Read Honor Bound for Wake’s perilous exploits inside Haiti in 1888.
Chapter 5. Au Revoir, not Adieu
Read The Assassin’s Honor and An Honorable War for more about Wake’s remarkable wife Maria and her influence on his life and work.
Maria had two sons. The oldest, Francisco, was a Franciscan priest in Havana murdered by Colonel Marron in February 1898. Juanito was a colonial bureaucrat and reserve army officer captured in battle by Wake, his stepfather. Read An Honorable War for details.
Modern naval opinion is that Maine was destroyed by an accidental spontaneous explosion of gases inside her coal bunker that ignited the adjacent ammunition magazine.
Chapter 8. The Society of the Night
Loma Quemada means “burned hill.” It is 643 feet high.
The Abakuá are still present in Cuba as well as in Cuban exile communities around the world, most notably New York City.
Chapter 9. Africa
Changüí music is still quite popular in Cuba, and many consider it to be the predecessor of salsa. You can see a video on YouTube at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvxWYQSHUYg.
Chapter 10. Civilization
Matusalem rum is still around. Since the 1959 revolution in Cuba it has been made in the Dominican Republic. I consider it to be the finest sipping rum in the world.
Chapter 11. Reinforcements
Wake’s friend Bowman Hendry McCalla (1844–1910) was one of the most famous U.S. naval officers of the latter nineteenth century. His naval service began at Annapolis in 1861 and included leading men in combat during the Civil War, the 1885 Panama Crisis, the 1898 Spanish-American War, and the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1903, retired in 1906, died in 1910, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Two U.S. warships have been named after him as well as McCalla Hill at the Guantánamo U.S. Naval Station.
“Goat locker” is an old sailor slang term for the senior petty officers’ quarters. It is still used. The colorful term comes from the days of sail, when ships carried goats and other livestock for food, milk, and eggs. They were kept near the petty officers for safety from thieves.
A “gam” is a conversation between sailors, frequently filled with unverifiable sea stories.
Read The Honored Dead to learn the details of how Rork lost his hand in Vietnam and subsequently gained his unique “appliance” courtesy of the French navy.
Chapter 12. The Great Man Himself
Calixto García Iñiguez (1839–98) was born in eastern Cuba in August 1839, only two months after Peter Wake was born in Massachusetts. García joined the struggle for Cuban independence in 1868, when the first phase of the war for independence began. The scar on his forehead was from an attempt to commit suicide with his pistol when captured by the Spanish in 1878. The wound gave him severe headaches for the rest of his life. For thirty years he served the cause of Cuba’s independence, becoming a senior general, second only to General Máximo Gómez, the commander in chief of all forces in the Cuban Army of Liberation. Like José Martí and so many other Cuban leaders, García was a Freemason.
When General Shafter and the American army entered Santiago de Cuba upon the surrender of the Spanish defenders in late July 1898, General García and his troops were not allowed to participate in the entrance procession or the ceremony. This intentional snub by Shafter caused enormous and lasting ill-will among the Cubans.
García died of influenza on 11 December 1898, only a few months after the war ended, while in Washington, D.C., on a Cuban diplomatic mission. He was temporarily buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Afterward, his remains were taken home to Cuba by the gunboat Nashville with full naval honors. He is still revered by the Cuban people.
Andrew Rowan (1857–1943) was a career Army officer from West Virginia who entered West Point at the relatively old age of twenty, graduating in 1881. Long interested in Cuba and fluent in Spanish, he wrote a book about the island (The Island of Cuba; a descriptive and historical account of the “Great Antilla”) in 1896. At the beginning of the Spanish-American War he was sent on a harrowing courier mission to take a message from President McKinley to General García assuring him of U.S. support. Later in the war, Rowan commanded black American troops in Cuba. He retired from active service in 1909 and died at San Francisco at age eighty-five. A famous essay, “Message to García,” was written in 1899 about Rowan’s exploits on his courier mission.
Details of Wake’s spy mission in Havana are included in An Honorable War.
