Never an Empire Read Free

Within minutes, what was left of the United States battleship Maine , was sinking to the bottom of the harbour and two hundred and twenty men were dead.
    The explosion had ripped apart the forward half of the vessel which housed the crew’s quarters where the majority of the sailors were off duty: resting or asleep. All died instantly. The officers’ quarters were housed in the rear half of the ship so most survived including the captain, Charles Sigsbee, who, as soon as he was able, sent the news of the disaster to Captain James Forsythe, Commander of the Naval Station at Key West, Florida.
    Forsythe forwarded the news to Washington, to the secretary of the Navy, John Davis Long.
    Sigsbee wires, Tell Admiral Maine blown up and destroyed. Send light House Tenders. Many killed and wounded …
    The Maine was only the second battleship to be commissioned for the US Navy and had been based on the latest of European naval design; her main armament resembled that used in the Royal Navy’s ironclad, Inflexible . She had been built as part of America’s response to the increase of foreign sea power in the Atlantic, especially that of the Brazilian battleship Riachuelo . The chairman of the Naval Affairs House Committee, Hilary A. Herbert, said of said ship to Congress, ‘if the whole of this old navy of ours were drawn up in mid-ocean against the Riachuelo it is doubtful if a single vessel bearing the American flag would get back to port’. However, as navies on both sides of the Atlantic rapidly added new ships to their fleets design also rapidly evolved and the Maine proved to be obsolete as a fighting force almost as soon as she was launched. Nonetheless she had been sent to Havana to ‘protect US interests’. Quite what form this protection might take if the US considered its interests threatened was unclear. Maine carried no marines who could be sent ashore as some sort of ground force and its armaments were of a calibre that could easily pound to fragments any parts of Havana that it chose to shoot at, but she could do little else.
    Whatever its practical purpose, however, the uninvited and unwelcome arrival of the Maine in Havana harbour could easily have been be interpreted by the Spanish as a deliberate attempt to exacerbate the already strained relations with America; almost an act of deliberate aggression. However, the Spanish were given no time to formulate their official response as the Maine went down on the evening of the day it arrived.
    To the American public, when the horrific news was broken to them, the sinking of their battleship and massacre of its crew could just as easily be interpreted as a dastardly act of aggression by the Spanish military against a ship doing no more than legitimately protecting US interests, what made it worse was that this had no military action but an underhand and despicable act of cowardice. Unable or afraid to face the might of the ship, the Maine had been sunk by a mine placed secretly alongside it while its sailors slept. At least was how William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer set about portraying the disaster. Sales of both newspapers shot up and the story, once launched, ran and ran.
    In both newspapers headline after headline deliberately tried to create an unstoppable public outcry for war with Spain. No matter to these two media moguls that their coverage was hysterical, unbalanced, and mostly inaccurate, including downright falsehoods, because neither paper cared whether the Spanish had, in truth, been responsible for the sinking or not. What they did care about was selling newspapers and a war with Spain would sell tens of thousands more of them. So the reporters, columnists, and illustrators of the Journal and the World went about their business. There could not be the slightest doubt as to who had sunk the Maine , could there? It was the cowardly Spanish. This truth, which both papers held to be self-evident, they blazoned forth to