwight Sigsbee was born in Albany, New York, in 1845, and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1863; he’d only entered the school in 1860, at age fifteen. At eighteen he was an exceptionally young ensign in the middle of an exceptionally bloody war. Sailing with Vice Admiral David Farragut into Mobile Bay and in support of the epic final amphibious assault on Fort Fisher, young Sigsbee served bravely in some of the Civil War’s deadliest naval combat, witnessing some of its most telling confrontations between the ancient technological triumvirate of sail, wood, and smoothbore cannon, and the coming era of engines, armor, and turret-mounted, long-range, rifled guns.

  Immediately after the war he was posted to the steam-sloop Wyoming, which was dispatched to join the Asiatic Squadron based at Shimonoseki, Japan. In the Pacific and all around the globe, Union ships were still hunting Confederate commerce raiders that hadn’t yet received word of their government’s collapse. By the time Wyoming got to Japan, most of these lone wolves had been trapped and tamed, but the Asiatic Squadron stayed on station, with a new mission to project American power in the Far East.

  Sigsbee served with distinction there, too, and was rewarded with promotions that would have been astonishingly rapid even in wartime. He progressed to master in 1866, to lieutenant the following year, and to lieutenant commander in 1868, at only twenty-three.

  For two stultifying decades after Appomattox, the Navy “dwindled into insignificance,” in the words of an admiral from a later era, Hyman Rickover. A maverick officer of the World War II generation who is generally regarded as the father of the nuclear Navy, Rickover reviewed Sigsbee’s career in a 1976 study How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed. A navy with few ships offers few chances for promotion. Sigsbee rose to “positions of higher rank and greater responsibility,” Rickover wrote, by focusing on hydographic science, a specialty that gave him a chance to shine.

  Sigsbee commanded the Blake on hydrographic surveys from 1875 to 1878. Working in collaboration with the great naturalist and industrialist Alexander Agassiz, Sigsbee undertook the deep-sea exploration of the Gulf of Mexico; the “device to handle some of the deep-sea data” was a breakthrough electrical sounding machine, which Sigsbee developed from prototypes created by Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and fellow Navy officer Lieutenant George Belknap. With it he discovered Sigsbee Deep, at 12,714 feet the profoundest abyss in the Gulf of Mexico. His mechanical cleverness also found expression in apparatus for collecting deep-water specimens, and inventions including an improved parallel ruler, trunk hinges, and electrical regulators. Kaiser Wilhelm I awarded Sigsbee the Prussian Red Eagle in recognition of his contributions to science. Still a lieutenant, Sigsbee was appointed the Navy’s chief hydrographer, holding that post from 1893 until 1897, when he was promoted to captain and given command of the Maine.

  All this scientific acumen and accomplishment might suggest a detail-oriented officer, an ambitious man with a steel-trap mind. However, Sigsbee’s photographic portraits, his memoirs, and others’ recollections all suggest a kindly, donnish fellow, something of a naval Mr. Chips. He had an artistic bent that was rare in an officer; while posted to the Naval Academy from 1869 to 1871, he created a drawing course, and freelanced his own sketches to the Daily Graphic, which offered him a job as a cartoonist. By the end of 1871 he was back at sea, where danger always found him decisive, but dull shipboard routine revealed him to be something of an absentminded professor.

  In 1886 Sigsbee commanded the USS Kearsarge, honorable but ancient victor of a famous Civil War duel with the Confederate commerce raider Alabama outside the harbor of Cherbourg, France. The fight had earned Kearsarge intense fame, including a battle portrait by Édouard Manet. By 1886, however, Kearsarge was just a storied has-been. An inspection board found her to be dirty, and specifically faulted Sigsbee for two failings: the marines were insufficiently drilled, and ordnance was not being handled according to instructions.

  That kind of report could cripple a peacetime officer’s slim chances for promotion. Sigsbee explained the lapses away, blaming the lack of drill on a spell of bad weather and the ship’s dirtiness on … well, on the ship itself. Kearsarge was dirty, he said, because she was old.

  The Navy accepted his excuses and dropped the charges. Perhaps it didn’t hurt that Sigsbee had served under Farragut, and that the Civil War’s other great naval hero, Admiral David Dixon Porter, wrote the Naval Examining Board on Sigsbee’s behalf.

  Rickover’s profile of Sigsbee cites another incident that might have ruined a man’s career. Shortly after receiving command of the Maine on April 10, 1897, Sigsbee decided to take the battleship “into New York Harbor through the treacherous Hell Gate without a pilot … To avoid ramming a crowded excursion steamer [Sigsbee] plowed into Pier 46. There is evidence that at least one high-ranking officer thought Sigsbee had used poor judgment in operation in crowded and restricted waters without a pilot. On the other hand, his split-second decision to hit the pier instead of the steamer prevented a heavy loss of life and won him a letter of commendation.”

