Adventures of a Sea Hunter (23 page)

With the war over, many of its combatants were acclaimed as heroes, among them Theodore Roosevelt, Admiral William Sampson, Richmond Hobson and the crew
ofMerrimac.
Hobson gained fame for his exploits and his good looks, earning the sobriquet of the “most kiss-able officer in the Navy.” He, like Roosevelt, rode his fame into political office. His crew also fared well. On November 2, 1899, the seven sailors of
Merrimac
were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Hobson did not receive the medal because of a provision barring its award to naval and marine officers. It was not until April 29, 1933, that then Congressman Richmond Hobson finally received his Medal of Honor from President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Our plane drops from the clouds and banks along the line of cliffs that define the shores of Cuba’s southeast coast. As we approach Santiago, I look out the window and see the walls of El Morro flash below me, then the lighthouse, and then we’re down, bouncing on the airstrip that stretches out next to the ancient fortress.
The Sea Hunters
team is here to explore waters rarely dived in search of a doomed fleet and one forgotten American collier that a century ago had been the talk of a nation.

We’re in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, with his permission, to dive all of the wrecks from the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898. We have toured Havana and the site of the destruction of
USS
Maine
, visited the U.S. memorial monument to
Maine’s
dead on the city’s oceanfront drive, the Malecon, and interviewed Cuba’s top historians and curators about that war. Now
The Sea Hunters
team heads to Santiago to see the sites: Daiquiri and Siboney, where the American troops landed; San Juan Hill, where the Rough Riders stormed up to victory; Santa Iphigenia Cemetery, where the dead of the battles are buried, and El Morro. Standing on its parapets with Mike Fletcher and John Davis, I look down into the narrow harbor mouth at the scene of
Merrimac’s
last mission. The collier would have steamed just a few yards away from El Morro’s closest guns and into the mouth of more guns that doubtless rained fire into
Merrimac’s
hull. “It’s a miracle the ship made it through with no one killed,” Mike says, and John and I nod in agreement. “It will be a miracle if anything has survived in that channel,” John says. Looking out at the active shipping, we agree.

After touring the battlefields and memorials on land, with their manicured lawns, statues and bronze plaques offering a distant, cleaned-up and sanctified image of that hundred-year-old war, we head out to sea to search for Cervera’s sunken fleet. Mike and his son Warren start by diving to find the wrecks of the torpedo boat destroyers
Pluton
and
Furor.
Their shattered and scattered remains litter the steep slope of the seabed, 100 to 120 feet down. From there, we head to the cruiser
Almirante Oquendo.
Dozens of shells ripped through the cruiser during her final flight and fight, and at the end, burning fiercely with more than half of the crew dead, the wounded ship hit the rocks near shore and broke in two. Very few men made it off
Oquendo.
Today, the cruiser’s grave is marked by one of its large u-inch guns sticking up out of the sea. We follow it down into a broken field of debris that only after a careful survey reveals the outlines of the ship.

The wreck of the Spanish cruiser
Almirante Oquendo,
a turret and gun sticking up out of the water. She was sunk off Cuba during the Spanish-American-Cuban War at the Battle of Santiago in 1898. James P. Delgado

We travel farther down the coast to look at
Oquendo’s
sister ship, the cruiser
Vizcaya.
Running flat out,
Vizcaya
slugged it out at near point-blank range with Schley’s flagship,
USS
Brooklyn.
The fight ended when
Vizcaya’
s bow exploded as she lined up to either ram
Brooklyn
or fire a torpedo from the tube set into its bow. An American shell detonated the torpedo before the Spaniards could fire it. Sinking and ablaze,
Vizcaya
could no longer fight. Wounded and “faint from the loss of blood,” the cruiser’s commander, Captain Juan Antonio Eulate, was in the sick bay where he met one of his junior officers, Ensign Luis Fajardo. An American shell had torn off one of Fajardo’s arms, but he told his captain “he still had one left for his country.”

