The dons responded spiritedly at first, but their frenzied, half-crazed fire could not match the cool nerve, trained eyes and skilled gunnery of the American sailors. Our fire was much more effective than in preceding bombardments. The Admiral's ordnance expert had given explicit directions to reduce the powder charges and to elevate the guns, so as to shorten the trajectory and thus to secure a plunging fire.
The effect of the reduced charges was marvelous. In fifteen minutes one western battery was completely wrecked. The Massachusetts tore a gaping hole in the emplacement with a 1,000-pound projectile, and the Texas dropped a shell into the powder magazine. The explosion wrought terrible havoc.
The frame was lifted, the sides were blown out and a shower of debris flew in every direction. One timber, carried out of the side of the battery, went tumbling down the hill.
The batteries on the east of Morro were harder to get at, but the New Orleans crossed the bows of the New York to within 500 yards of shore and played a tattoo with her long eight-inch rifles, hitting them repeatedly, striking a gun squarely muzzle-on, lifting it off its trunnions and sending it sweeping somersaults high in the air.
When the order came, at 6:30, to cease firing, every gun of the enemy had been silenced for ten minutes, but as the ships drew off some of the Spanish courage returned and a half-dozen shots were fired spitefully at the Massachusetts and Oregon, falling in their wakes.
WENT ASHORE WITH A RUSH.
Sea and weather were propitious when, on June 22, the great army of invasion under General Shatter left their transports in Baiquiri harbor, and landed on Cuban soil. The navy and the army co-operated splendidly and as the big warships closed in on the shore to pave the way for the approach of the transports and then went back again, three cheers for the navy went up from many thousand throats on the troop-ships and three cheers for the army rose from ship after ship.
The Cuban insurgents, too, bore their share in the enterprise honorably and well. Five thousand of them in mountain fastness and dark thickets of ravines, lay all the previous night on their guns watching every road and mountain path leading from Santiago to Guantanamo. A thousand of them were within sight of Baiquiri, making the approach of the Spaniards under cover of darkness an impossibility.
There is a steep, rocky hill, known as Punta Baiquiri, rising almost perpendicularly at the place indicated. It is a veritable Gibraltar in possibilities of defense. From the staff at its summit the Spanish flag was defiantly floating at sunset; but in the morning it was gone, and with it the small Spanish guard which had maintained the signal station. Between nightfall and dawn the Spaniards had taken the alarm and fled from the place, firing the town as they left.
The flames were watched with interest from the ships. Two sharp explosions were heard. At first they were thought to be the report of guns from Spanish masked batteries, but they proved to be explosions of ammunition in a burning building.