Текст книги "Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: James Delgado
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Mystery solved, we turned back to learning more about our medium clipper. Then, out of the blue, I received a phone call from Nuna Cass. She had found the letter book of King Philip’sfirst captain, Charles Rollins, who was one of her ancestors. The letter book’s detailed accounts of both Captain Rollins’s experiences as well as that of the ship had sparked her interest. She offered to help reconstruct the ship’s history. We learned that King Philipbegan life in November 1856 as the largest vessel ever launched from the shipyard of Dennett Weymouth in Alna, Maine. Nearly twice the tonnage of any other vessel built there, the 182-foot King Philipwas also the last full-rigged ship built by Weymouth, who died in 1875, just three years before King Philipmet her end.

I flew to Maine and, with the help of Peter Throckmorton, a good friend who was one of the fathers of underwater archaeology, I drove out to visit the “Old Weymouth place.” A manicured lawn sloped down to the riverbank, and as we walked to the water, Peter pointed out the logs and timbers that marked the old shipyard’s ways. More than a century after Dennett Weymouth’s death, the remains of his shipyard were still there, preserved by the cold fresh waters of the Sheepscot River. This was the first time in my career that I’d made the journey, through space and time, from the grave of a ship that I was studying back to her cradle.

Peter, fired up by the moment, went up to the house and knocked on the door. The lady who answered was not a descendant, but she told us that there some old Weymouth family papers in the attic. She rummaged around and came downstairs with a faded drawing. While it was not labeled, we knew immediately what it was. Weymouth had carefully drawn the outline of King Philipand, with the sail maker, had laid out the sail plan for the ship. I don’t know what stunned us more– finding the plan or that generous woman succumbing to Peter’s entreaties to donate it to the maritime museum back in San Francisco.

We ended the day by driving to nearby Newcastle to visit the home of the Glidden family, one of King Philip’sfirst owners. Glidden & Williams operated the principal clipper ship line between New England and California from 1850 until well after the Civil War. King Philip, built after the heyday of the extreme clippers with their knife-like hulls and lofty spars filled with sail, was a more full-bodied “medium” clipper and a predecessor to the boxier “down-easters” that were the last generation of American wooden-hulled full-rigged sailing ships. To make money with these ships, they had to carry cargoes quickly. The fast clippers of the late 1840s and early 1850s made record time on their voyages, but their narrow hulls could not carry much cargo. The medium clippers were a compromise, sacrificing some of the form that made the ships fast for more capacity. Just the same, King Philipwas said by historian William Fairburn to have been a good sailer with good (that is, fast) passages. “She was,” commented Fairburn, “undoubtedly hard driven.”

“Hard driven” applied not only to the ship but her crew. To get a slow ship to make good passages meant pushing both ship and men to their limits, if not beyond. And King Philip’screw mutinied on more than one occasion, setting the vessel on fire on two occasions. In 1874, a U.S. naval officer, who sent an armed force aboard King Philipin Rio de Janeiro to quell an uprising, during which “the ship’s steward had been killed and most of the crew had deserted,” sympathetically commented that “perhaps they had good reason.” Intrigued by the harsh reality of life before the mast, I spent more time digging into the ship’s history than into the sand that shrouded her bones.

Instead of running to California like other Glidden & Williams ships, King Philipentered the “general carrying trade,” loading all types of merchandise and delivering them to ports around the world. Captain Rollins’s letter book spans the time between June 1857 and May 1860. Those early letters did far more to flesh out those water-stained oak bones than all of the archeology I could ever practice on the hulk, an invaluable lesson for me. Beyond the science and the study of the “object,” in this case the half-intact hulk I was enthusing over, the significance of any find lies in the connections to real people.

Rollins’s first letters recorded a voyage from Gravesend, England, around the tip of Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean and then to Melbourne, Australia. He reported that “the ship sails fair” with all sail set but went on to say that “my crew have mostly left the ship,” leaving him with two officers and seven men. “The cook is away today and it is doubtful if I see him again. They leave about ^120 wages behind them. I do not think the ship shall lose anything by these men as I shall take but two mates from here and the Steward shipped in Boston was totally unfit for his place. He had no idea of cooking or of saving provisions and besides was abominably filthy.” From Melbourne, King Philipsailed to the coast of Peru to load guano – the accumulated droppings of sea birds– being mined in the Chincha Islands as fertilizer. The reeking cargo stunk to high heaven but was literally worth its weight in gold.

