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Updated: May 4, 2025
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.
Long trains of four-mule wagons loaded with provisions, camp equipage, and lumber moved slowly through the soft, deep sand of the unpaved streets in the direction of the encampment; the sidewalks were thronged with picturesquely dressed Cuban volunteers from the town, sailors from the troop-ships, soldiers from the camp, and war correspondents from everywhere; mounted orderlies went tearing back and forth with despatches to or from the army headquarters in the Tampa Bay Hotel; Cuban and American flags were displayed in front of every restaurant, hotel, and Cuban cigar-shop, and floated from the roofs or windows of many private houses; and now and then I met, coming out of a drug-store, an army surgeon or hospital steward whose left arm bore the red cross of the Geneva Convention.
There have been more hospital-ships sunk than troop-ships, for the troop-ship is armed and convoyed, but the hospital-ship is an easy victim.
Just how far off the French coast we were at this time does not matter here, or from what direction we were approaching; but we were far enough off for that group of destroyers to show how they went about their work of guarding the troop-ships. To comb the sea about us was their mission; and they were attending to it every minute. The fleet steamed on.
Attended first by the Maria de Gloria alone, and afterwards by the Carolina, the Nitherohy, and a small merchant brig, the Colonel Allen, in which he had placed a few guns, he pursued and harassed the cumbrous crowd of Portuguese warships, troop-ships, and trading vessels, about eighty in all, through fourteen days.
The fortunes of war had thrown them together, Willard as impecunious as ever, and the Damon and Pythias, the Orestes and Pylades, the two Ajaxes of the old days were in close and intimate touch once more, Damon, as of old, the banker for the twain. The troop-ships were to proceed as soon as coaled.
Six or eight war-ships, ranging in size and fighting power from monitors to torpedo-boats, were still lying at anchor off the custom-house and the Marine Hospital; transports with stores and munitions of war were discharging their cargoes at the piers; big four-masted schooners, laden with coal for the blockading fleet, swung back and forth with the ebbing and flowing tides as they awaited orders from the naval commandant; graceful steam-yachts, flying the flag of the Associated Press, were constantly coming in with news or going out in search of it; swift naphtha-launches carrying naval officers in white uniforms darted hither and thither from one cruiser to another, whistling shrill warnings to the slower boats pulled by sailors from the transports; officers on the monitors were exchanging "wigwag" flag-signals with other officers on the gunboats or the troop-ships; and from every direction came shouts, bugle-calls, the shrieks of steam-whistles, the peculiar jarring rattle of machine-guns at target practice, and the measured beats of twenty or thirty ships' bells, striking, at different distances, but almost synchronously, the half-hours.
The various types of cruisers are not expected to fight with any but vessels of their own class, which they may encounter in the discharge of similar duties, such as scouring the seas as the advance guard of the slower line of battle-ships, preying upon or escorting merchant vessels, blockading ports, and acting as convoys for troop-ships.
The great troop-ships had steamed between the coral reefs towards Suez, and no cry for help had ever summoned them back. Willoughby risked only his health in that white palace on the Red Sea. There could not have been a moment when Feversham was in a position to say, "Your life was forfeit but for me, whom you call coward."
On the 29th of December the whole body, after many delays in getting down Channel, put to sea from Plymouth: twenty-two ships of the line, fourteen frigates and smaller vessels, besides a huge collection of storeships, victuallers, ordnance vessels, troop-ships, and merchantmen, the last named being the "trade" for the West Indies and Portugal.
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