ainst us
at this time. The _Wompatuck_ was sent by Captain Goodrich into the
mouth of the harbor at Guantanamo to attempt to grapple the cable
there. The tug and the _St. Louis_ were both forced to retire, not by
the weight of fire from the coast, but by a petty Spanish gunboat,
aided by "a small gun on shore." Could this fact have been
communicated to Commodore Schley when he decided to return to Key West
on the 26th, on account of the difficulty of coaling, he might have
seen the facility with which the place could be secured and utilized
for a coaling station, as it subsequently was by Admiral Sampson, and
that there thus was no necessity of starting back some seven hundred
miles to Key West, when he had with him four thousand tons of coal in
a collier. When the lower bay was occupied, on the 8th of June, our
attacking vessels were only the naval unprotected cruiser _Marblehead_
and the auxiliary cruiser _Yankee_, the former of which was with the
Flying Squadron during its passage from Cienfuegos to Santiago, and
throughout the subsequent proceedings up to Sampson's arrival off the
latter port. No resistance to them was made by the Spanish gunboat,
before which the vulnerable and inadequately armed _St. Louis_ and
_Wompatuck_ had very properly retired.

Although the information received of Cervera's entering Santiago was
not reliable enough to justify detaching Sampson's ships from before
Havana, it was probable to a degree that made it imperative to watch
the port in force at once. Telegrams were immediately sent out to
assemble the four auxiliary cruisers--_St. Paul_, _St. Louis_,
_Harvard_, and _Yale_--and the fast naval cruiser _Minneapolis_ before
the mouth of the harbor. The number of these ships shows the
importance attached to the duty. It was necessary to allow largely for
the chapter of accidents; for, to apply a pithy saying of the Chief of
the Naval Bureau of Equipment,--"the only way to have coal enough is
to have too much,"--the only way to assemble ships enough when things
grow critical, is to send more than barely enough. All those that
received their orders proceeded as rapidly as their conditions
allowed, but the Department could not get hold of the _St. Louis_.
This failure illustrates strongly the remark before made concerning
the importance of knowing just where cruisers are to be found; for of
all the five ships thus sought to be gathered, the _St. Louis_ was, at
the moment, the most important,