A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

Spain indignantly rejected the proposal, or rather the prospect of the proposal, and the Secretary of State also dismissed it as ‘a robber doctrine I abhor’. But its drafting was to have important repercussions. The President at the time was Pierce, a Republican. Tension between the north and south was mounting; the parties were mustering their forces; and the Democrats were toying with the idea of enlisting the support of Cuba as a slave-owning state. A number of Cuban planters were attracted by the idea. Could not a free Cuba follow the example of a free Texas? Buchanan, by endorsing the Ostend Manifesto, proved to his fellow Democrats that he was in favour of the annexation of Cuba. This was to stand him in good stead in the Democratic convention in Charleston. Up till this point, Douglas had seemed the favoured candidate. Douglas was a man of parts and power who had first attracted attention by his championing of Andrew Jackson and his insistence on the restoration to Jackson of the fine that had been imposed on him after the battle of New Orleans. But at the Democratic convention, in the changed climate of approaching conflict, he was outmanoeuvred by Buchanan. Buchanan won the nomination and was elected. He was not a failure as a President; an obese bachelor, he was socially a great success, and entertained the future Edward VII in a manner that that exacting gourmand thoroughly appreciated, but he was not the man of destiny that the hour required. Four years later he was beaten at the polls by Lincoln. No one can tell to what heights a man may rise if circumstance ‘puts the sword into his hand’; if Douglas had won the nomination, he might have held the fort for the Democrats in 186L Had he done so, the course of history would have been different. At this point, as so often in the past, the politics of the West Indies affected the drama of a larger stage.

  For the four years of war between the States, Cuba’s concerns lay outside the story of the USA. Cuban interests lay with the Confederates, and her harbours were extremely useful to them; so useful that the State Department felt that it must have some protection for its trade in the Caribbean, particularly after the episode of the Alabama. There was serious talk, after the war, of her purchasing the Danish Virgin Islands. The Danes believed, indeed, that the deal was going through, and proclamations from Charles X were posted in the streets of St Thomas, St John and St Croix, announcing the conditions of the take-over, but, under a new administration, Congress did not endorse the bargain, and once again the Cuban issue filled the centre of the stage.

  It was to remain there till the century’s close. In 1868 a revolution broke out in Spain and Isabella was deposed. This was the signal for a revolt in Cuba, and a civil war began that was to last ten years. It was a war of murder and destruction as ruthless as the 1936-1939 civil war in Spain. The rebels freed the slaves, without compensation to the owners, not on humanitarian grounds but to swell their own ranks. There was no quarter on either side. Women enlisted as soldiers in the Cuban army because they felt that that was the safest place for them to be. The Spanish forces greatly outnumbered the Cubans; they were better trained and better armed; but the government made the mistake of sending out infantry instead of the cavalry, which would have been better suited to the terrain. Spanish generalship was also at fault in organizing a series of defensive zones which involved the splitting up of their forces into small groups which provided easy targets for the Cuban guerrillas, who were expert horsemen and wielded their cutlasses with pitiless skill. A smaller army might have done better. The Spaniards were, moreover, more vulnerable to tropical diseases than the Cubans, and a fifth of their casualties were due to fever. The governor, Valmaseda, was as fierce as any of his conquistador predecessors. He issued a series of proclamations as a warning to civilians; any unoccupied house was burned, any occupied house had to fly the white flag of surrender.

  The contest was watched with the closest attention in the USA. With the war between the States ended, the Southerners no longer needed a slave-owning state as an ally, but Cuba lay too close to the United States for its concerns to be ignored. The sympathies of the country lay with the rebels. There was the long tradition of support for any colony striving to free itself from the overlordship of colonial masters. The Spaniards were slave owners. A number of exiled Cubans toured the country appealing for arms and funds; a number of Americans enlisted in the Cuban army, while the more prudent lined their pockets with the proceeds of blockade-running. Relations between Spain and the USA grew strained. Nor can it be denied that Spain had many causes for complaint. It was estimated that during the ten years of war thirty thousand Cubans emigrated to the USA and changed their nationality; many of them then returned to Cuba, demanding protection as American citizens. The American authorities were clearly making no attempt to prevent their nationals from supplying the rebels with arms, money and supplies. Spain announced that she would treat as pirates any gunrunners that she captured, and was soon provided with an opportunity of showing that she was not threatening idly.

