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Updated: May 11, 2025
"We got good lays, us before the mast, but there never was a fair sharin' aboard that ship. One night I crawled aft an' looked in the stern-port. 'Twas just after we'd got our lays for kidnappin' the Governor o' Santiago a rich town as you know. In the cabin sat ol' Brig, a bare cutlass acrost his lap, countin' piles o' moidores that filled the whole table.
During the week that followed that important Sunday, crowds of women, children, and old men; Spaniards, Cubans, and people of other nations, went out of Santiago. They hardly knew where to go. Men who saw that sight said it was pitiful. All the roads leading from Santiago were filled with people and wagons, toiling on to some place of safety.
June 3. The collier Merrimac was sunk in the channel of Santiago Harbour, as has already been told. June 4. Captain Charles Vernon Gridley, commander of the cruiser Olympia, and commanding her during the battle of Manila Bay, died at Kobe, Japan. June 5.
The Sevilla house seems to stand on or near the crest of the highest ridge that the road crosses; and a short distance beyond it, through an opening in the trees, we caught sight, suddenly and unexpectedly, of the city of Santiago itself a long, ragged line of pink barracks, thatched houses, church steeples, and wide-spreading trees, standing upon a low hill on the other side of what looked like a green, slightly rolling meadow, which was five or six hundred feet below the position that we occupied, and perhaps three miles away.
We commenced our advance from our first landing place on the 23d, and that night General Young and I, as second in command of the Second Cavalry brigade, had a long war talk about taking the very strong Spanish position about five miles up the road to Santiago.
I would have died right there, but I thought of my book, and I turned to the index, where every subject known to the vast realm of knowledge is set down alphabetically, from 'A' to 'Z', twenty thousand references in all, dealing with every subject from the time of Adam to the present day, including, in the new and revised edition just from the press, a history of the war with Spain, with pull page portraits of Dewey, Sampson, Cervera, and the boy king, and colored plates of the battles of Manila Bay and Santiago.
For a time they shouted in hopes of being heard aboard the Santiago, but only those who have tried it know that it is a matter of merest luck when a steamer rounding to in a fog succeeds in finding or even coming anywhere near the spot where she was in collision not ten minutes before.
Then came the feeding and caring for all these troops a difficult matter for those at Victoria and San Antonio had to be provisioned overland from Indianola across the "hog-wallow prairie," while the supplies for the forces at Brownsville and along the Rio Grande must come by way of Brazos Santiago, from which point I was obliged to construct, with the labor of the men, a railroad to Clarksville, a distance of about eighteen miles.
The many-colored, one-story houses of Santiago are Moorish in architecture, ranged in narrow streets, which cross each other at right angles with considerable regularity, but with roadways in an almost impassable condition, lined with sidewalks of ten or fifteen inches in width.
Had the Spanish Admiral been trying for one of those ports, even at the low rate of speed observed in going from Curaçao to Santiago about seven and five-tenth knots he could have left Curaçao on the evening of May 15th, and have reached Cienfuegos on the 21st, between midnight and daybreak, enabling him to enter the harbor by 8 A.M. more than twelve hours before the arrival there of our Flying Squadron.
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