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use the sailors’ cliché, clear sailing. But Roosevelt was hard pressed to turn a naturalist phrase in his diary. There was a certain unrest about these tiny islands themselves—waves breaking heavily on their beaches, tides advancing and retreating—which transcended description. When he first caught sight of the shoreline of Cuba’s Santiago Bay, waves beating in diagonals, Roosevelt finally turned somewhat poetic. “All day we have steamed close to the Cuban Coast,” he told his sister Corinne, “high barren looking mountains rising abruptly from the shore, and at a distance looking much like those of Montana. We are well within the tropics, and at night the Southern Cross shows low above the horizon; it seems strange to see it in the same sky with the Dipper.”42

On June 23 the Rough Riders landed at the fishing village of Siboney about seven miles west of Daiquirí, behind General Henry Ware Lawton’s Second Division and General William Shafter’s Fifth Corps. They were ready for action. Their attitude toward the Spanish occupation of Cuba was best summed up by Wister’s ultimatum in The Virginian: “I’ll give you till sundown to leave town.”43 In New York and Washington, D.C., Roosevelt had romanticized the Cuban insurgents who were fighting the Spanish. However, he soon called them “the grasshopper people,” for the shabby way they had treated the land.44 The woods and fields were so dry that Roosevelt feared they would catch on fire. Only the little grasses tossing purplish shadows in the sand seemed irrigated. Everything man-made looked battered and cheap. Ironically, the Rough Riders were under the command of Brigadier General S. B. M. Young, whom Roosevelt called “as fine a type of the American fighting soldier as a man could hope to see.” By happenstance General Young had once been in command of Yellowstone National Park, and Roosevelt, as president of the Boone and Crockett Club, had worked with him on wildlife protection and forest preservation issues.45

The Rough Riders took ashore blanket rolls, pup tents, mess kits, and weaponry, but no one thought to give them any insect repellent. It was hot. There was no wind, and they felt on fire. The tangled jungles and chaparral of Cuba, particularly in early summer, were breeding grounds for flies that now swarmed over the camps. As it turned out, these insects were as much the enemy in the Cuban heat as the Spaniards. They filled the air with psssing, droning, chirping, and humming; not for a second were they quiet. Sleeping with a mosquito net was a must. There were 100 varieties of ants in Cuba, including strange stinging ants that seemed to come from a different world. (Darwin, in The Descent of Man, claimed that “the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man.”46) The little crouching chameleons with coffin-shaped heads, unafraid of the soldiers, changed color from bright green to dark brown depending on the foliage they rested on. “Here there are lots of funny little lizards that run about in the dusty roads very fast,” Roosevelt wrote to his daughter Ethel, “and then stand still with their heads up.”47

Unfortunately, the military mapmakers had failed to tell Colonel Roosevelt and company that Las Guásimas, the dingiest village imaginable, was, with only modest exaggeration, the world’s biggest scorpions’ nest. Soldiers soon swelled up from scorpion bites, which also caused dizzyness and arthritic-like aches. Stephen Crane, who was then a war correspondent for the New York World (and whom Roosevelt disdained as immoral because of his novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets), wrote nastily that the former New York police commissioner and bird-watcher recognized “the beautiful coo of the Cuban wood-dove” but inexplicibly seemed deaf to the fatal noise of a “Spanish guerrilla wood dove which had presaged the death of gallant marines.”48 It was a Craneian cheap shot; still, Roosevelt may have been the only soldier in Cuba who recorded ornithological observations of cardinals and tanagers.

Just two days