“We had thirteen aboard this ship,” the fearful cook remarked. “I think we stand a chance for life, since three coons have embarked. Now let our good retriever, Nig, a life-line take ashore, and all hands of the steamship Snyg may see New York once more.”
But Nig refused to leave the ship, and so the fearless crew the life-boat launched, but breakers stove the stout craft through and through. Said Captain Wiig:
“Though foiled by Nig, our jig’s not up, I vow; I’ve still my gig, and I don’t care a fig—I’ll make the beach somehow!”
And Mate Charles Christian of the Snyg (who got here yesterday) helped launch the stanch gig of the Snyg so the crew could get away. The gig was anchored far inshore; with raft and trolley-line all hands on the Snyg, including Nig, were hauled safe o’er the brine.
Although the Snyg, of schooner rig, will ply the waves no more, let us hope that Wiig gets another Snyg for the sake of the bards ashore.
The Sun’s handling of the news of the brief war with Spain, in 1898, has an interest beyond the mere brilliance of its men’s work and the fact that this was the last war in which the newspaper correspondents had practically a free hand.
For years “Cuba Libre” had been one of the Sun’s fights. From the first days of his control of the paper Mr. Dana had urged the overthrow of Spanish dominion in the island. His support of the revolutionists went back, as E. P. Mitchell has written, “to the dark remoteness of the struggles a quarter of a century before the war—the time of the Cespedes uprising, the Virginius affair, and the variegated activities of the New York Junta.” Mr. Mitchell adds:
The affection of the Sun and its editor for everything Cuban except Spanish domination lasted quite down to and after the second advent of Maximo Gomez; it was never livelier than in the middle seventies.
Mr. Dana was the warm friend of José Marti. He corresponded personally (with the assistance of his Fenian stenographer, Williams) with the leading revolutionists actually fighting in the island. He was the constant and unwearied intellectual resource of a swarm of patriots, adventurers, near-filibusters, bondholding financiers, lawyer-diplomats, and grafters operating exclusively in Manhattan. A Latin-American accent was a sure card of admission to the woven-bottomed chair alongside the little round table in the inner corner room of the series of four inhabited by the Sun’s entire force of editors and reporters.
We were then the foremost if not the only American organ of Cuban independence. The executive journalistic headquarters of the cause was just outside Mr. Dana’s front door. The Cuba Libre editor, as I suppose he would be styled nowadays, was a gentleman of Latin-American origin, who bore the aggressive and appropriate name of Rebello. The Cuba Libre “desk” was about as depressing a seat of literary endeavor as the telegraph-blank shelf in a country railroad station, which it resembled in its narrowness, its dismal ink-wells, rusty pens, and other details of disreputable equipment. From this shelf there issued, by Mr. Dana’s direction, many encouraging editorial remarks to Rebello’s compatriots in the jungle.