Captain Eulate, in his official report of the battle, said: “I immediately convened the officers who were nearest… and asked them whether there was anyone among them who thought we could do anything more in the defense of our country and our honor, and the unanimous reply was that nothing more could be done.” As Spaniards, some with their uniforms ablaze, leapt screaming from their burning ship into the sea, some men on
Texas
started to cheer their victory until Captain John Philip yelled out, “Don’t cheer, boys! These poor devils are dying!”
USS
Iowa
, commanded by Robley Evans, approached next. Evans, incensed that Cuban sharpshooters were gunning down Spanish survivors struggling in the surf, sent a boat ashore and told the Cubans to stop firing or he would shell them.

With Mike Fletcher and his son Warren, I drop down into the sea, swimming past twisted armor plate and the broken engines of
Vizcaya.
We swim along the hull, punctured here and there by shellfire and the rocks where the burning hulk settled. Looming up in the milky sea, washed by the surging of the surf that breaks overhead, is the bulk of one of the cruiser’s turrets, its u-inch Hontoria cannon still in place but resting on its side in the sand. With Mike, I drop down to the narrow gap that the gun passes through. The men at these guns died at their posts, heavy shells raining down and setting off the powder inside as they raced to load and fire.
Oquendo’s
survivors said that a 350-pound charge of powder exploded from a hit on a turret and flashed through it, killing the gun crew laboring inside before erupting in a sheet of flame that ripped off the head of a nearby officer. Similar scenes of horror played out on
Vizcaya.

I shrug out of my dive vest and tank, and shove them through a narrow gap in the armor. Then, kicking and squeezing, I work my body into the turret. It is still and dark, as it should be—this is a tomb. Mike follows, and we strap our gear back on and carefully float in the enclosed space, filming it. We’re probably the first living people to be in here in more than a hundred years, and we quietly and respectfully document the turret, disturbing its peace only with our lights and air bubbles in order to share the story of what happened here with the world.

Our last dive on Cervera’s fleet is the cruiser
Cristobal Colon
, scuttled at the end of the battle by its crew. After opening the seacocks, they ran
Colon
up on the beach and abandoned ship as the Americans approached. Eager to salvage the newly built warship, the U.S. Navy tried to tow
Colon
off the rocks but, flooded and open to the sea, the cruiser sank in 100 feet of water. The sea is clear and calm, and as we descend down into the deep, the wreck of
Colon
is laid out before us, with gear on the decks and railings on ladders leading into the darkness of the cruiser’s hull. Flicking on our lights, we cannot resist the siren call of the secrets within the hull. We drift into a magazine half filled with mud and open to the seabed outside thanks to a large hole blasted through the side. Sticking out of the mud are rows of shells, still live and deadly a century after
Colon’s
demise. Passing out of the hole, we follow the hull, now festooned with marine life and growth that make the steel hulk a beautiful artificial reef, a haven to countless fish. The warm, sunlit waters have granted new life to
Cristobal Colon
and helped lay to rest some of her ghosts. As we surface, we agree that the time has come to find the elusive wreck of
Merrimac.

Our boat pushes past the fortress of El Morro, following the track of
Merrimac’s
final run. Richmond Hobson published a book about the mission in 1899, and with it in hand, we’re following the course he plotted in its pages to where the wreck should lie. Discussions with our Cuban hosts have given us hope. There is indeed a wreck near the spot, but it is a battered hulk that harbor authorities blasted around 1976 to clear the shipping channel. Now it may just be a pile of debris that we will have a difficult time proving was the famous collier. Getting permission to dive in this forbidden zone has also proved challenging, but the Cuban authorities, interested in learning just what lies there, and wanting all of the story told, have given their okay.