After discharging the guano at Rotterdam in September 1858, Rollins took on four hundred casks of gin and headed for England, and from there to San Francisco with a cargo of lumber, sugar, pig iron, livestock and coal. His letter to Glidden & Williams from San Francisco is full of complaints, particularly about a “patent reefing gear” installed in the rigging to handle some of the work that the sailors usually did aloft. The gear should have acted like a rolling window shade to retract a sail in heavy wind so as to keep the wind from bursting it or breaking the yards or mast. Rollins raged that the gear was too tightly installed, slipped off its rollers and cut into the wooden spars, and jammed frequently. In a fierce gale, the gear stuck, leaving the sail exposed to the full fury of the wind instead of “reefing” or rolling up. The main topgallant mast bent and nearly broke, then the sail burst, ripping away in the storm.

I was amused by Rollins’s comments on this Victorian-era invention to cut costs by replacing people with a machine. Reading his letter was a revelation, and one that I would not find in the cold dead hulk of a wrecked ship, about how frustrated people felt when confronted by technology that promised to help but did not.

Rollins left King Philipin early 1860, but under other captains and other crews, the ship carried a variety of cargoes around the world. In 1869, at a stop in Honolulu, the crew mutinied and set King Philipon fire. The damage was bad – so bad that the ship was condemned and sold at a “fire sale.” Puget Sound lumber merchants Pope & Talbot bought and repaired King Philip, but the bad luck that had dogged the ship since the beginning continued.

On an 1874 voyage out of Baltimore, the crew mutinied and set fire to the ship. After the fire was put out, the crew still refused to sail. An armed force of U.S. Marines from the nearby United States Naval Academy at Annapolis finally had to go aboard to re-establish order. After that, Pope & Talbot never sent King Philipon another protracted voyage. They rerigged the ship as a bark for better maneuverability on the Pacific coast. Later that year, the press reported that “King Philiphad just completed her tenth trip to Puget Sound and back since January 1st, 1876, and has still some days to spare. She has brought to port in that time nearly ten million feet in lumber.” The regular run to and from Puget Sound occupied the ship’s days.

But bad luck continued to trouble King Philip.On January 25, 1878, she was leaving empty, or in ballast, from San Francisco. Cast off on the bar by her tug without any wind to fill her sails, the ship drifted in the current and into the breakers. Both anchors failed to hold, and at five that evening, King Philipwent ashore. At low tide, the hull was high and dry; sightseers were able to walk right up and touch the stranded hulk. By the next day, the ship was “immovable” according to press accounts, and the insurance company sold the wreck to John Molloy, a local grocer who also speculated on scrap and salvage. He blasted the hulk apart with black powder to salvage what he could, but the lower hull, set firmly in the sand, remained in place. Periodically uncovered by the shifting sands of Ocean Beach, King Philipfinally disappeared from view in the 1920s, when sand was dumped there to build the Great Highway. Six decades later, thanks to the winter storms of 1982–83, I was introduced to the beached wreck whose story we fleshed out from the archives.

CAPE COD AND THE BARK FRANCES

My fascination with beached shipwrecks like that of King Philipcontinued through several years and other projects, but my last serious foray with them came in September 1987, as part of a team consisting of the National Park Service’s Submerged Cultural Resources Unit (SCRU) and the U.S. Navy’s Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit One, documenting wreck sites at Cape Cod National Seashore.

More than a thousand ships have come to grief off Cape Cod’s shores, and local shipwreck historian Bill Quinn showed us dozens of photos of wooden wrecks in eroding dunes and washed up on beaches. But the only skeleton we spent any time on was an iron ship that lay just offshore on a sandbar in rolling surf. That shipwreck, sitting off Head of the Meadow Beach in Truro, Massachusetts, was all that was left of the 120-foot German bark Frances. Frances, bound for Boston with a cargo of sugar and tin ingots, came to grief on the night of December 26, 1872. The fourteen-man crew took to the rigging and was slowly freezing to death as the salt spray coated them with ice.