  During the war between the States, a British firm had built two sister ships as gunrunners, the Virginius and the Tornado. The Tornado was bought by Spain. The Virginius was sold in the United States, apparently to a private trading company. With her papers seemingly in order, she sailed out of New York in 1871, with an American captain and crew, and flying the stars and stripes. Two years later she was chased in the open sea by the Tornado. Her speed should have been equal to her sister’s, but it was many months since she had been overhauled, and her engines were in a faulty state. She jettisoned much of her cargo; lacking fuel, she plied her engines with fried fat, the smoke from which facilitated her pursuit; eventually she was caught before she could reach a neutral harbour, and was brought back a captive to Santiago.

  She was flying an American flag; her master, Captain Fry, was an American, so were the majority of his crew. She was carrying a hundred passengers. She was ostensibly plying between Curaçao and Jamaica, but her cargo contained arms and contraband. Her papers were not in order. It was evident that she was operating under instructions from the Cuban rebels. According to the instructions that he had received from Madrid, it was the duty of the officer in charge, General Burriel, to treat her as a privateer.

  The case aroused the greatest excitement. The USA was in a difficult position. Captain Fry had been trading illegally, but he was captured on the open sea, and it was the laws of the USA, not of Spain, that he had infringed. But Burriel was not the man to be deterred by a legalistic quibble. The trial was perfunctory; the crew was sentenced to be shot. They were lined up on their knees, with their backs to the firing squad; Captain Fry, whose sentence was not to be carried out till the following day, walked along the line, bidding each member of his crew farewell. When the shooting was over, the heads were severed from the bodies and impaled, while the trunks were trampled on by horses. G. W. Sherman, of the New York Herald, was imprisoned for four days for attempting to sketch the scene, and Ralph Keeler, a well-known writer who had gone down as a reporter, disappeared and was never seen again. It was generally believed that the Spaniards had had him murdered.

  That night Captain Fry wrote a farewell letter to his wife that, although obviously written for posthumous publication, is not unmoving. ‘Calmly seated on a beautiful moonlight night in a most beautiful bay in Cuba’, it began.

  Next morning Captain Fry marched calmly with his fellow officers to his execution. He was fortunate in that the first volley proved mortal for him, since the marksmanship of the firing squad was vacillating and most of the victims had to be finished off by an officer’s revolver. Among the men who marched with Captain Fry was the second engineer, who had assured his captors that he had meddled with the engine so that the ship might be overtaken by the Tornado. He was promised his freedom, but was told that in order to prevent his fellows from learning of his treachery he should march with them to the point of execution. But either through bad shooting, carelessness, faulty orders or official contempt for treachery, he met the same fate as the others. He died protesting violently.

  A number of passengers, and a few members of the crew,
still awaited sentence, but at this point a surprising intervention occurred. Admiral Lorraine, a British naval officer in charge of the squadron at Jamaica, brought a man-of-war into Santiago and assured the authorities that he would shell their city if there were any further executions. He eventually secured the release of the survivors. On his arrival in New York he could scarcely be given an official welcome, but in private he was treated as a hero, and the wild men of Nevada sent him from the Comstock mines a silver nugget with the message, ‘Sir, you are a brick.’

  Throughout the USA there was an outburst of indignation; the Spanish Minister of State rejected the USA’s first protest with ‘serene energy’, but eventually Madrid disowned the action and paid an indemnity of eighty thousand dollars to the families of the victims. It refused, however, to make any reparation to the Stars and Stripes, which the USA claimed had been insulted. Spain argued that it was Captain Fry who had insulted the flag by using it as a cover for surreptitious and illegal trading. Eventually the matter was allowed to drop, and the Virginius was released. She was not, however, to reach American soil. A hurricane struck her east of Florida. She perished, but without loss of life. Spain, though she had officially disowned General Burriel, promoted him.