  The East Rive
r incident certainly demonstrated that Sigsbee had a cool head. Still, one can question the decision to keep him in command of the Maine. He was a senior and experienced officer; on the other hand, he sometimes seemed to have his head in the clouds.

  Still more mysterious is his superiors’ decision to send the Maine to Havana in the tense early weeks of 1898. Cuba was at war. The Spanish weren’t winning, and they were painfully aware of the support the mambises were receiving from exiles and sympathizers in the United States.

  Relations between expat yanquis and Havana’s peninsulares were excruciatingly tense. In response to brief outbreaks of anti-American rioting, Consul Fitzhugh Lee, a former Confederate cavalryman, asked the White House to send a Navy vessel—and then quickly canceled the request, rightly perceiving that such a visit would be both unwelcome and dangerously provocative. The White House ignored the second message and sent the Maine anyway.

  Maybe Sigsbee was in command because Navy planners understood that the premier battleship’s first mission was likely to be diplomatic. His mild manner made the politic best of the Maine’s stay in Havana Bay. He performed all the intranaval ceremonies, invited Spanish and Cuban guests aboard, and made appearances at receptions and bullfights.

  None of which did a thing to mollify angry Spaniards and peninsulares or to make the Maine any less tempting a target. Indeed, the risk of some kind of incident was so high that observers on all sides of the conflict could not help wondering whether the Maine had been sent simply to draw fire.

  Yet McKinley may have honestly believed that the Maine would overawe the Spanish.

  Perhaps it did.

  Only one uncertainty remains certain: There’s absolutely no conclusive evidence of any attack on the Maine by mine, bomb, or other infernal device.

  There is, however, plenty of material and circumstantial evidence to suggest that she was blown up by an undetected fire in one of her coal bunkers. Though computer-aided reconstructions have added some clarity and muddied other matters, Rickover’s 1976 book remains the definitive analysis. The admiral tallies the lack of evidence for attack, then describes the epidemic of coal bunker fires and explosions in ships of the day.

  In the race to develop modern warships, new design ideas were sometimes put into practice before second thoughts could prevent mistakes. Some countries created ships with gun turrets that smashed superstructures; others suffered the embarrassment of having ships nearly sink when pointing all guns to one side caused a dangerous list. One bright idea was to use coal bunkers to shield magazines from enemy fire. Whatever theoretical advantage this practice gained came at the cost of a very real danger: spontaneous ignition of the soft, bituminous coal.

  “Since 1895,” Rickover wrote, “there had been three coal bunker fires in the Olympia, four in the Wilmington and at least one in the Petrel, the Lancaster and the Indiana. There had been several bunker fires recently in the Brooklyn, and it was well known that those on board the Cincinnati and the New York almost caused the magazines to explode. The Oregon, too, had been endangered.”

  The bunker most likely to have caused the Maine’s magazine to explode had not been inspected for twelve hours: plenty of time, experience had proven, for a coal fire to run wild, especially in Havana’s tropical heat.

  “I heard a terrible crash, an explosion I suppose that was,” recalled boatswain’s mate Charles Bergman, who was in his hammock, as was most of the crew at that late hour. “Something fell, and then after that I got thrown somewhere in a hot place. Wherever that was I don’t know. I got burned on my legs and arms, and got my mouth full of ashes and one thing and another. Then the next thing I was in the water—away under the water somewhere, with a lot of wreckage on top of me that was sinking me down. After I got clear of that I started to come to the surface of the water again, and I got afoul of some other wreckage. I got my head jammed in, and I couldn’t get loose, so I let myself go down. Then it carried me down farther. I suppose when it touched the bottom somewhere it sort of opened out a bit, and I got my head out and started for the surface of the water again. I hit a lot of other stuff with my head, and then I got my head above the water. I got picked up by a Spanish boat, one of these shore boats, I think.”

  Bergman is one of only two known survivors from the crew’s quarters in the Maine’s forward compartments, on the berth deck. Whatever destroyed the Maine did so by detonating the ammunition in the forward magazines, creating a blast sufficient to lift the ship’s bow out of the water and peel the upper decks back like the lid of a sardine can. Of the Maine’s 354 officers and men, 266 died in the explosion, most of them ordinary seamen caught at ease or asleep in their forward quarters.

  The Maine sank and settled on the harbor bottom in minutes. Within the hour, Sigsbee—the last to leave her decks—was visiting wounded sailors who had been brought to the City of Washington, a passenger ship anchored close by the wreck.

  “I walked among the wounded some minutes,” he wrote, “and spent a few more in watching the fitful explosion of ammunition on board the Maine,” which had sunk but wasn’t completely submerged. “Then I went to the captain’s compartment and composed my first telegram to the Navy Department.”

