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At three o'clock on the morning of June 3, Lieutenant R. P. Hobson, with a volunteer crew of seven men, ran the steam-collier Merrimac into the mouth of the harbor, under a heavy fire from the Spanish batteries, dropped her anchors in mid-channel between Churruca Point and Smith Cay, opened her sea connections, exploded a number of torpedoes hung along her sides at the water-line, and when she sank, hung on to a raft attached by a rope to the sunken vessel.
Two brass-bound sea-chests and a pile of signal-flags were lying on her deck aft, and she had not been touched, apparently, since she was sunk by the guns of our battle-ships on the night of July 4. Three hundred or three hundred and fifty yards farther in we passed what the sailors of the fleet call "Hobson's choice," the steam-collier Merrimac.
After that the slow one picked right up. Soon it was standard speed with everybody in proper alignment again. Not often do seagoing people get the chance to see a fleet of merchant steamers cruising the wide ocean. A full-rigged sailing-ship, a steam-collier, a tramp steamer, all came out of their way in one day to view the strange sight.
A line to run from Liverpool to Portland, in the state of Maine, is in contemplation; and the Cunard Company are building four screw-steamers the Andes, Alps, Jura, and Etna which are to carry the mails to Chagres, as well as New York. The first steam-collier has come into the Thames, having run the distance from Newcastle in forty-eight hours.
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