  Before the ten years of war ended, another incident was to lower the prestige of Spain. The grave in Havana of a pro-Spanish editor was desecrated, and forty students were suspected of the outrage. They were brought to trial, but there was no evidence against them and they were acquitted; this did not, however, suit the military authorities. The captain general ordered their re-arrest; they were tried by a court martial and found guilty. Every fifth one was shot as a warning to the community. The USA began to feel that it was more than uncomfortable to have so close a neighbour with so little regard for the laws of justice.

  The civil war followed its course, with varying fortunes, with neither side quite strong enough to subdue the other. At last an uneasy truce, the outcome of boredom and exhaustion, was concluded. The liberation of the slaves was confirmed, under a time clause. Cuba was promised representation in the Cortes and some share in the administration of its own affairs. There was an amnesty for the rebel leaders. On paper it looked a reasonable compromise, but Spain made little attempt to fulfil her obligations. Technically, Cuba was represented in the Cortes, but the voting was so manipulated that the seats were held by the puppets of the captain general. The level of taxation was maintained. When a Cuban received a prepaid letter, he was liable for additional postage. The island contributed twice as much per capita to the interest on Spain’s national debt as a Spaniard did. Trade was so hampered by duties and restrictions that it was cheaper to send a sack of flour from Mississippi to Spain, pay duty on it there, then ship it back to Cuba, than send it straight to Havana. A trade agreement with the USA was signed in 1891 but withdrawn in 1894. And all the time, refugees from Cuba were working up anti-Spanish propaganda. Even though the Spanish throne itself seemed relatively stable, most visitors to Cuba felt that beneath the calm prosperity of its cane fields and tobacco plantations danger waited.

  It came unexpectedly, without warning, and for no special cause in 1895. At first the Spaniards took the revolt lightly, and one officer complained that it was a bore having to hunt mountain goats, but the opposition was stronger now than it had been in 1869. The Cubans were convinced that Spain was resolved to deny them a fair constitution. Spain had not counted on the amount of ill feeling that she had engendered in the USA. She also did not know that at the close of her tenure in the Caribbean she was to be opposed to a buccaneer every bit as ruthless as any of those who from Tortuga had harried her silver fleets.

  In New York, William Randolph Hearst was in the saddle, and he was ready to exploit to its full the mounting clamour in the country to be rid of this menace on its doorstep. Grover Cleveland was at the White House; he had said that ‘Cuba is so close to us as to be hardly separated from our territory.’ But Cleveland was a Democrat, and opposed to war. Theodore Roosevelt describes him as having ‘no more backbone than a chocolate éclair’.

  Hearst was concerned with the publicity of his newspapers. He sent down Richard Harding Davis as his chief reporter, and Remington to illustrate his stories. The Spaniards were waging the war with a brutal ruthlessness. General Weyler’s little finger was thicker than Valmaseda’s loins. He organized a system of concentration camps –recontentrados – into which the inhabitants of whole areas were herded and allowed to perish of hunger and neglect. In his search for suspects, neither sex nor race were respected. Hearst double-headlined as the truth each fresh rumour of atrocities. Pulitzer watched with alarm the rise of the Journal’s sales, and harried his reporters on the World to outdo his rival. Had there been no Hearst, Pulitzer might well have used his influence in favour of peace. The journalists were in a most difficult position. They were not allowed to visit the front; they had to stay in an hotel in Havana, relying on official handouts and rumours from insurgents. The censorship was extremely strict. At one point Remington cabled Hearst: ‘Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.’ Hearst cabled back: ‘Please remain. You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.’

  Eventually Remington sent up a picture, portraying three young women being stripped naked in the presence of gloating soldiers. The picture was accompanied by a story under Davis’ signature, explaining that the women were suspected of carrying secret information and that the search had taken place on an American ship. The public was indignant, but not nearly as indignant as the three young ladies were on their arrival in New York when they were shown the picture. They had been searched, they protested, in the privacy of their cabins, and by female policewomen.

