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 coöperation 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.