The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  There was a catch: Shafter did not have enough ships. There was no American merchant marine to speak of that could transport them. The Army and the Navy fell to squabbling. The Navy said the Army had never requested ships; the Army said the Navy refused to provide them. The Army had to scour Eastern ports for leasable ships, and even then came back with only enough to carry about 17,000 troops and a few hundred horses and mules. The rest would have to stay behind on the first wave.48

  Each regiment had to make cuts. “The dreary hotel corridors were crowded with the anxious, expectant faces of those who were to go and of those who were to remain behind,” Bonsal wrote. Some regiments made cuts man by man, but Wood and Roosevelt decided to leave four entire troops behind—C, H, I, and M—along with all but a few horses. Men wept; officers assigned to stay in Tampa pleaded with Wood to change his mind. Hamilton Fish, a sergeant in Troop I, resigned his commission so he could enlist as a private in a troop that was still going to Cuba; Allyn Capron, the West Point graduate and Army veteran in command of Troop L, immediately requested that Fish be added to his unit. Two particularly vocal troop captains, both from New Mexico, were George Curry of Troop H and Maximiliano Luna of Troop F. Wood called them to his tent. He told them he couldn’t take both. Luna was the first to make his case. “He made the pleas that it was his right to go as a representative of his race,” Roosevelt wrote. “He demanded the privilege of proving that his people were precisely as loyal as any others.” Capron, standing nearby, suggested they flip a silver dollar. The two troop leaders assented. Luna won; Troop F would go to Cuba, and Curry and Troop H would stay.49

  Less lucky were the soldiers, like Theodore Miller, who had joined late and didn’t have all their equipment. At a troop review on the afternoon of June 6, his captain told him he would have to stay behind; among other things, Miller needed a rifle. “I almost broke down with disappointment, and did cry,” he wrote. The next morning, though, his captain came up to him with a carbine and cartridge belt. The owner had been on guard duty and fallen asleep, and the captain had drummed him out. Miller was, he decided as he walked away with the gun, pretty lucky after all.50

  • • •

  Finally, on June 7, during his evening coffee, Shafter received a telegram from Washington, via Western Union: “You will sail immediately as you are needed at destination.” He told the regiments to be ready to embark, at Port Tampa, the next morning. The men were camped mostly north of Tampa, but the port was nearly ten miles south, close to the mouth of what is today called Hillsborough Bay, and reachable by a single railroad track. Even then, the track ended fifty feet from the pier, the two points separated by loose sand in which even an unburdened man sank to his ankles—it would be much worse for soldiers and stevedores carrying fifty pounds or more of equipment.51

  Once again, confusion reigned. There was no plan, or equipment, to actually move the regiments from their camps to the dock. “We were allowed to shove and hustle for our selves as best we could, on much the same principles that had governed our preparations hitherto,” Roosevelt wrote. Wood and Roosevelt were ordered to have their men at a nearby track at midnight, where there would be a train to pick them up. They all drank a few cups of coffee, then set out. But just as in San Antonio, at the start of their journey, no train materialized. The men dropped their packs and sacked out, there beside the railroad track. “I never spent a night like that in my life, and felt decidedly on the bum the next morning,” Miller wrote. But there was still no train, and Roosevelt and Wood began to worry they’d be left behind. At one point they received orders to march to a different track, but there was no train there, either. Finally at 6 a.m., a locomotive hauling coal bins came along, headed north; the two officers persuaded the conductor not only to let the regiment pile into the coal bins, but to go in reverse all the way to Port Tampa. The men loaded in and held on as best they could, and the train jittered down the track. At one point they passed a train full of men from the 71st New York Volunteers, a regiment that, under slightly different circumstances, might have included Roosevelt, at the time one of the country’s most famous New Yorkers. “Hallo Teddy! Speech! Speech! We—Want—Roosevelt!” the regiment cheered. Roosevelt demurred, and the train moved on. By the time the Rough Riders arrived at Port Tampa, they were covered in coal dust. One sergeant shouted: “Boys, I guess we are rough riders now, all right!”52

