ts had been within one hundred yards of the
beach, instead of half a mile away.

In the second place, most of the boats and lighters seemed to be
directed and handled by men who had had little experience in boating
and no experience whatever in landing through heavy surf. As a result of
this, boats were often stove against the timbers of the little pier
which the engineer corps had hastily built; while the lighters, instead
of being held by an anchor and stern-line as they went into the
breakers, were allowed to swing around into the trough of the sea, where
they either filled and sank, or drifted ashore, broadside to the beach,
in such a position that fifty men could hardly turn them around and get
them off.

Finally, the soldiers and Cubans who acted as stevedores, carrying the
boxes from the boats and piling them on the pier, were not intelligently
directed, and, consequently, labored without method or judgment--getting
in one another's way; allowing the pier to become so blocked up with
stuff that nobody could move on it, much less work; and wasting more
energy in talking, shouting, and bossing one another than they utilized
in doing the thing that was to be done.

If I had ever had any doubt with regard to the expediency of giving to
the navy full and absolute control of the army and its supplies while at
sea, such doubt would have been removed by one day's observation at
Siboney. Army officers, as a rule, know nothing of water transportation,
and cannot reasonably be expected to know anything about it; and to put
them in charge of transports, lighters, and surf-boats is almost as
inconsiderate as to put a sailor in charge of a farm and expect him,
without any previous training, to run reaping-, binding-, and
threshing-machines, take proper care of his live stock, and get as much
out of the soil as an agricultural expert would. Every man to his trade;
and the landing of supplies from thirty or forty transports, in small
boats, on an unsheltered, surf-beaten coast, is not the trade of an army
quartermaster. Lieutenant-Colonel Humphrey and Major Jacobs undoubtedly
did all that they could do, with their knowledge and experience, and
with the limited facilities that General Shafter had provided for them,
to get supplies ashore; but the results were not gratifying, either to
observers at Siboney, or to soldiers at the front. If officers of the
navy had directed the loading of stores on the transports at Tampa, and
th