“Minnesota,” April 30th. 8 A.M.
Yesterday, at 9.30, Captain Watson came to fetch me to go to San Juan, dashing up to the ship in great style in his motor-launch. Captain Simpson sent Lieutenant Smyth, who was eager to see it, with us. We descended the gangway in the blazing sun and got into the launch, which, however, refused to move further. Finally, after some time of hot rolling on the glassy water, we transferred to one of the Minnesota’s boats, and in a few minutes I found myself landing, after two months, at the dreadful and picturesque fortress, under its new flag. The old one, let us hope, will never again fly over hunger, insanity, despair, and disease.19
We found Captain Chamberlain in his office. He is a strong, fine-looking young man. Indeed, our marines and blue-jackets are a magnificent-looking set, hard as nails, and endlessly eager. Captain Chamberlain was surrounded by all the signs of “occupation,” in more senses than one. Records, arms, ammunition, uniforms of the “old régime” were piled about, waiting till the more vital issues of flesh and blood, life and death, have been disposed of. Captain Chamberlain was in New York only a week ago, and now finds himself set to clean up, in all ways, this human dumping-ground of centuries. He detailed an orderly to accompany us, and we went through a door on which the Spanish orders of the day were still to be seen written in chalk.
We started through the big machine-house, which was in excellent up-keep, so the officers said, full of all sorts of valuable material, especially electrical. This brought us out on the big central patio, where three groups of fifty-one prisoners each sat blinking in the unaccustomed light, and waiting to have straw hats portioned out to them, temporarily shielding their heads from the sun with rags, dishes, pans, baskets, and the like. An extraordinary coughing, sneezing, spitting, and wheezing was going on. Even in the hot sunshine these men were pursued by the specters of bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma, and kindred ills. We went into a dim dungeon, just cleared of these one hundred and fifty-three men. It seemed as if we must cut the air to get in, it was so thick with human miasmas; and for hours afterward an acrid, stifling something remained in my lungs, though I kept inhaling deeply the sun-baked air. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I looked about; the dripping walls were oozing with filth; there were wet floors, and no furniture or sanitary fittings of any kind. A few shallow saucepans, such as I had seen rations poured into at my former visit, were lying about. The rest was empty, dark, reeking horror. But God knows the place was abundantly hung and carpeted and furnished with human misery, from the dull, physical ache of the half-witted peon, to the exquisite torture of the man of mind habituated to cleanliness and comfort. What appalling dramas have there been enacted I dare not think.
One was told me. A man, not long imprisoned, accidentally found, in the darkness, a stick and a thick, empty bottle. With the bottle he drove the stick deep into the brain of a man, unknown to him, who was dozing near him. When taken out to be shot he was found to be of the educated class. He said, in unavailing self-defense, that he had been crazed by the darkness and the suffocating stench.
On coming out into the blessed air again, we examined at rather close range these lines of men just readmitted to the fellowship of sun and sky. They presented a varied and disheartening study for the ethnologist—or conqueror. There was every type, from half-breed to full Indian; the majority of the faces were pitted by smallpox. A few of the men had small, treasured bundles, to which they clung, while others, except for the rags that covered them, were as unfettered by possessions as when they were born. Thick, matted, black hair and irregular growths of stubby, Indian beards gave their faces a savage aspect. At the end of one of the lines were two very young boys, not more than thirteen or fourteen, their faces still fresh and their eyes bright. I wanted to ask why they were there, but their line had received its hats, and they were marched out through the portcullis to the beach.
Many of the inmates of San Juan were conscripts awaiting the call to “fight” for their country; others were civil delinquents, murderers, thieves. Most of the poor brutes had a vacant look on their faces. The political prisoners had already been freed. Two of the big dungeons were still full. There were five or six hundred in one space, pending the cleaning out of the empty ones, when they were to be redistributed. Captain Chamberlain was in the patio, trying to expedite matters, when we came out of the first dungeon. I think he had some sixty men to assist him, and was wrestling with book and pencil, trying to make some sort of classification and record. We walked over to another corner to inspect a dungeon said to have chains on the walls and other horrors still in place. Between the thick bars of one where those sentenced to death for civil crimes were kept peered a sinister face, pockmarked, loose of mouth, and dull-eyed. I asked the owner of it what he had done. “Maté” (“I killed”), he answered, briefly and hopelessly. He knew he was to pay the penalty.
There has not yet been time for our men to investigate fully the meager, inexact records of the prison. We went through the patio, under the big portcullis, along the way leading by the canals or moats to the graveyard by the beach. This was speakingly empty. There were only a few graves, and those seemed to be of officers or commanders of the castle and members of their families long since dead. With mortality so constantly at work, and with no graves to be found, testimony, indeed, was given by the sharks swimming in the waters. A simpler process than burial was in practice: a hunting in the darkness, a shoveling out of bodies, a throwing to the sea—the ever-ready.
