"How is it?" "Why is it?" "How can it be?" are the questions Admiral Dewey asks when told that the American people, without exception, rejoice to celebrate him—that if one of the men known to have been with him May 1st should be found out in any American theater he would be taken on the stage by an irresistible call and a muscular committee of enthusiasts, and the play could not go on without "a few words" and the "Star Spangled Banner," "Hail Columbia," "Yankee Doodle," "Dixey" and "My Country, 'tis of Thee"; that the hallelujah note would be struck; that cars are chalked "for Deweyville"; that the board fences have his name written, or painted, or whittled on them; that there are Dewey cigars; that blacksmith-shops have the name Dewey scratched on them, also barn doors; and that if there are two dwelling-houses and a stable at a cross-roads it is Deweyville, or Deweyburg or Deweytown; that there is a flood of boy babies named Dewey, that the girls sing of him, and the ladies all admire him and the widows love him, and the school children adore him. The Admiral says: "I hear such things, and altogether they amaze me—the newspapers, the telegrams, the letters become almost unreal, for I do not comprehend what they say of my first day's work here. There was not a man in the fleet who did not do his duty."
The Admiral is told that he need not think to stay away until the people who have him on their minds and in their hearts are tired of their enthusiasm; that he cannot go home undiscovered and without demonstrations that will shake the earth and rend the skies; that the boys will drag the horses from his carriage, and parade the streets with him as a prisoner, and have it out with him, giving him a good time, until it will be a hard time, and he might as well submit to manifest destiny! His country wanted another hero, and he was at the right place at the right time, and did the right thing in the right way; and the fact answers all questions accounting for everything. Still he has a notion of staying away until the storm is over and he can get along without being a spectacle. Why, even the ladies of Washington are wild about him. If he should appear at the White House to call on the President, the scene would be like that when Grant first met Abraham Lincoln.
One rough day on the bay I took passage in a small steam-launch to visit the Olympia, where the Admiral's flag floated, to call on him. There was plenty of steam, and it was pleasant to get out a good way behind the breakwater, for the waves beyond were white with anger, and the boat, when departing from partial shelter, had proceeded but two or three hundred yards when it made a supreme effort in two motions—the first, to roll over; the second, to stand on its head. I was glad both struggles were unsuccessful, and pleased with the order: "Slow her up." The disadvantages of too much harbor were evident. The slow-ups were several, and well timed, and then came the rise and fall of the frisky launch beside the warship, the throwing of a rope, the pull with a hook, the stand off with an oar, the bounding boat clearing from four to ten feet at a jump; the clutch, the quick step, the deft avoidance of a crushed foot or sprained ankle, with a possible broken leg in sight, the triumphant ascent, the safe landing, the sudden sense that Desdemona was right in loving a man for the dangers he had passed, the thought that there should be harbors less fluctuating, a lively appreciation of the achievements of pilots in boarding Atlantic liners. The broad decks of the Olympia, built by the builders of the matchless Oregon, had a comforting solidity under my feet. The Admiral was believed to be having a nap; but he was wide awake, and invited the visitor to take a big chair, which, after having accompanied the launch in the dance with the whitecaps, was peculiarly luxurious. The Admiral didn't mind me, and had a moment's surprise about an observer of long ago strolling so far from home and going forth in a high sea to make a call. I confessed to being an ancient Wanderer, but not an Ancient Mariner, and expressed disapprobation of the deplorable roughness of the California Albatross, a brute of a bird—a feathered ruffian that ought to be shot.