Fortunately for them, Cape Cod’s reputation as a ships’ graveyard had inspired the government to erect lifesaving stations. Because of an average of two wrecks each winter month, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had built huts to shelter shipwrecked mariners in 1797. But it was not until 1871, the year before Frances’swreck, that the U.S. government had assumed responsibility for lifesaving with the creation of the United States Life-Saving Service (USLSS). Stations were built on dangerous sections of coast, manned around the clock, and lifesavers walked the beaches on patrol to spot ships in trouble and sound the alarm.

A crew of volunteers from Truro, led by Captain Edwin Worthen, keeper of the USLSS’S new Highland Lifesaving Station, came to the aid of Frances’screw. Dragging a whaleboat through the dunes and onto the beach, the lifesavers braved the surf and being crushed against the wallowing steel hull to pluck the freezing men from the rigging. Every soul aboard was saved, but the ordeal proved too much for Captain Wilhelm Kortling, Frances’smaster. He died from the effects of his exposure to the cold, three days later. When the surf quieted down, some of the cargo was salvaged, and then Franceswas left to the sea. But the wreck never broke up. Buried periodically by an offshore sandbar, the hulk, as the National Seashore’s visitor guide explains, “pokes up occasionally above the Atlantic waves and serves as a memorial to the more than 1,000 shipwrecks that have occurred along the outer Cape over the past three and a half centuries.”

To get to Frances, we had to walk carefully backwards through the surf, then turn around quickly to dive under the waves and swim fast to avoid becoming a scuba-clad surfer instead of a diver. I joined my friend and colleague, National Park Service (NPS) archaeologist Larry Murphy, on a reconnaissance dive. Murphy is a tall, solidly built man whose nickname at the time was “Mongo,” in recognition of his size and strength. As we swam up to Frances, I was amazed to see that most of the ship was there – not just a skeleton. Half buried in the sandbar was the entire iron hull, rising up out of the seabed to the decks. We took measurements of the bow and drifted up to the intact wooden deck. Holes bashed through the planking showed an open space below, which we thought was the forecastle where the crew had bunked. Neither Murphy nor I could fit through the holes, so we swam back down and headed aft to an open hatch in the deck. The main deck was half gone, battered away by the sea or nineteenth-century salvagers who were after the cargo of tin ingots. We easily dropped into the hold and were rewarded by the sight of a small scatter of ingots. Beyond them was a hole in the iron bulkhead that led directly into the forecastle. The light that came in through the holes in the deck above us illuminated the scene as the pounding of the surf boomed through the iron hull. We both realized that few if any had been in this compartment since that night just after Christmas 1872.

The wooden bunks of the German sailors had collapsed, but, as we surveyed the room, we spotted a wooden box, half buried in the sand, with a hole in the lid. We thought that it might be a sailor’s sea chest, filled with his personal belongings, preserved by the sand and ready to reveal its secrets to us. Murphy cautiously stuck his hand into the hole to feel around, and suddenly yanked his hand back, bellowing through the regulator clenched in his teeth. As he waved his right hand frantically, I saw a large crab, its claw firmly holding on for the ride. I nearly drowned as I burst out laughing, holding my regulator in with my teeth. Larry managed to pull the crab off and, nursing his sore but not injured hand, beckoned that it was time to go.

Back on the beach, we were debriefing with the Navy divers, who had also been mapping the wreck and who had anchored a small inflatable boat over the bow. They had a strange tale to report. As they were swimming over the bow, a sudden burst of air bubbles had poured out from inside the wreck, and they could swear they heard, muffled through the water, alternating screams and shrieks of laughter that had convinced some of them that the wreck was haunted.

* * *

The state of preservation of Frances, like that of King Philip, was mirrored by what we found on other shipwrecks buried in the sand on other beaches. The fact that ships lost on storm-tossed coasts in violent surf conditions did not break up into matchsticks was not widely recognized by maritime archaeologists. Murphy and I had presented a paper on that topic in 1984, to our colleagues at an annual conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, though it was ignored in favor of more exciting deep-water discoveries. But the evidence we gathered, as well as some of the interesting real-life stories behind some of these ships, ultimately showed that you never know where a fascinating shipwreck is going to show up, be it buried below high rises in a modern city or in a sand dune on a long stretch of coastline.