  Pulitzer made the most of his rival’s slip, but Hearst was not deterred. He was soon exploiting the predicament of a Cuban Joan of Arc, who had been flung into prison because, Hearst maintained, she had resisted the advances of a Spanish colonel. In vain did the Spaniards protest that the woman was a baggage anyhow. The spirit of American chivalry was roused. Hearst scooped Pulitzer and his other rivals by sending down a commando raid to rescue her from prison.

  The war followed its guerrilla course; once again, neither side was strong enough to subdue the other, but this time neither side was prepared to compromise. Weyler, ‘the brute’, was recalled and a more humane captain general was appointed in his place; but the system of recontentrados was continued. The tempo of Hearst’s editorials grew more belligerent, while a World journalist was screaming, ‘American citizens are imprisoned and slain without trial. Blood on the roadside, blood in the fields, blood on the doorsteps. Blood, blood, blood.’

  For many years, lawlessness had thrived in the country districts, and no man had ridden there unarmed. Now even the towns became unsafe, and the USA, to protect the lives and properties of its citizens, sent down one of its men-of-war, the Maine, on a friendly mission to anchor in Havana harbour. On the night of February 15, 1898, she was blown up, and 286 sailors were drowned. No explanation of this disaster has been found. Spain immediately sent a message of sympathy to Washington, and the American consul at Havana cabled that ‘public opinion should be suspended until further report’, but Hearst and Pulitzer were baying for blood and McKinley was now at the White House. The politicians in Washington were as much in the dark as the journalists in Havana. Senators, indeed, relied for their information on ‘eyewitness’ reports written from hotel lounges. The American ambassador in Havana was anti-Spanish. Spain was ready to compromise to a point deeply humiliating to her pride, and the American ambassador in Madrid pleaded her case with Washington. But Madrid was many thousand miles away. The Senate was almost equally divided, though the pro-war majority in the House was overwhelming. Had McKinley been firm, he might have won over the four senators whose votes would have turned the scale. But McKinley was weak, and Hearst got his war.

  It was a comic-opera kind of war, as far as any operation can be described as comic in which m
en are being killed and maimed. If the Cubans and Spaniards had been left to fight it out between themselves, the war might have dragged on for twenty years, but Spain, from a distance of three thousand miles, was ill-equipped to match ‘the might, majesty, dominion and power’ of the United States. She fought, however, with her traditional pride and courage. In the far Pacific, Admiral Dewey in a single morning and with the loss of seven lives destroyed the batteries of Manila and the ships at anchor in the harbour, but the Spanish fleet under Admiral Cervera, which was based on home waters, was to cause a good deal of trouble. When war broke out, it was refuelling in the Canaries, and for several days the American fleet was uncertain of its whereabouts. The eastern seaboard was considerably disturbed. A hostile flotilla was capable of inflicting heavy damage upon unprotected towns. Rumour succeeded upon rumour, but at last it was learned that the fleet had eluded the protective cordon and slipped into Santiago. The Americans did not know how powerful a fleet was to be opposed to them, and one of the most daring and skilful exploits of the war was undertaken by a young naval officer, Victor Blue, who landed down the coast, alone, climbed the hills above the harbour, and brought back the news that five cruisers and two torpedo boats were anchored there.

  As a countermeasure, the admiral in charge of the US fleet conceived the ingenious idea of sinking an anchored coaling ship across the narrow 350-foot entrance to the harbour, thus imprisoning the Spanish fleet. It was the same device that the Spanish had practised against Drake three centuries before in Puerto Rico, and he entrusted this mission to Lt Richmond Hobson, a twenty-seven-year-old officer born in Alabama, youngest member and head of his class of‘89, who later was to propose and conduct a postgraduate course in naval architecture at Annapolis. It was a most dangerous mission, the chances of survival were small. Hobson, with six companions, wore underclothes, life preservers and revolvers at the waist. The ship, the Merrimac, was loaded with coal. It was Hobson’s plan to shatter the hull with small torpedoes as soon as the ship was anchored across the entrance. He started immediately after moonset.