LITERATURE AND LIFE
SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR
BY
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
CERTAIN summers ago our cruisers, the St. Louis and the Harvard, arrivedat Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with sixteen or seventeen hundred Spanishprisoners from Santiago de Cuba. They were partly soldiers of the landforces picked up by our troops in the fights before the city, but by farthe greater part were sailors and marines from Cervera’s ill-fated fleet.I have not much stomach for war, but the poetry of the fact I have statedmade a very potent appeal to me on my literary side, and I did not holdout against it longer than to let the St. Louis get away with Cervera toAnnapolis, when only her less dignified captives remained with those ofthe Harvard to feed either the vainglory or the pensive curiosity of thespectator. Then I went over from our summer colony to Kittery Point, andgot a boat, and sailed out to have a look at these subordinate enemies inthe first hours of their imprisonment.
I.
It was an afternoon of the brilliancy known only to an afternoon of theAmerican summer, and the water of the swift Piscataqua River glittered inthe sun with a really incomparable brilliancy. But nothing could lightup the great monster of a ship, painted the dismal lead-color which ourWhite Squadrons put on with the outbreak of the war, and she lay sullenin the stream with a look of ponderous repose, to which the activities ofthe coaling-barges at her side, and of the sailors washing her decks,seemed quite unrelated. A long gun forward and a long gun aft threatenedthe fleet of launches, tugs, dories, and cat-boats which fluttered abouther, but the Harvard looked tired and bored, and seemed as if asleep.She had, in fact, finished her mission. The captives whom death hadreleased had been carried out and sunk in the sea; those who survived toa further imprisonment had all been taken to the pretty island a milefarther up in the river, where the tide rushes back and forth through theNarrows like a torrent. Its defiant rapidity has won it there thegraphic name of Pull-and-be-Damned; and we could only hope to reach theisland by a series of skilful tacks, which should humor both the wind andthe tide, both dead against us. Our boatman, one of those shore NewEnglanders who are born with a knowledge of sailing, was easily master ofthe art of this, but it took time, and gave me more than the leisure Iwanted for trying to see the shore with the strange eyes of the captiveswho had just looked upon it. It was beautiful, I had to own, even in myquality of exile and prisoner. The meadows and the orchards came down tothe water, or, where the wandering line of the land was broken and liftedin black fronts of rock, they crept to the edge of the cliff and peeredover it. A summer hotel stretched its verandas along a lovely level;everywhere in clovery hollows and on breezy knolls were gray old farm-housesand summer cottages—like weather-beaten birds’ nests, and likefreshly painted marten-boxes; but all of a cold New England neatnesswhich made me homesick for my malodorous Spanish fishing-village,shambling down in stony lanes to the warm tides of my native seas. Here,every place looked as if it had been newly scrubbed with soap and water,and rubbed down with a coarse towel, and was of an antipatheticalertness. The sweet, keen breeze made me shiver, and the norther