CHAPTER TEN
HEROES UNDER FIRE

THE COAST OF CUBA

The long swell of the sea rolls in from the open Caribbean and breaks against the steep rocks of the promontory known as El Morro. The coast of Cuba, rocky and steep, stretches to the east and the west, defining the narrow gap that is the entrance to Santiago Harbor. Rising above the gap and the stone-lined terraces carved out of the cliff is the masonry mass of Castillo del Morro San Pedro de la Roca, also known, like the promontory it dominates, as El Morro. The ancient fortification, first built in the early seventeenth century and subsequently rebuilt numerous times to defend Santiago from the attacks of pirates and privateers, no longer bristles with guns. Fluttering atop its parapets is the flag of Cuba, which has flown here for a scant one hundred years in the five centuries since Christopher Columbus first circumnavigated the island’s shores and planted a colony. For much of Cuba’s history, the banner of Spain flew atop El Morro, though the rich harbor and island it claimed were contested by other powers and internal rebellions. It was supplanted in 1898, albeit briefly, by the flag of a newly awakened imperial power, the United States.

THE LAST MISSION OF USS MERRIMAC: JUNE 3, 1898

In February 1898, Cuba’s three-year struggle for independence from Spain and fears for American lives and property in Cuba convinced President William McKinley to send the battleship Maineto “show the flag.” American interest in Cuba – including demands from various quarters for the outright takeover of the island – dated back half a century, and Spanish officials were highly suspicious of the United States government’s motives in sending the Maineto Havana. When Mainemysteriously exploded in Havana Harbor on the evening of February 15, suspicions of Spanish “treachery,” fanned by the U.S. press, swelled public outrage and led Congress to declare war on April n. Volunteers enlisted around the country, and soon camps were filled with troops training and assembling to sail to Cuba with the slogan: “Remember the Maineand to hell with Spain!”

The U.S. Navy dispatched a squadron of ships to hit Spain’s fleet in the Philippines, and another to both blockade Cuba and counter the Spanish naval forces assembled there. But the Americans arrived off Cuba to find an enemy who would not come out to fight. The Spanish fleet lay out of reach of the American ships inside the harbor of Santiago de Cuba, protected by a series of seventeenth– and eighteenth-century forts that Spanish marines and sailors had hastily fortified with more modern breech-loading weapons. They also had protected the narrow entrance to the harbor with “torpedoes,” or mines. The Cape Verde Fleet of the Spanish Navy, under the command of Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete, consisted of four battle cruisers and two torpedo boat destroyers. The U.S. Navy’s North Atlantic Squadron was a force of two battleships, five cruisers and more than a dozen other vessels, commanded by Rear Admiral William T Sampson. Sampson’s forces were augmented by a second group of ships, the Flying Squadron (so-called because it was intended to be a fast-response group of ships that would “fly” to wherever needed), commanded by Commodore Winfield Scott Schley. Schley’s squadron of two battleships, three cruisers and the collier Merrimac(laden with coal to fuel the other ships) further stacked the odds against Cervera.

The Spanish admiral, a highly respected veteran, knew all too well that he was in a hopeless situation. Cervera had already resigned as Spain’s Minister of the Marine when his inspections found the Spanish Navy was in poor condition, ill-equipped to fight, and ravaged by political machinations and corruption. When Spain prepared for war against the United States, he returned to uniform out of a sense of duty, but his correspondence with his superiors minced no words when he was ordered to sail to Cuba to try and break the American naval blockade. “It is impossible for me to give you an idea of the surprise and consternation experienced by all on the receipt of the order to sail. Indeed, that surprise is well justified, for nothing can be expected of this expedition except the total destruction of the fleet or its hasty and demoralized return.” His concerns rebuffed, Cervera wrote back: “With a clear conscience I go to the sacrifice.”

To forestall that sacrifice, Cervera kept his fleet in the protected anchorage of Santiago Harbor, his guns pointing at the entrance, because the large American force was too powerful to confront. The guns protecting Cervera and the threat of mines kept the Americans out, but to prevent the Spanish fleet from slipping away under cover of darkness, Sampson decided to “bottle them up” in the harbor. To do that, he turned to a young and eager engineering officer and to the most untrustworthy ship in his fleet, the collier Merrimac.

