e smoke began to rise over a projecting
point of the rampart which hid, from our point of view, the mouth of the
Aguadores ravine. Anxious to see what was going on, I persuaded Miss
Barton to let the _State of Texas_ run out of the cove and take some
position from which we might witness the bombardment. Getting under way
at once, we steamed out four or five miles in a west-southwest direction
to a point about three miles off Aguadores, from which we could see the
whole line of the coast. A column of infantry--the Thirty-third
Michigan, I think, under command of General Duffield--had moved westward
along the railroad under the rampart to the mouth of the Aguadores
ravine, and was apparently engaged in attacking the enemy's position
there under cover of Admiral Sampson's guns. We could not clearly follow
the movements of the troops, for the reason that they were hidden, or
partially hidden, by the bushes and trees, but we could see every
movement made and every shot fired by the war-ships. The _Gloucester_,
on the western side of the notch, was knocking to pieces the old stone
fort half-way up the hill; the _New York_, from a position directly in
front of the railroad-bridge, was enfilading the ravine with four-and
eight-inch shells; while the _Suwanee_, completely hidden most of the
time in a great cloud of smoke, was close in to the mouth of the river,
sweeping the whole adjacent region with a storm of projectiles from her
rapid-fire and machine guns. I do not know whether the old Aguadores
fort had any armament or not. Its sea face had been reduced to a heap of
crumbled masonry before we reached the scene of action, and I did not
afterward see a shot fired from it, nor a single soldier in or about it.
Its offensive power--if it ever had any--was so completely destroyed,
that I momentarily expected General Duffield's troops to ford the river
above the railroad-bridge and take undisputed possession of it. But the
Michigan men were apparently prevented from doing so by the fire from
some rifle-pits up the ravine, which the guns of the war-ships could
not, or did not, wholly silence. We were not in a position, perhaps, to
form a trustworthy judgment with regard to the strength of the
Spaniards' defense; but it seemed to me that if the attack had been
vigorously made and persistently followed up, the enemy might have been
driven from the ravine. Admiral Sampson, in his report of the
engagement, says that the Spaniards had no