The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [328]
Coffee was being served at the Tampa Bay Hotel on the evening of Tuesday, 7 June, when General Shafter was summoned to the Western Union office by order of the President of the United States. His instructions, tapped out on a direct line from the White House, were terse: “You will sail immediately as you are needed at destination.”61
McKinley’s urgency was prompted by an agonized cable from Admiral Sampson, who had been blockading the Spanish Cuba Squadron in Santiago Harbor since 1 June: “If 10,000 men were here, city and fleet would be ours within 48 hours.” Shafter could only tap back, “I will sail tomorrow morning. Steam cannot be gotten up earlier.”62
Notwithstanding this guarded reply, the words “sail immediately” ran like an electric shock through the Fifth Corps. By midnight the Rough Riders were packed and waiting with their baggage at the track which had been assigned to them. No train appeared, and after a long period of waiting new orders arrived to proceed to another track. There was no train there, either; but just after dawn some filthy coal-cars hove into sight, and, to quote Roosevelt, “these we seized.” The fact that the locomotive was pointing the wrong way did not deter them. “By various arguments” the engineer was persuaded to steam the nine miles to Port Tampa in reverse gear.63
Wednesday’s sun disclosed what appeared to be a black regiment descending from the coal-cars and jostling for space on the already overcrowded quay. More men kept arriving every few minutes, until the boards groaned with a swarming mass of human freight. Thirty transport ships were taking on the last bales of food and equipment, but it was anybody’s guess which regiments were to follow onto what vessel. While the Rough Riders (now mockingly called “Wood’s Weary Walkers”)64 stood sweating patiently in the sun, Wood and Roosevelt fanned out in search of Shafter’s chief quartermaster, Colonel C. F. Humphrey. “After an hour’s rapid and industrious search” they happened upon him almost simultaneously. Humphrey said they were welcome to a transport named Yucatán, which had not yet come in to the quay. Wood, sensing a certain lack of interest in the quartermaster’s voice, jumped into a passing launch and hijacked the Yucatán in midstream. Meanwhile Roosevelt learned that the ship had already been assigned to two other regiments—the 2nd Regular Infantry and the 71st New York Volunteers.
Accordingly, I ran at full speed to our train; and leaving a strong guard with the baggage, I double-quicked the rest of the regiment up to the boat, just in time to board her as she came into the quay, and then to hold her against the Second Regulars and the Seventy-first, who had arrived a little too late, being a shade less ready than we were in the matter of individual initiative.
Roosevelt listened with polite sympathy to the protests from the quay, but his final argument was conclusive: “Well, we seem to have it.”65 The 71st marched off in a huff, accompanied by a shower of coal from the Yucatán’s bunkers.
Presently Roosevelt noticed two photographers standing beside a huge tripod and camera. “What are you young men up to?”
“We are the Vitagraph Company, Colonel Roosevelt, and we are going to Cuba to take moving pictures of the war.”
The photographers found themselves being escorted up the gangplank. “I can’t take care of a regiment,” said nineteenth-century America’s greatest master of press relations, “but I might be able to handle two more.”66
CONSIDERING THE LOGISTICAL problem of moving 16,286 troops along a single stretch of track between 9:00 P.M. Tuesday and 5:00 P.M. Wednesday, the “criminally incompetent” General Shafter did not do too badly. He had no choice but to leave the remainder of his corps behind in Tampa, owing to wild miscalculations of available berth space; as it was the ships were so crammed with men that bodies covered every foot of deck. Convinced that he had done everything that God and gout permitted him, Shafter struggled over the side of his flagship Segurança at