The Admiral would be picked out by close attention as the origin of some millions of pictures; but he is unlike as well as like them. Even the best photographs do not do justice to his fine eyes, large, dark and luminous, or to the solid mass of his head with iron-brown hair tinged with gray. He is a larger man than the portraits indicate; and his figure, while that of a strong man in good health and form and well nourished, is not stout and, though full, is firm; and his step has elasticity in it. His clean-shaven cheek and chin are massive, and drawn on fine lines full of character—no fatty obscuration, no decline of power; a stern but sunny and cloudless face—a good one for a place in history; no show of indulgence, no wrinkles; not the pallor of marble, rather the glint of bronze—the unabated force good for other chapters of history. It would be extremely interesting to report the talk of the Admiral; but there were two things about him that reminded me of James G. Blaine, something of the vivid personality of the loved and lost leader; something in his eye and his manner, more in the startling candor with which he spoke of things it would be premature to give the world, and, above all, the absence of all alarm about being reported—the unconscious consciousness that one must know this was private and no caution needed. A verbatim report of the Admiral would, however, harm no one, signify high-toned candor and a certain breezy simplicity in the treatment of momentous matters. Evidently here was a man not posing, a hero because his character was heroic, a genuine personage—not artificial, proclamatory, a picker of phrases, but a doer of deeds that explain themselves; a man with imagination, not fantastic but realistic, who must have had a vision during the night after the May-day battle of what might be the great hereafter; beholding under the southern constellations the gigantic shadow of America, crowned with stars, with the archipelagoes of Asia under her feet and broad and mighty destinies at command.
It was the next day that he anchored precisely where his famous ship was swinging when I sat beside him; and his words to the representative of three centuries of Spanish misrule had in them an uncontemplated flash from the flint and steel of fixed purpose and imperial force. "Fire another gun at my ships and I will destroy your city."
We can hardly realize in America how flagrant Europeanism has been in the Manila Bay; how the big German guns bought by Spain looked from their embrasures; how a powerful German fleet persisted in asserting antagonism to Americanism, and tested in many ways the American Admiral's knowledge of his rights and his country's policy until Admiral Dewey told, not the German Admiral, as has been reported, but his flag lieutenant, "Can it be possible that your nation means war with mine? If so, we can begin it in five minutes." The limit had been reached, and the line was drawn; and Dewey's words will go down in our records with those of Charles Francis Adams to Lord John Russell about the ironclads built in England for the Confederacy: "My Lord, I need not point out to your lordship that this is war."
Perhaps the German Admiral had exceeded the instructions of his Imperial Government, and the peremptory words of the American Admiral caused a better understanding, making for peace rather than for war.
Next to the Americans the English have taken a pride in Admiral Dewey, and they are in the Asiatic atmosphere our fast friends. They do not desire that we should give up the Philippines. On the contrary, they want us to keep the islands, and the more we become interested in those waters and along their shores, the better. They know that the world has practically grown smaller and, therefore, the British Empire more compact; and they find Russia their foe. They see that with the Pacific Coast our base of operations looking westward, we have first the Hawaiian Islands for producers and a coal station, naval arsenal, dockyards for the renovation and repair and replenishment of our fleets; and they see that we have reserved for ourselves one of the Ladrones, so that we will have an independent route to the Philippines. The Japanese have cultivated much feeling against our possession of Hawaii, the animus being that they wanted it for themselves; and likewise they are disturbed by our Pacific movement, anticipating the improvement of the most western of the Alutian Islands, an admirable station overlooking the North Pacific; all comprehending with Hawaii, the Alutian Island found most available, the Ladrone that we shall reserve and the Philippines, we shall have a Pacific quadrilateral; and this is not according to the present pleasure and the ambition for the coming days, of Japan. England would have approved our holding all the islands belonging to the Spanish, including the Canaries, and Majorca and Minorca and their neighboring isles in the Mediterranean, and take a pride in us. She has been of untold and inestimable service to us in the course of the Spanish War, and her ways have been good for us at Manila, while the Germans have been frankly against us, the Russians grimly reserved, and the French disposed to be fretful because they have invested in Spanish bonds upon which was raised the money to carry on the miserable false pretense of war with the Cubans. One day while I was on the fine transport Peru, in the harbor of Manila, the American Admiral's ship saluted an English ship-of-war coming in that had saluted his flag, and also displayed American colors in recognition that the harbor of Manila was an American port. That was the significance of the flashes and thundering of the Admiral's guns and the white cloud that gathered about his ship that has done enough for celebrity through centuries.