Chapter 13. Decisions of War and Love
Oregon was a 10,000-ton Indiana-class battleship commissioned in 1896. This formidable warship mounted twin 13-inch guns, four 8-inch guns, four 6-inch guns, twelve 3-inch guns, twenty 6-pounder guns, six 1-pounder guns, and four torpedo tubes. Oregon’s dash around South America to get to Cuba in time to fight became legendary.
William Thomas Sampson (1840–1902) was a naval officer from New York who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1861. After a typical career, he served as president of the board of inquiry into the Maine sinking in early 1898. Afterward he was promoted to rear admiral and given command of the North Atlantic Squadron, the main battle force against the Spanish in the Caribbean. In 1901 Congress created the Sampson Medal, to be given to all naval personnel who served in combat actions under Sampson’s command in the war. Sampson thus became one of only four members of the U.S. armed forces ever to be authorized to wear a military decoration with his own image on it. Adm. George Dewey, Gen. Pershing, and Rear Adm. Richard Byrd are the others. Sampson retired in 1902 and died a few months later.
Gloucester was originally the yacht Corsair owned by financier John Pierpoint Morgan. Corsair was launched in 1891. At 240 feet and almost 800 tons, with a speed of 17 knots, she was one of the largest and fastest yachts in America. In April 1898 she was obtained by the U.S. Navy and commissioned Gloucester, under the command of Lt. Cdr. Richard Wainwright. Gloucester was armed with four 6-pounder guns and served the U.S. Navy in various capacities until 1919.
Richard Wainwright (1849–1926) was a career naval officer, originally from Washington, D.C., and an 1864 graduate of the Naval Academy. In 1896 he was head of ONI. In February 1898 he was executive officer in Maine when she exploded. He subsequently commanded Gloucester. He retired in 1911 and died fifteen years later at age seventy-seven.
Chapter 14. Find a Bigger Mule
Wake is referring to the Battle of Fredericksburg on 13 December 1862, when the Union army under the command of Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside suffered 12,653 casualties during a stupid frontal assault on the fortified Confederate defenses. Burnside’s reputation never recovered.
Chapter 16. The Liberators
The Daiquiri cocktail, a mixture of rum, sugar, and lime juice, is named for the village. Jennings Cox, an American mining engineer who worked near Daiquiri, is usually given credit for inventing the drink in the early 1900s. William Chanler, a wealthy American adventurer, businessman, and politician who served with the U.S. Army V Corps in Oriente, Cuba, in 1898, subsequently bought the copper mines near Daiquiri, learned of the drink, and introduced it to the social scene in New York City.
Chapter 17. In the Arena and Daring Great Things
Captain Bucky O’Neill (1860–98) was a gambler, sheriff, friend of Wyatt Earp at Tombstone, Arizona, and politician. He volunteered for Theodore Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” cavalry regiment and was appointed a captain. In 1907 seven thousand people gathered at Prescott, Arizona, to unveil a monument memorializing him and the other Rough Riders. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Some may fault Roosevelt’s memory of the famous proverb of Solomon. The word usually used in Bibles of the period is “stalled,” not “fattened.” They mean the same.
“Facing the elephant” (or “seeing the elephant”) was a nineteenth-century military slang term for experiencing combat. It is generally thought to be from the classic descriptions of infantry facing an assa
ult by war elephants in the ancient world—a terrifying experience.
Chapter 18. The Grand Strategy
Gen. Joseph Wheeler (1836–1906) was an American military officer, politician, and author. After graduating from West Point in 1858 he served in the U.S. Army until 1861, when he resigned and joined the Confederacy. He served with distinction in the Confederate army, during which he was wounded three times and had sixteen horses shot from under him. After the Civil War he represented Alabama in Congress for twenty years. He was also the author of six books on military subjects. His oldest son served in the U.S. Army during the fighting in Cuba, and one of his daughters was a Red Cross nurse there. General Wheeler is one of the few former Confederate officers buried at Arlington.
The 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments are storied units of the U.S. Army, part of the fabled “Buffalo Soldier” regiments formed after the Civil War to fight Indians. The 9th and 10th were activated in 1866 as segregated black regiments and served continuously until 1944. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Sr., the first black general in the U.S. Army, served as a young lieutenant in the 9th Cavalry. Both regiments were reactivated in 1958, this time as integrated units, and both still serve today.