  The port itself was a hellscape, “a swarming ant-heap of humanity,” according to Roosevelt: Tens of thousands of men, their horses, and their supplies jostled for placement in the heat, and there was no one there to direct them onto their assigned ships. While they waited, many men, unable to find shade, simply sat fully clothed in the muddy water to cool off. Henry Plant, who owned most of Port Tampa, had built a smaller hotel here, an adjunct to the Tampa Bay Hotel, but it was off limits to enlisted men. To make things more difficult, the tycoon had refused to close off the rail line to civilian trains, and thousands of sightseers competed with the Army for track space, and for space on the quay when they arrived. A few enterprising locals had set up a row of temporary restaurants, whorehouses, and bars nearby, and men with ready cash headed there to cool off.53

  Shafter oversaw the loading from a makeshift desk beside the quay—a packing case as a table and two cracker boxes as a chair. Along with the handful of ships that could dock at the quay at a time, just six more could sit out in the twenty-one-foot-deep channel. The other twenty-five, along with the cruisers and destroyers and torpedo boats that would escort them, had to wait further down the bay. Despite the disarray, those who took a step back from it all were in awe of the moment. Clara Barton, who was then in Tampa, recalled standing at the quay, looking out over the bay: “The great ships gathered in the waters; the monitors, grim and terrible, seemed striving to hide their heads among the surging waves; the transports, with decks dark with human life, passing in and out, and the great monarchs of the sea held ever their commanding sway. It seemed a strange thing, this gathering for war. Thirty years of peace had made it strange to all save the veterans.”54

  While their men gathered on the quay, Roosevelt and Wood split up to find someone to direct them to a ship—none had been assigned to them yet. There was a colonel nominally in charge of the loading process, and they both found him at the same time. He pointed at a ship in the channel—the Yucatan, a 336-foot coastwise passenger ship that had been used to shuttle among New York, Havana, and points in between. It looked just big enough for the regiment to fit comfortably. Unfortunately, Roosevelt soon learned, two other regiments had been assigned to it as well. As soon as it docked, Roosevelt ran aboard, and Wood ordered Allyn Capron, who had been standing nearby, to rally the men to follow. As they were still walking up the gangplank, officers from the Second Regular Infantry and the 71st New York Volunteer Regiments arrived, a hair too late; the 71st went off in search of another ship, and four companies of the Second Regulars came aboard. Roosevelt, ever conscious of publicity, spied a two-man crew from the Vitagraph Company standing with their motion picture camera by the quay and shouted: “I can’t take care of a regiment, but I might be able to handle two more.” Secure in their berths, the Rough Riders spent the rest of the day and most of the night loading their equipment—which, in yet another moment of incompetence, had been unloaded at the far end of the quay.55

  Unlike in the Civil War, soldiers in the Spanish-American War tended not to sit for photos. Especially in the North, it was common in the 1860s for men to have their image captured in a daguerreotype studio before heading to the front, giving later generations a rich record of the names and faces who fought. They often brought relatives or friends to sit with them, along with mementos and other visual clues about their loves, values, and hopes. Nothing like this exists for their children, the men who fought in Cuba and the Philippines at the end of the century. Perhaps, in 1898, no one expected the war to last very long; perhaps by then, photography was so commonplace that no one considered it necessary. But the result is
that we lack that same rich visual archive.56

  There is one photo, though, taken not in a studio but on a deck about the Yucatan, that stands out as a visual reminder of the sort of men who went to war in 1898. The photo is of Hamilton Fish. He wears a dark shirt, probably blue—though a close-up, it is grainy, and black and white. His sleeves are rolled up, above the elbow. His arms, thick as ropes, reach down to the gunwale, where his hands rest, large and sinewed. His face, framed by the shirt below and a broad-brimmed slouch hat above, is full and thick, but his skin is taut and leathered. It is the face of a young man who has already seen much, a face that has taken abuse at the expense of a will determined not to die without his share of scars. He has the nose of a pug, with thin lips wrapped around a wry smile. He is looking right at the camera. He is going to war.