Merrimac, a four-year-old, British-built collier, was one of Schley’s Flying Squadron, though the 333-foot vessel had slowed the fleet to a slow crawl across the ocean. Plagued with engine and steering problems, Merrimacprobably would have been sent home had it not been loaded with coal. Merrimac’screw fueled Schley’s ships by filling bags with coal, hoisting them on deck and then slinging them over to whatever warship was moored alongside. It was hard, dirty work, not only for the stokers in Merrimac’sholds but also the receiving ship, as the thick black coal dust clung to everyone and everything.

Sampson picked the unreliable Merrimacto trap the Spanish fleet in the harbor by sinking herself to block the narrow entrance. On May 30, as the American fleet assembled off Santiago, Sampson ordered

^{Inside El Castillo del Morro de San Pedro de la Roca, also known as El Morro, built in the early seventeenth century to defend Santiago de Cuba. Below these ramparts steamed the collier Merrimacin a brave but failed attempt to block the harbor entrance. James P. Delgado}

Commodore Schley to prepare Merrimacfor the mission. Schley disagreed with Sampson. He argued that if the Spanish were trapped inside Santiago Harbor, their guns would help to defend the city against the American troops preparing to march overland to seize Santiago. Schley thought it would be better to lure Cervera out of the protected harbor and destroy him, but Sampson reiterated his orders to use “the promptest and most efficient use of every means” and sent a bright but untested twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant, naval constructor Richmond Pearson Hobson, to ready Merrimacfor the suicide mission.

Hobson, who was attached to Sampson’s staff to make observations on how well the ships performed after recent work in the Navy Yard (that’s what a naval constructor did), was vain, stubborn and eager to prove himself. He was also very unpopular with his fellow officers. But he was brilliant, and his enthusiasm made him a perfect choice for Sampson. Hobson’s plan was to strip Merrimacof “useful gear” and to rig her to sink quickly with charges once she was in position immediately inside the harbor entrance. There, if the charts were accurate, the 333-foot length of the ship would block much of the narrow channel.

Hobson set ten charges along Merrimac’shull and connected them to electric batteries linked by wire to a central station on the bridge. Crews worked in the hot Cuban sun to grease the seacocks (valves in the engine room) so that they would open quickly to help flood the ship, and “all openings, hatches, manhole covers, etc. were opened.” Hobson had the anchors rigged at the bow and stern, near the waterline, to swing the ship hard to starboard at the last moment to position her across the channel. As Hobson later explained: “The general plan contemplated a minimum crew of volunteers … with the simplest form of duty for each… The anchors were to be slung over the sides and held by simple lashings, ready to be cut with an ax, a man stationed at each anchor.” Only two men were to stay below, one in the engine room and one in the boiler room. One man was to take the wheel and one was to assist with the torpedoes, making in all a crew of six. That was not enough, and another man was added.

Hobson selected his crew from hundreds of volunteers from the fleet. Seven men – Randolph Clausen, George Charette, Osborn Deignan, Francis Kelly, Daniel Montague, John Murphy and George Phillips – joined Merrimacas final preparations were made for an early morning run into the harbor on June 3, 1898.

Merrimac’slast trip started at 3 a.m. Fortunately for Hobson, darkness cloaked the collier and the Spanish sentries at El Morro did not spot the ship until she was just 2,000 yards from the harbor entrance. The forts and batteries opened fire. Associated Press reporter “Chappie” Goode, watching from USS New York, reported: “In a few seconds the mouth of Santiago Harbor was livid with flames that shot viciously from both banks … the dull sound of the carronade and its fiery light were unmistakable evidences of the fierce attack that was being waged on Hobson’s gallant crew.” Captain Robley “Fighting Bob” Evans, observing from the bridge of the battleship Iowa, said, “It looks like Hell with the lid off!”

Hobson and his crew, stripped to their underwear to make it easier to swim away when the ship sank, crouched down as shell after shell hit Merrimac.Hobson later wrote: “The striking of projectiles and flying fragments produced a grinding sound, with the fine ring in it of steel on steel. The deck vibrated heavily, and we felt the full effect, lying, as it were, full-length on our faces. At each instant it seemed that certainly the next would bring a projectile among us … I looked for my own body to be cut in two diagonally, from the hip upward, and wondered for a moment what the sensation would be.”