While trudging through the Las Guasimas jungle, I encountered the interesting plants and animals described in this chapter, with explanations provided by a dear Cuban friend. The wasps reminded me of the modern exile Cuban slang for Communist Cuban spies in Miami: avispas (wasps). The “wasp network” in Miami still exists.
Chapter 20. Facing the Elephant
Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916) was a well-known American journalist, war reporter, world adventurer, and author from New York City. Davis was a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt and promoted the image of Roosevelt’s regiment in Cuba. Because of his reports from a U.S. warship early in the war, the Navy banned reporters from its ships for the rest of the war. Davis died of a heart attack at the young age of fifty-one.
Chapter 21. The Butcher’s Bill
Roosevelt’s quote is from Lady Macbeth in Act 2, scene 2, of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, written in 1605.
Chapter 23. A Lovely View of Santiago
An “enfilade” is when weapons are fired from a flanking position down the lengthwise axis of an enemy’s position or formation, as in a trench.
A banshee is a figure of Gaelic folklore said to be a spirit woman (sometimes ugly, sometimes pretty) who mourns the death of a clan member by wailing loudly. The more banshees heard wailing, the more important the person who died; the louder the wailing, the more tragic and unexpected the death.
Chapter 24. The Killing Ground
Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing (1860–1948) graduated from West Point in 1886. He got the then-derisive nickname “Black Jack” because he served with black regiments in the Indian and Spanish-American wars. In World War I Pershing commanded American Expeditionary Forces in Europe. He retired in 1924 with the rank of General of the Armies of the United States. He died at age eighty-seven.
Chapter 26. Parker’s Guns
Pierre Loti was the pen name of Louis Marie-Julien Viaud (1850–1923), a French career naval officer and novelist who became a lifelong friend of Wake after they met at the 1883 Battle of Hué in Vietnam, where Rork lost his hand. Loti wrote forty-two books, many of them set in exotic locales around the world, and became a celebrated literary figure.
The “military crest” of a hill is a line just below the actual geographical crest. Defenses on the actual crest are silhouetted and thus easily seen and engaged. Those on the military crest are less visible.
For Wake’s exploits in Samoa, read Honors Rendered.
John Henry Parker (1866–1942) was originally from Missouri. An 1892 graduate of West Point, he became an expert in, and proponent of, the offensive use of machine guns. Lieutenant Parker was initially prohibited from landing his unit in Cuba, being ordered to wait his turn because he was only a lieutenant. He appealed to General Shafter, who believed in Parker and his machine-gun tactics and sent a special launch to land the machine guns. Parker had to spend his own money for Cuban mules to get the guns to the front, where they more than proved their worth in saving the day for the Americans. Parker saw combat again in World War I and retired as a brigadier general in 1924.
Chapter 29. Perfumed Moonlight
Clarissa “Clara” Harlowe Barton (25 December 1821–1912) was a teacher, pioneering professional nurse, founder of the American Red Cross, and founder of modern military nursing. In her early adult life she was a teacher. She began nursing soldiers at battlefields during the Civil War, something relegated at the time to male medical orderlies only. After the war she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, searching for the remains of soldiers buried anonymously or missing in the war. She found and properly buried more than 20,000 soldiers during the next 4 years. Barton was a battlefield nurse in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). Ten years later she started the American Red Cross. In the mid-1890s she served as a nurse in the concentration camps where the Spanish government interned Cuban civilians before the United States joined the Cubans’ fight against the Spanish in 1898. Her Red Cross work with the U.S. Army in Cuba saved thousands of American, Cuban, and Spanish lives. Due to internal politics within the Red Cross she retired in 1904. In her later years she wrote several books about her life and causes. She died at age ninety at her home in Maryland, which is now open to visitors. See www.nps.gov/clba/index.htm.
Chapter 32. The Actor
Between 1898 and 1901 the Edison Manufacturing Company and the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company made sixty-eight films about the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection against the U.S. Army. These films were very short, usually about two minutes, and none had sound. Many were reenactments rather than live footage. Visit the Library of Congress’ collection at www.loc.gov/collection/spanish-american-war-in-motion-pictures/about-this-collection/ to see these fascinating films.
