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In a few minutes the harbor of the city is in sight. Steamships, with their painted stacks and funnels, and sailing vessels, with every sort of mast and rigging, crowd the harbor. Row-boats by the hundred are moving in every direction, and little steam-launches and motor-boats are spitting viciously as they go back and forth.
The scheme favoured by Riveros, and which was ultimately carried out, was to send in a number of steam-launches from the ships, each armed with a couple of spar-torpedoes, and try to blow up the Peruvian ships.
I'll take you through all the Courts!" His home-sickness had quite slipped away from him, and for the moment he was the skipper of the canary-coloured vessel driven on a shoal by the reckless jockeying of rival mariners, and he was trying to recollect all the fine and biting things he used to say to masters of steam-launches when their wash, as they drove too near the bank, used to flood his parlour-carpet at home.
The huge Van Alstyne house and its rambling dependencies were packed to their fullest capacity with the Gormers' week-end guests, who now, in the radiance of the Sunday forenoon, were dispersing themselves over the grounds in quest of the various distractions the place afforded: distractions ranging from tennis-courts to shooting-galleries, from bridge and whiskey within doors to motors and steam-launches without.
The blame should rest, and eventually will rest, upon the officer or department that sent thirty-five loaded transports and sixteen thousand men to the Cuban coast without suitable landing facilities in the shape of surf-boats, steam-launches, and lighters.
Aside from the pyrotechnics, the chief occupations of this place are boating and fishing. Boats abound row-boats, sail-boats, and steam-launches for excursion parties. The river consequently presents an animated appearance in the season, and the prettiest effects are produced by the white sails dipping about among the green islands.
His first plan was to take a squad of men, with two steam-launches, up the Roanoke, and blow the ram up by means of a torpedo. The launches were sent from New York, but one was swamped while crossing Delaware Bay. Cushing, however, was not the man to be balked by an accident: so, cutting down his force one-half, he prepared for the start.
All of these local conditions were known, or might have been known, to General Shafter before he left Tampa; but when he arrived off the coast they seemed to take him wholly by surprise. He had brought with him neither surf-boats, nor steam-launches, nor suitable lighters, nor materials with which to construct a pier.
The steam-launches of the Almirante Cochrane and the Blanco Encalada were then lowered into the water, together with a small Hereschoff torpedo-boat which the O'Higgins had brought up on her deck. These little craft all rendezvoused at the flagship, and spar-torpedoes were hastily fitted to all three, one projecting from the bow of each boat.
As the river above all things is, and ought to be, a place of recreation, care must be particularly taken that in restraining these practices the enjoyment of the many be not interfered with. The rational pleasure of 999 people ought not to be checked because the last of the thousand acts as a blackguard. This point, too, bears upon the question of steam-launches.
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