  • • •

  The ships were expected to leave the next morning, and hundreds of Tampans gathered to see them off, with a band in tow. But as the men gathered on deck to wave goodbye to the crowd, word came that unidentified ships had been spotted in the Nicholas Channel, between Cuba and Florida. They would have to wait until the coast was, literally, clear. The crowd dispersed, the men’s hearts sank. Though they didn’t know it yet, it would be another six days before they sailed.

  With so many men crammed into each ship, and so many ships crammed into the bay, the expedition went collectively stir-crazy. At one point the Yucatan, with 3,500 pounds of dynamite in its bow, barely avoided a collision with another transport ship, the Matteawan; the two vessels missed a head-on impact by less than ten feet. “As good as a mile,” said Colonel Wood, wiping his brow in relief. The Rough Rider Woodbury Kane, standing next to him along the deck, replied, “I don’t know, I think I’d have felt better if that confounded thing had been a mile away.”57

  The Yucatan was cramped and hot, and the men spent most of their time on deck, trying to find what shade they could. Some swam; those who couldn’t, or were simply too much in awe of such an immense body of water, stood on deck with rifles in hand, watching for sharks, which rumor said were swimming nearby. The food was even worse than the meager rations they had eaten on the train. The core of each meal was “canned fresh beef,” a stringy, stinky mass of meat that most of them refused to consume. At one point Charles Knoblauch, who had quit his job as a Wall Street stock trader to join the regiment, swam the half mile to shore with a wad of bills in his pocket, ate a big meal, and swam back. Theodore Miller, tasked with rowing Wood to the Seguranca, General Shafter’s flagship, and other points around the bay, got lucky and managed to spend a few hours onshore. Among other items, he bought 35 cents worth of gum, which he sold for 70 cents back on board, “besides all I gave away and chewed myself.”58

  On June 13, the men on the ships learned the welcome but frustrating news that the “enemy” vessels were in fact a pair of civilian ships. Finally, they were allowed to leave. That morning thirty-one ships carrying 10 million pounds of rations, 2,295 horses and mules, 16 pieces of artillery, and 16,987 men—including 89 war correspondents and 11 foreign observers—slipped out of Hillsborough Bay toward the Gulf of Mexico. On the quay stood three women and a group of sweaty stevedores, the only goodbye party for the largest invasion force the United States had ever assembled.59

  CHAPTER 7

  “WHO WOULD NOT RISK HIS LIFE FOR A STAR?”

  As the fleet passed down through Tampa Bay and out into the open Gulf, the water darkened from light blue to cerulean to indigo, and the men cheered to be finally on their way to battle. Several ships had regimental bands aboard, and from any vessel a listener could hear strains of “Swanee River” and “Rock of Ages” and the ever-popular “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” carrying across the water from one ship to another, like seagoing symphonies. “There is nothing so fine as the cheers and bands and the sight of the thirty ships with their battleships guarding them,” Davis wrote to his father. This wasn’t just the largest amphibious invasion ever mounted by an American army, and the first of any note since General Winfield Scott landed 8,600 men at Veracruz during the Mexican War. Despite the chaos leading up to its departure, the fleet was the largest foreign expedition anywhere since Britain set off for the Crimean War, forty-four years before. If America needed to demonstrate its military prowess to the world, this was a stunning debut. “We have scored the first great triumph in what will be a world movement,” Roosevelt wrote to his sister Corinne.1

  From afar, the fleet must have struck quite an impression: thirty-one transport vessels, painted pitch-black, accompanied by fourteen gray warships, all steaming along at eight knots in three columns, each column led by a cruiser, a mass of ships altogether over half a mile across and several miles long. Among the nearly 17,000 men aboard the fleet, the transports carried 15,058 enlisted men, 819 officers, 30 civilian clerks, 272 teamsters and packers, and 107 stevedores. In the animal pens below huddled 2,295 horses and mules. The ships also held 114 six-mule wagons, 81 escort wagons, 16 light guns, four 7-inch howitzers, four 5-inch siege guns, a Hotchkiss revolving cannon, eight field mortars, four Gatling guns, and a pneumatic dynamite gun. Gunboats darted among the troopships, their captains barking orders by megaphone; at other times the ships communicated via colored rockets.2