With five Cuban divers, we suit up—myself, Mike and Warren— and drop into the dark green water at slack tide. Even so, the current is
strong, and we hang on to the weighted line we dropped earlier and follow it down. The water is dirty with silt, and we cannot see our hands in front of our faces. It gets darker, closing in, grayer, verging on black . . . and then suddenly, 30 feet from the bottom, the water clears dramatically. Below us is the mangled stern of a large steel ship. We trace the stern and find the rudder, knocked free of its mounts and resting against the hull. We follow it to the bottom and find the propeller. Mike shines the light on it, pointing out that one of its blades is missing — and it looks like it was shot away.

We continue on, under the overhang of the hull, past steel plating that dangles from the hull, and up onto the deck. I swim back to the stern and look into a tangle of debris. Lying in there is the ship’s steering gear, and it, too, looks as if it was hit by gunfire. Gouges and broken steel castings provide evidence of a tremendous blow, and I’m reminded, floating and kicking against the current, of Hobson’s account of how
Merrimac’s
stern was hit by gunfire and lost her ability to steer.

My excitement grows as we drift with the current along the deck, moving towards the bow. The decks of the wreck are laid out exactly as on
Merrimac’s
plans, with large coal holds, scuttles and ventilators, and the mounts for the ship’s two masts each lying between pairs of coal holds. This has to be
Merrimac.
I grin with my regulator clenched in my teeth and turn to Mike with a “high five” sign. The centrally located superstructure is badly mangled, the bridge smashed and gone, but, lying in the debris, I see a broken Champagne bottle. It’s too perfect, I think. We know that just before they headed in, Hobson and his crew drank a toast in a melodramatic moment, and I wonder if this is their bottle. It could have been tossed in years later from a passing ship, but just the same, I wonder.

Nearby are pairs of the ship’s davits used to launch
Merrimac’s
boats, again situated exactly where the plans indicate they should be. Shell holes in the decks are graphic evidence of heavy fire. One shell hole penetrates the deck on the starboard side of No. 3 hold, at an angle that suggests it was fired from an elevation off the ship’s starboard quarter, so presumably from El Morro just after
Merrimac
cleared the harbor entrance and was proceeding in.

Swimming forward, we find that the charges lowered into the water by the Cubans in 1976 have torn the hull down to below the waterline at the bow, scattering steel fragments along the seabed. And yet, buried in the mud, is the forward anchor. Concealed by silt with only one shank exposed, it is connected to the mangled stem by thick anchor chain. Later, Warren Fletcher finds the stern anchor above the silt off the ship’s starboard side, tightly held by chain, suggesting that instead of being shot away, as Hobson suspected, it had jammed and remained suspended alongside the hull when
Merrimac
sank. We also find two rows of anchor chain, partially buried in the buckled plating and sediment that covers the deck, running from the bow to the stern, exactly the way that Hobson described how his crew had rigged it.

We can find no definitive evidence of damage from the scuttling charges, though a hole and damage to the port quarter conceivably could be related to the charge that Hobson placed there. The hull is set into the silt of the harbor bottom to a level above the waterline, and our limited time on each dive does not allow for a comprehensive survey of the side of the hull to see if there is blasting damage. But we do see other damage that testifies to
Merrimac’s
end—and that demonstrates dramatically why
Merrimac’s
crew, like the men in the Spanish ships who fought through flame and shot—deserve the honor of being called heroes. The decks are warped and twisted from the intense heat of the fires that burned through
Merrimac’s
coal for an hour. Reaching into the torn hull, I pull out chunks of coal that laboratory analysis later shows are “coked” as a result of the fire.

There is nothing pretty about war, and when the pomp and ceremony and the glamour are stripped away, what is left, so visibly on this wreck and on the shattered hulks of Cervera’s sunken fleet, is harsh evidence of the intensity of battle, the costs of war, and the strength of character and love of country that inspires people to sail into harm’s way to fight for a cause or to defend what they hold dear. As we surface from the muddy grave
of Merrimac
, I think of how raw and untouched this undersea battlefield is compared to the museum-like setting of San Juan Hill and its cleaned-up, memorialized and glorified view of war.