The officers’ quarters are the final model of comfort. On the Sumner there are accommodations for more than sixty officers. Thirteen bath-rooms belong to them. These baths are the most perfect made by scientific plumbing; each has a great porcelain tub, with its spray and shower; each room is done in white marble tiles, with nickel fittings throughout. There is a large dining-saloon and also a comfortable smoking-room. In short, every comfort that is known, afloat or ashore, for both officers and men, is included in these new transports, which are in all respects a distinguished honor to our government.
In her fleet of splendid transports, of which the Sumner is a fair example, the United States now leads the world. Indeed, ours is the only government that has a complete transport service of its own regularly equipped. The others have a continuous use of hired transports. The British abandoned their governmental transport service a few years ago as a failure.
American transport Sumner in the harbor at Malta.
A British transport taken from the merchant marine.
The American fleet of transports has been built up entirely since the war with Spain by the purchase and reconstruction of a number of vessels from the merchant marine. It grew out of sheer and alarming necessity.
When the war with Spain broke out, and it became necessary to transport General Shafter’s army to Cuba, the government was compelled to use every sort of vessel which the entire Atlantic seaboard could produce to get a sufficient number flying the American flag to carry a little army of 15,000 men a few hundred miles. So serious was the problem that old side-wheelers were used, as well as a great number of ancient craft that were barely seaworthy. This humiliating condition stands in contrast with England’s readiness when the South African War called for transports. She sent over 220,000 men several thousand miles by sea, on British bottoms, without making so much as a ripple on the surface of maritime commerce and traffic. The experience of Japan in her war against China in 1895 might have taught us a lesson. After her first army had sailed and landed and fought, operations were practically suspended for months, as there were not enough ships available to carry over the second army. But we do not learn our lessons that way, and we required our own melancholy experience, both in the confusion of the hired ships off Daiquiri and in their cruel inadequacy for the broken-down soldiers on the return voyage, to teach us the need of regular and model transports for our armies across the sea. In view of this costly experience it seems like an unpatriotic thing for the private lines now running to Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines to be engineering a movement to have our proud little national fleet of transports abolished.
Our transport service is adequate for our present needs, but in the event of a new war, which might require us to send an enlarged army over seas, we are practically no better prepared than in 1898; for there are no more ships in the merchant marine carrying the United States flag which could be drafted into service than were in commission then. There are practically no American ships in trans-oceanic service outside those of the government. During the past year I sailed entirely around the continent of Africa, through the Mediterranean, touching at many of the important ports on the route. In all that time I saw but two vessels flying the American flag. One was a little lumber schooner from Maine, lying in the harbor of Madeira; the other was a bark, at Cape Town, over which there was an immense amount of trouble raised because the crew refused to take her out to sea on account of her unseaworthy condition. Consul-General Stow was making an investigation to estimate whether the hulk would float long enough to get back to an American port, not to be condemned, but to be painted over and sent out again, a disgrace to the nation. American vessels do not carry five per cent. of our exports abroad, for what American tonnage we have is suitable chiefly for coastwise and lake navigation. While England’s red ensign of the merchant marine is seen over the stern in every port of the navigable world, to our shame, a ship flying the stars and stripes is a stranger on the seas.
On the other hand, we pay out $165,000,000 each year to foreign ships simply to carry our products abroad. We need our own ships for our own traffic. We may suddenly need them some day for availability in war.