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Our last dive on Cervera’s fleet is the cruiser Cristobal Colon, scuttled at the end of the battle by its crew. After opening the seacocks, they ran Colon up on the beach and abandoned ship as the Americans approached. Eager to salvage the newly built warship, the U.S. Navy tried to tow Colon off the rocks but, flooded and open to the sea, the cruiser sank in 100 feet of water. The sea is clear and calm, and as we descend down into the deep, the wreck of Colon is laid out before us, with gear on the decks and railings on ladders leading into the darkness of the cruiser’s hull. Flicking on our lights, we ca
Our boat pushes past the fortress of El Morro, following the track of Merrimac’s final run. Richmond Hobson published a book about the mission in 1899, and with it in hand, we’re following the course he plotted in its pages to where the wreck should lie. Discussions with our Cuban hosts have given us hope. There is indeed a wreck near the spot, but it is a battered hulk that harbor authorities blasted around 1976 to clear the shipping cha
With five Cuban divers, we suit up — myself, Mike and Warren— and drop into the dark green water at slack tide. Even so, the current is strong, and we hang on to the weighted line we dropped earlier and follow it down. The water is dirty with silt, and we ca
We continue on, under the overhang of the hull, past steel plating that dangles from the hull, and up onto the deck. I swim back to the stern and look into a tangle of debris. Lying in there is the ship’s steering gear, and it, too, looks as if it was hit by gunfire. Gouges and broken steel castings provide evidence of a tremendous blow, and I’m reminded, floating and kicking against the current, of Hobson’s account of how Merrimac’s stern was hit by gunfire and lost her ability to steer.
My excitement grows as we drift with the current along the deck, moving towards the bow. The decks of the wreck are laid out exactly as on Merrimac’s plans, with large coal holds, scuttles and ventilators, and the mounts for the ship’s two masts each lying between pairs of coal holds. This has to be Merrimac. I grin with my regulator clenched in my teeth and turn to Mike with a “high five” sign. The centrally located superstructure is badly mangled, the bridge smashed and gone, but, lying in the debris, I see a broken Champagne bottle. It’s too perfect, I think. We know that just before they headed in, Hobson and his crew drank a toast in a melodramatic moment, and I wonder if this is their bottle. It could have been tossed in years later from a passing ship, but just the same, I wonder.
Nearby are pairs of the ship’s davits used to launch Merrimac’s boats, again situated exactly where the plans indicate they should be. Shell holes in the decks are graphic evidence of heavy fire. One shell hole penetrates the deck on the starboard side of No. 3 hold, at an angle that suggests it was fired from an elevation off the ship’s starboard quarter, so presumably from El Morro just after Merrimac cleared the harbor entrance and was proceeding in.
Swimming forward, we find that the charges lowered into the water by the Cubans in 1976 have torn the hull down to below the waterline at the bow, scattering steel fragments along the seabed. And yet, buried in the mud, is the forward anchor. Concealed by silt with only one shank exposed, it is co
We can find no definitive evidence of damage from the scuttling charges, though a hole and damage to the port quarter conceivably could be related to the charge that Hobson placed there. The hull is set into the silt of the harbor bottom to a level above the waterline, and our limited time on each dive does not allow for a comprehensive survey of the side of the hull to see if there is blasting damage. But we do see other damage that testifies to Merrimac’s end — and that demonstrates dramatically why Merrimac’s crew, like the men in the Spanish ships who fought through flame and shot — deserve the honor of being called heroes. The decks are warped and twisted from the intense heat of the fires that burned through Merrimac’s coal for an hour. Reaching into the torn hull, I pull out chunks of coal that laboratory analysis later shows are “coked” as a result of the fire.
There is nothing pretty about war, and when the pomp and ceremony and the glamour are stripped away, what is left, so visibly on this wreck and on the shattered hulks of Cervera’s sunken fleet, is harsh evidence of the intensity of battle, the costs of war, and the strength of character and love of country that inspires people to sail into harm’s way to fight for a cause or to defend what they hold dear. As we surface from the muddy grave of Merrimac, I think of how raw and untouched this undersea battlefield is compared to the museum-like setting of San Juan Hill and its cleaned-up, memorialized and glorified view of war.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HITLER’S ROCKETS
More than 400 feet beneath the Harz Mountains of Germany, we trudge through darkness, climbing over fallen rock and twisted metal, splashing through pools of stagnant scummy water. The darkness is as thick and oppressive as the silence that fills the tu
Ahead of us lie 12 miles of tu