As Merrimacentered the channel, Hobson found that he could not steer the ship. “Our steering gear was gone, shot away at the last moment, and we were charging straight down the channel.” Then, as they neared their planned position to scuttle the ship, most of the explosive charges failed to detonate. Only two out of the ten exploded. Damaged but still afloat, and now ablaze, Merrimacdrifted deeper into the harbor and directly into the line of fire of Cervera’s ships and a gun battery on the shore. More shells tore into the collier’s hull. Then came “a blasting shock, a lift, a pull, a series of vibrations, and a mine exploded directly beneath.”

The last blast stopped the ship, and she began “steadily sinking two thirds athwart.” Merrimac, stuck at one side of the channel, burned fiercely as the wind whipped through the torn hull and decks to fan the coal in the hold into a blast furnace. The steel decks began to soften and twist in the heat. “The Merrimacgave a premonitory lurch, then staggered to port in a death-throe,” said Hobson. “The bow almost fell, it sank so rapidly… the stricken vessel now reeled to port… and plunged forward. The stern rose and heeled heavily; it stood for a moment, shuddering, and then started downward, righting as it went.”

Incredibly, not one member of Hobson’s crew was killed or even seriously injured. Two men were cut by shrapnel, but not badly. As Merrimacslipped away beneath them, the eight Americans found themselves in the water. A raft from the wreck washed by, and they grabbed its ropes and clung alongside, hiding from the bullets of Spanish soldiers and marines until the gunfire died away. At daybreak, a steam launch approached, searching for survivors. It was the personal craft of Admiral Cervera, who had insisted on an inspection of the sunken ship. Hobson and his seven men were pulled from the water at Cervera’s order. The Spanish admiral turned to Hobson and spoke one word: “Valiente!”

It was a valiant but a failed mission. Hobson was disheartened, admitting Merrimac“did not completely block the channel,” because at the end the current had swung the ship from its sideways position and straightened her out. Ships could steam past the wreck. But while Hobson and his crew had not succeeded, their bravery inspired more than Admiral Cervera. That afternoon, Cervera sent a launch out to the American fleet, under a flag of truce, to inform Sampson that his men had survived. The news cheered the American sailors, while correspondents filed reports for the papers back home praising the “gallant Hobson” and Merrimac’screw.

The eight Americans, meanwhile, remained prisoners of Spain, lodged in cells in the imposing fortress of El Morro. From his cell, Hobson could look out each day and see the masts of Merrimacsticking up in the water. He and the crew also watched from their cells when the U.S. fleet bombarded El Morro to weaken Spanish defenses while American troops waded ashore several miles south at Daiquiri and Siboney. Since the Spanish Navy had not been neutralized or defeated, the key to American victory was to seize Santiago by land. Troops pushed inland, joining Cuban rebels as they advanced towards the old city. Tropical disease, heat and tough Spanish resistance slowed the American advance, but finally, the outer defenses of Santiago were breached.

The breakthrough occurred on the city’s outskirts at two small forts atop Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill, where the volunteer regiment of Rough Riders fought their way to victory. They were led into battle by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt after the regiment’s commanding officer, Leonard Wood, was wounded. This was the beginning of a new phase of Roosevelt’s life that would catapult him into the White House within a few years. It was also the death knell for Spain’s empire in the Americas, which had been whittled down to just Cuba and Puerto Rico.

That death knell also resounded on the sea. On July 3, Cervera ordered his fleet to leave Santiago and make for the high seas. He hoped to outrun the Americans, whom he could not outgun, but the waiting U.S. fleet opened fire. Over the next few hours, one by one, the Spanish ships died. All were sunk, some dying in massive explosions as their magazines erupted, while others, torn by shot and shell and on fire, steamed for the rocky shore where their crews beached them rather than go down in deeper water where the sailors had less of a chance of surviving. Cuban rebels on the shore fired on Spanish sailors struggling in the surf, as sharks circled and ripped into the wounded men.

The victorious Americans treated the Spanish wounded, including Admiral Cervera, and accorded them the same chivalry that the Spaniards had granted to Hobson and his men. The war ended with the Spanish surrender outside of Santiago. Surprisingly, the victorious Americans did not invite their Cuban allies – in a war ostensibly fought for Cuban independence – to attend the negotiations or the surrender. Instead, the United States assumed control of Cuba, governing the island until 1903 and leaving only after writing a Cuban constitution that granted the U.S. the right to militarily intervene in Cuban affairs and a perpetual lease to Guantanamo Bay for a naval base. The seeds of Cuban discontent and a future revolution were thus sown.