  Mindful of tense relations between the United States and Spain, Sigsbee “feared the result of first impressions of the great disaster on our people.” He composed a telegram that is a monument to understatement:

  Maine blown up in Havana harbor at nine forty to-night and destroyed. Many wounded and doubtless more killed or drowned. Wounded and others aboard Spanish man-of-war and Ward Line steamer. Send Light House Tenders from Key West for crew and the few pieces of equipment above water. No one has clothing other than that upon him. Public opinion should be suspended until further report. All officers believed to be saved … Many Spanish officers, including representatives of General Blanco, now with us to express sympathy.

  Sigsbee

  Displaying a hero’s gift for grace under pressure, Captain Sigsbee transcended grief and anger. His duty, as he saw it, was “to sustain the government during the period of excitement or indignation that was likely to follow the reception of the first report.” He took care to include news of Spanish aid and sympathy.

  This was statesmanship, and something more. Given the understandable temptation to anger—Sigsbee recalled that, in composing the telegram, he “found it necessary to repress my own suspicions” about the Maine’s destruction—this was uncommon decency.

  On the morning after, Captain Sigsbee got his first good look at the wreck. With her keel resting on the harbor bottom, the 319-foot-long battleship wasn’t quite submerged. While all her decks were awash, the mainmast stood like a steeple’s skeleton, watching over a tangle of topside rigging and equipment, from smashed boats to the poop deck searchlight. The Stars and Stripes still hung from the mast; above it dangled a mop, blown from the deck into the rigging. Up forward was the wreck’s iconic form, the bizarre, backtwisted superstructure and fore-decks. The bridge, pilot house, conning tower, and a six-inch gun had all been thrown upside down and aft.

  “The broad surface that was uppermost,” Sigsbee wrote, “was the ceiling of the berth-deck, where many men had swung from beam to beam in their hammocks the night before. On the white paint of the ceiling was the impression of two human bodies—mere dust,—so I was told afterwards.”

  The only man other than Bergman to escape the berth-deck, coal-passer Jeremiah Shea, could explain his survival only by joking, “I think I must be an armor-piercing projectile, sir.”

  Only a quarter of the sailors and Marines on board that night—men on duty in the engine room, at communications posts, on guard, or serving the needs of officers in the ship’s aft compartments—lived. The rest were lost to the worst disaster to strike the U.S. military since the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

  Like “Custer’s Last Stand,” the Maine’s obliteration was the kind of shock that scars a generation. Like news of Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor, or JFK’s assassinatio
n, the Maine catastrophe generated indelible stories and images. As Americans who were of age on September 11, 2001, remember “Let’s roll!”—the overheard battle cry of United Airlines Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer—so Americans of the “Spanish War” generation were almost certain to know that the last thing Captain Sigsbee remembered hearing before the explosion was “Taps.”

  “I laid down my pen to listen to the notes of the bugle,” Sigsbee recalled, “which were singularly beautiful in the oppressive stillness of the night. The Marine bugler, Newton, who was rather given to fanciful effects, was evidently doing his best. During his pauses the echoes floated back to the ship with singular distinctness, repeating the trains of the bugle fully and exactly. A half-hour later, Newton was dead.”

  To stand, as tens of thousands of Americans did, on Columbus Circle in May 1913, in the company of Charles Sigsbee, to dedicate the Maine memorial and to hear the long rise and fall of “Taps” was to close a circle of time and sorrow, putting a national grief to rest.

  “Taps” was followed by “The Star-Spangled Banner,” played in solemn tempo by the New York Navy Yard’s band as the monument was unveiled by nine-year-old George Hearst, only son of monument committee member and Spanish War boomer, publisher William Randolph Hearst. The national anthem played on as the ships anchored in the Hudson roared out massed twenty-one-gun salutes. One after another, official mourners laid wreaths at the monument’s base, Sigsbee last of all. And while the band played and the mourners paid their respects, over on the Hudson the New York Naval Militia set afloat a floral effigy of the Maine, a ship of flowers drifting helplessly out to sea.

  Chapter 10

  DAVID SWIMS TO GITMO

  In the Dormitory suburbs east of Havana, I slept on a child’s bed, a low iron frame with cheap wooden head- and footboards. It was a lot like the bed I’d slept in as a little boy, though that one had been stacked on top of my brother’s. The height protected me from monsters under the bed, but not from gravity; there’s still a scar under my hair from a fall onto the handle of my Radio Flyer. Still, I loved the high bunk, its tree-house security. I decorated the headboard with a Bugs Bunny decal. And in my room in Yolanda’s apartment, the little bed’s headboard was appliquéd with another cartoon figure, a daffy white bird.