General Scott had in contemplation the landing of an army
of twelve thousand men on the open beach at Vera Cruz, he caused
sixty-seven surf-boats to be built for that particular service, each of
them capable of holding from seventy to eighty men. Every detail of the
disembarkation had been carefully considered and planned; every
contingency that could be foreseen had been provided for; and the
landing was successfully made in the course of two or three hours,
without a single error or accident.

When General Shafter sailed from Tampa, on June 14, with an army
considerably larger than that of General Scott, his equipment for
disembarkation on an exposed, surf-beaten coast consisted, according to
his own report, of only two scows! One of these went adrift at sea, and
the loss of it, the general says, "proved to be very serious and was
greatly felt." I don't wonder! Two scows, for an army of sixteen
thousand men and ten or fifteen ship-loads of supplies, was a
sufficiently economical allowance; and when that number was reduced by
half, and a whole army-corps became dependent upon one scow, I am not
surprised to learn that "the disembarkation was delayed and
embarrassed." There is a reference in the report to certain "lighters
sent by the quartermaster's department," and intended, apparently, for
use on the Cuban coast; but when and by what route they were "sent" does
not appear, and inasmuch as they were lost at sea before they came into
General Shafter's control, they can hardly be regarded as a part of his
equipment. All that he had with him was this flotilla of two scows. I
heard vague reports of a pontoon-train stowed away under hundreds of
tons of other stuff in the hold of one of the transports; but whether it
was intended to supplement the flotilla of scows, or to be employed in
the bridging of rivers, I am unable to say. I do not think it was ever
unloaded in Cuba, and I am quite sure that it never was used.

The almost complete absence of landing equipment, in the shape of
surf-boats, lighters, and launches, eventually proved, as I shall
hereafter show, to be disastrous in the extreme; and if the navy had not
come to the rescue, at Daiquiri and Siboney, it is not at all certain
that General Shafter could have landed his army. In a telegram to the
War Department dated "Playa del Este, June 25," he frankly admits this,
and says: "Without them [the navy] I could not have landed in ten days,
and perhaps not at all."