Admiral Dewey created the situation in the Philippines that the President wisely chose by way of the Paris Conference to receive the deliberate judgment of the Senate and people of the United States. Dewy has been unceasingly deeply concerned about it. His naval victory was but the beginning. He might have sailed away from Manila May 2d, having fulfilled his orders; but he had the high and keen American spirit in him, and clung. He needed a base of operations, a place upon which to rest and obtain supplies. He had not the marines to spare to garrison a fort save at Cavite, twelve miles from Manila; and he needed chickens, eggs, fresh meat and vegetables; and it was important that the Spanish Army should be occupied on shore. Hence, Aguinaldo, who was in Singapore, and the concentration of insurgents that had themselves to be restrained to make war on civilized lines. One of the points of the most considerable interest touching the Filipinos is that the smashing defeat of the fleet of Spain in Manila Bay heartened them. They have become strong for themselves. The superiority of the Americans over the Spaniards as fighting men is known throughout the islands Spain oppressed; and the bonds of the tyrants have been broken. It should not be out of mind that the first transports with our troops did not reach Manila for six weeks, and that the army was not in shape to take the offensive until after General Merritt's arrival, late in July. All this time the American Admiral had to hold on with the naval arm; and it was the obvious game of Spain, if she meant to fight and could not cope with the Americans in the West Indies, to send all her available ships and overwhelm us in the East Indies. At the same time the German, French, Russian and Japanese men-of-war represented the interest of the live nations of the earth in the Philippines. As fast as possible Admiral Dewey was re-enforced; but it was not until the two monitors, the Monterey and Monadnock, arrived, the latter after the arrival of General Merritt, that the Admiral felt that he was safely master of the harbor. He had no heavily armored ships to assail the shore batteries within their range, and might be crippled by the fire of the great Krupp guns. It was vital that the health of the crews of his ships should be maintained, and the fact that the men are and have been all summer well and happy is not accidental. Admiral Dewey took the point of danger, if there was one, into his personal keeping, by anchoring the Olympia on the Manila side of the bay, while others were further out and near Cavite; and throughout the fleet there was constant activity and the utmost vigilance. There was incessant solicitude about what the desperate Spaniards might contrive in the nature of aggressive enterprise. It seemed incredible to Americans that nothing should be attempted. How would a Spanish fleet have fared for three months of war with us in an American harbor? There would have been a new feature of destructiveness tried on the foe at least once a week.
The Spaniards ashore seemed to be drowsy; but the Americans were wide awake, ready for anything, and could not be surprised; so that we may commend as wisdom the Spanish discretion that let them alone. The ship that was the nearest neighbor of Admiral Dewey for months of his long vigil flew the flag of Belgium. She is a large, rusty-looking vessel, without a sign of contraband of war, or of a chance of important usefulness about her; but she performed a valuable function. I asked half a dozen times what her occupation was before any one gave a satisfactory answer. Admiral Dewey told the story in few words. She was a cold-storage ship, with beef and mutton from Australia, compartments fixed for about forty degrees below zero. Each day the meat for the American fleet's consumption was taken out. There was a lot of it on the deck of the Olympia thawing when I was a visitor; and the beef was "delicious." I am at pains to give Dewey's word. While the Spaniards ashore were eating tough, lean buffalo—the beasts of burden in the streets, the Americans afloat rejoiced in "delicious" beef and mutton from Australia. It was explained that the use of cold-storage meat depended upon giving it time to thaw, for if it should be cooked in an icy state it would be black and unpalatable, losing wholly its flavor and greatly its nourishing quality. Australia is not many thousand miles from the Philippines—and one must count miles by the thousands out there. The Belgians have a smart Consul at Manila who is a friend of mankind.