  The fleet looked different up close. For one thing, the troopships were not actually troopships. They were a motley collection of mostly cargo and cattle ships that had been hastily refitted in Tampa; the Yucatan, which carried the Rough Riders, had previously hauled mail and passengers for the Ward Line. And they were old: Two of the ships, the Clinton and the Morgan, were sidewheel steamers built for river and coastal use during the Civil War. One of the few ships of any modern provenance, the Florida, which carried a water-distilling plant, struck another craft while waiting in Tampa Bay and had to remain behind for repairs. The crews, all of them private commercial operators and none of them versed in sailing in formation, struggled to keep up and in their columns. Every day that healthy eight-knot clip slowed to seven, then six, and even then, transports lagged behind, fell out of line, had to be herded back in order by the martinet torpedo boats, “Like swift, keen-eyed intelligent collies rounding up a herd of bungling sheep,” Davis wrote. One ship dropped behind by fifty miles before the fleet stopped to let it catch up. Every evening the fleet slowed to a crawl so that the stragglers could catch up and the torpedo boats could once again nudge the columns back into line. Still, Arthur Lee, the British Army attaché, wrote, “By daylight each morning all semblance of order in the columns had vanished.” Officers on the escorting Navy ships recommended that the fleet split in two, with the faster ships moving on in a separate squad, but General Shafter, from his flagship, the Seguranca, refused. A voyage that should have taken two and a half days took over twice as long.3

  The ships themselves were floating disasters—“suggestive,” Roosevelt wrote to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, “of the black hole of Calcutta.” In the holds, contract crews had stripped out the stables and coal bins and cargo bulkheads and nailed together wooden bunks, with no consideration of personal space: On the Yucatan, the bunks stood four beds high, with about two feet between each of them. The wood used for the bunks was raw and unsanded; men got splinters just sitting on them. They found space where they could; Miller, Wrenn, Larned, and Teddy Burke located a small room in the stern, on the second deck, where the ship’s crew had imprisoned a stowaway boy who had stabbed a sailor. They set up camp there, until they were kicked out to make room for a measles-quarantine ward. There were just a few water barrels on each ship for all personal needs, whether to drink or wash, and that water “smelled like a frog-pond or a stable-yard, and it tasted as it smelt,” said Davis, who sailed with Shafter aboard the Seguranca. In Tampa, Colonel John Jacob Astor, an heir to the Astor fortune and a member of Shafter’s staff, had offered to buy sufficient water for everyone, but Shafter refused—it was good enough for him, the general said, so it should be good for his men.4

  Equine and fu
el odors had already turned the air inside the ships revolting before the men boarded; after a few days at sea, it was hard to breathe anywhere belowdecks. The air was heavy with sweat and breath-stink. “I have often wondered how steerage passengers lived,” Theodore Miller wrote in his diary. “Well, I found out, and experienced a much worse life.” There were few lights; men found their way around with matches. After the first night, most of them dared court-martial and slept on the deck, so many that with the lights out, it was impossible to move topside without stepping on someone. It was worse for the animals, who had no choice but to stay crowded together in the suffocating holds, where spruce stanchions separated them into 2.5 foot by 8 foot pens. Dozens died, including 12 percent of the mules. The men tossed the carcasses overboard, letting them trail in their wake until being plowed under by the next ship in the line.5

  In its haste to pack the ships with troops and horses, the Army had neglected to pack enough for either to eat. There was sufficient food for a quick trip from Tampa down to the Florida Keys and across the straits to Mariel or Matanzas, east of Havana, a daylong sail that had been part of the earlier plan of attack. No one had bothered to add more rations when the landing site shifted to Santiago, nearly 700 miles away, and on the opposite side of the island. Instead, the men ate whatever rations they had brought with them, and made them last as long as they could. Worse, the ships lacked cooking facilities for the enlisted men, so they had to eat cold food, mostly hardtack, a few cans of beans, and the ubiquitous, nauseating canned beef. In the semitropical heat, the cans would expand and pop when opened, recalled James Church, the Rough Riders’ assistant surgeon, “with a kind of explosion effect, like a bottle of Mumm’s extra dry; we would eye the contents in shuddering silence, while the bravest held their breath a while.”6