Chapter 35. Memories of Santiago
Melilla is an ancient (since 1497) Spanish enclave and colony on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. It is still Spanish territory.
Chapter 37. Madam Clara
Emile Berliner invented the gramophone in 1887 and was the first to use a flat disc (of hard rubber) to reproduce music. This was the forerunner of modern records. By the Spanish-American War ten years later, gramophones had become very popular around the world.
Chapter 40. Carlito
For more about the mortal feud between Wake and the Boreaus, both senior and junior, read The Darkest Shade of Honor, Honorable Lies, and The Assassin’s Honor.
Chapter 42. Sunrise
Flood tides bring seawater into harbors, bays, and rivers. Ebb tides take it out. Tidal heights and current speeds are not that great on the Cuban coastline but do affect vessels and swimmers.
Chapter 44. A Choice of Deaths
Emilio Díaz-Moreu y Quintana (1846–1913) was a Spanish career naval officer and politician. He joined the navy in 1858 as a twelve-year-old naval cadet. By the 1890s he had earned an impressive record and was highly respected by his peers. He also was a member of the Spanish parliament (the Cortés) and a proponent for modernizing the navy. After the naval Battle of Santiago he was held as a prisoner of war at the U.S. Naval Academy until August 1898, then repatriated to Spain in early September. At age sixty-seven he died at his home in Alicante. His descendants have continued his tradition of serving Spain in the government. Interestingly, one of his descendants is a well-respected senior U.S. naval officer (and reader of the Honor Series) who just completed a successful tour in command of an American cruiser. Emilio Díaz-Moreu y Quintana would be very proud.
Chapter 45. Sunday Routines
The Spanish lookouts seem to have missed two other ships, New Orleans and Newark, which had already steamed eastward. Newark was Wake’s command in 1897. For more on that, read An Honorable War.
Rear Admiral Sampson was steaming away from Santiago to attend a meeting with Major General Shafter
at Siboney. The Spanish didn’t know of this meeting or plan their sortie for it.
Chapter 46. A Storm of Steel and Lead
Anthracite coal is relatively smokeless and burns at a higher temperature, producing more steam and greater power. Bituminous coal is the opposite and far less efficient.
There is only one ship from the Spanish-American War left in the world, Olympia, Admiral Dewey’s flagship at the Battle of Manila Bay on 1 May 1898. She was retired from service in 1922 and became a museum ship in 1957. She is moored at Philadelphia’s Independence Seaport Museum and is well worth a visit. To read more, go to the museum’s website at www.phillyseaport.org/.
Chapter 47. The Ultimate Irony
Charles Edgar Clark (1843–1922) was from Vermont and graduated from the Naval Academy in 1863. His career was routine until he took command of Oregon in March 1898 and shortly thereafter made his epic voyage. Clark retired as a rear admiral in 1905. He wrote a fascinating autobiography, My Fifty Years in the Navy, in 1915 and died seven years later at age seventy-nine.
Chapter 52. Reunion and Defiance
SS Seneca was a 2,700-ton steamer built in 1884. She was a passenger ship for the Ward Line from 1894 to 1914, mainly working the Cuban routes. In April 1898 the U.S. government chartered her and transformed her into a troop transport. In June she took troops to Cuba. In July she was hastily turned into a hospital ship and took sick and wounded troops to the United States. The voyage home was harrowing for her passengers, for there were few medical supplies or personnel on board. From 1914 onward Seneca was used as a cargo barge. In 1928 she was sunk in a collision with the ironically named SS Siboney off Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
Chapter 53. Living in the Mud No More
Kaiserin Maria Teresa was a 5,300-ton cruiser commissioned in 1894, with a dual 9½-inch-gun main battery. Resolute, a newly acquired former merchant steamer-turned-auxiliary cruiser, spotted her approaching the transports off Siboney and signaled a nearby battleship, Indiana, that a Spanish battleship was about to attack. Indiana intercepted the foreign cruiser and was about to open fire when Indiana’s captain recognized her at the last minute. At the end of World War I Kaiserin Maria Teresa was allocated as a prize of war to the British, who sold her for scrap.
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