Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [69]
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