As we passed along one of the ledges we could hear sounds of life, almost of animation, coming through the loopholes that slanted in through the masonry—a yard and a half deep by four inches wide. These four-inch spaces were covered by a thick iron bar. When I had last passed there, a dead, despairing silence reigned. Now, all knew that something had happened, that more was to happen, and that good food was the order of the day. Coming back, we met the second detachment of fifty-one, being marched out to the sandy strip at the ocean-end of the fortress. Many of them will be freed to-day to join those other hundreds that I saw. They will know again the responsibilities, as well as the joys of freedom, but, alas, they will be of very little use to the state or to themselves. We walked up the broad stairs leading to the flat roofs covering the dungeons. A squad of our men had established themselves on the wide landing, with their folding-cots, rifles, and all the paraphernalia of their business. Captain Watson said, as we got upon the azotea, “The holes in the floor were ordered cut by Madero when he came into power.” I told him that I didn’t think so, they had seemed to me very old; and when we examined them the raised edges were found to be of an obsolete form and shape of brick, and the iron barrings seemed to have centuries of rust on them. Nothing was changed. Nothing had ever been changed. It remained for a foreign hand to open the doors.
The torpedo-house, which was near our landing, seemed business-like, clean, and very expensive, even to my inexpert eyes. Stores were being landed by one of the Minnesota’s boats—great sides of beef, bread, coffee, vegetables, sugar. I was so thankful to see them, and to know that hunger no longer stalked right under our bows.
I reached home in time for two baths and to change all my clothing before one o’clock, when Commander Tweedie arrived for lunch. He had a most interesting tale to tell of his journey down from Mexico City, and told it in the characteristic, deprecating way of an Englishman who has done something, but who neither wants credit nor feels that he has done anything to deserve it. He came back as far as Soledad in a special train, with a guard of twenty-five of the famous Twenty-ninth. At Soledad he saw a miserable, hungry, thirsty, worn-out party of Americans, men, women, and children, from Cordoba. Most of them had been in jail for eight days, and then found themselves stranded at Soledad for twenty-four hours, without food or drink, huddled up by the railroad station. Tweedie is a man of resource. Instead of getting back to Vera Cruz and reporting on the condition, he made up his mind that he would take the party on with him, or stay behind himself. After some telegraphing to Maass, with whom he had, fortunately, drunk a copita (oh, the power of the wicked copita!) as he passed his garrison, he finally got permission to start for Vera Cruz with the derelicts, under the fiction of their being English.
They had to walk the twenty blazing kilometers from Tejería, a sort of burning plowshare ordeal, one old lady and various children being carried in blankets. He gave them every available drop of liquid he had in his car, and he said the way the children lapped up the ginger-ale and lemonade was very amusing. Still under the auspices of Carden, a train-load of five or six hundred started, last night or this morning, for Coatzacoalcos. Sir Lionel, fearing a panic, decided not to say, till he gets off this last train-load, that our affairs are no longer in his hands. I think magnanimity can scarcely go further; my heart is full of gratitude for the inestimable services the English have rendered my countrypeople.
At four o’clock I went on shore to see Admiral Fletcher. Ensign Crisp (wearing side-arms) accompanied me. Captain Simpson thinks it more suitable to send some one with me, but never, in all her four hundred years or so of existence, has Vera Cruz been safer, more cheerful, more prosperous, more hygienic. The zopilotes circling the town must think mournfully of the days when everything was thrown into the street for all that flies or crawls to get fat and multiply on.
I found Admiral Fletcher in his headquarters at the Terminal, serene and powerful. He said, “I go out to the Florida to-morrow. I have finished my work here. Things are ready to be turned over to General Funston.” I told him not only of my admiration for his work during these last days, and what it entailed, but that more than all I admired his work of keeping peace in Mexican waters for fourteen months. A dozen incidents could have made for disturbance but for his calm judgment, his shrewd head, and the big, very human heart beating in his breast; and I said to him what I have repeated on many occasions, that it is due to Huerta, to Admiral Fletcher, and to Nelson that peace has been maintained during these long, difficult months. It was destined for an incident outside the radius of the power of these three to bring about the military occupation.
We spoke a few words of the old Indian, still wrestling on the heights. Admiral Fletcher ended by saying, in his quiet, convincing manner, “Doubtless when I get to Washington I will understand that point of view. Up to now I know it only from this end.”
I told him how I hated half-measures; how they were disastrous in every relation of life—family, civil, public, and international—and never had that been proven more clearly than here. Even he does not seem to know whether we have brought all this tremendous machinery to the shores of Mexico simply to retreat again, or whether we are to go on. As I went away, I could but tell him once more of my respect and affection for himself and my admiration for his achievements. I passed out of the room, with tears in my eyes. I had seen a great and good man at the end of a long and successful task. Later, other honors will come to him. Probably he will get the fleet. But never again will he, for fourteen long months, keep peace, with his battle-ships filling a rich and coveted harbor. When all is said and done, that is his greatest work.