The Hobbits of Flores: An Update

Lian Bua -- the cave on Flores Island where the Hobbit fossils were unearthed

In January, we reviewed Mike Morwood and Penny van Oosterzee’s A New Human, subtitled “The Startling Discovery and Strange Story of the ‘Hobbits’ of Flores Indonesia.” (The controversy engendered by this amazing new discovery was further updated in Hobbit Update and Hobbit as a Separate Species: Update.)

Now, additional evidence accumulates. The “Hobbit” (Homo floresiensis) is indeed a new human species, according to a statistical analysis of “Flo”, an especially complete fossil skeleton of the diminutive hominids, reported in Science Daily and via EurekAlert!. The conclusion? According to Dr. Karen Baab, one of the authors of the study, “attempts to dismiss the hobbits as pathological people have failed repeatedly because the medical diagnoses of dwarfing syndromes and microcephaly bear no resemblance to the unique anatomy of Homo floresiensis.”

Red Cosmos

The Space Review features a brief review of Red Cosmos, a new biography of Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, father of Soviet rocketry and visionary space scientist.

My-Oh-Myopia: The Dog in Hindsight

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Steven Pinker offers Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective, a review of What the Dog Saw– and Other Adventures.

Justinian’s Flea

With all the contemporary interest in the H1N1 flu strain and incessant discussion of the risks and likelihood of global pandemics, William Rosen’s delightful, eclectic and far-ranging Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire would seem to be of considerable interest to a broader readership. But a quick perusal of customer reviews on Amazon.com might dissuade you from giving this book a second thought. While the work appears to engender a radical divergence of opinion running the gamut from adoration to revulsion, it is much disparaged in a number of comments — most frequently for the sin of digression. But this admitted tendency to wander is in truth an integral part of the book’s charm, far more virtue than vice, as Rosen meanders across a wide landscape of interrelated topics from architecture through epidemiology and politics to zoology.

Despite a few minor flaws, I found the book richly rewarding and provocative.

If I were to recommend one book and one book only on this intriguing topic, it would be William McNeill’s profoundly interesting Plagues and Peoples, which remains a classic in the field. But Rosen’s Justinian’s Flea would make an excellent companion book, and constitutes an intriguing diversion in its own right.

A Brief Excerpt: Origins

“The scholars and scientists who have spent their lives searching for the birthplace of bubonic plague tend to start their investigations in the present, ‘walking back the cat’ as cleverly as they can. The modern world has literally dozens of basins where the disease is chronic in animal populations, but only three are thought to be more than a century or so in age, and they match up with Devignat’s three variant strains of Y. pestis. Given the fact that, of all the players in the drama – bacterium, flea, rat, and human – Y. pestis is by far the newest, it seems certain that it evolved in one of those three locales: the Himalayan foothills, the Great Steppe reaching west from China, or the Great Lakes of East Africa.

“The demographer J.C. Russell was, for many years, the most passionate advocate of a Great Steppe origin, a view that still has adherents today. Russell’s argument is fairly weak, however, given the lack of any real evidence for plague in the extensive prairie that runs from Mongolia to the Ukraine until the year 610 and not really very much at all until the second great pandemic that devastated Europe in the fourteenth century. Choosing between India and Africa is more difficult; Pauline Allen argued persuasively for an Indian origin, citing the migration of R. rattus westward as a stowaway in uncounted thousands of cargo ships sailing back and forth between Ethiopia and India. However, the historian Peter Sarris rightly observes that India is much closer to, and had significantly greater contact with China, than with the Mediterranean, yet bubonic plague appeared in China at least sixty years later than it did in Alexandria. Sarris is cautious about giving too much weight to this, since the sea routes between Ethiopia and India are far more direct than the overland routes connecting India with China. However, Persia also encountered the plague after Alexandria and Constantinople, and stands squarely astride the land route between the former cities and China. If India were truly the demon’s birthplace, it was a rather meandering demon, one that originated in India, spread to Africa and China, and then bypassed Persia on the way to the Mediterranean.

“Yet another theory holds that the origins of the plague were in Pharaonic Egypt, when the rat flea X. cheopsis jumped from its favored species, Avicanthis niloticus, the Nile rat, to R. rattus, the immigrant species from India. Among the odder hypotheses about the origins of the disease is the one that appears in Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe’s Our Place in the Cosmos, which posits an extraterrestrial birthplace for the plague, whose periodicity is best explained by such activities as sunspots. More persuasive, even though lacking the sophistication of a modern epidemiologist, is the contemporary chronicler Evagrius Scholasticus, who records that the disease ‘took its rise from Aethiopia, as is now reported, and made a circuit of the whole world in succession . . . .’

“(One bit of inferential data supporting an African genesis fro the plague is offered by David Keys’s examination of the four great sixth-century East African port cities – Opone, Essina, Toniki, and Rhapta, all now vanished – which were the ancient world’s largest suppliers of ivory, sending up to fifty tons of the precious stuff, the product of five thousand elephants, up the Nile every year. If the plague started in East Africa, he reasoned, one would certainly see an effect in ivory production, and so he did. From the years 400-540, 120 major ivory artworks [out of an estimated 400,000 made] survive; from 540-700, only 6 survive.)

“If the demon were born in the fertile African valleys between Lake Tana in the north and Lake Rudolf in the south, lands that are to new species what Iowa is to corn, it would have had its choice of northward routes aboard its flea/rat hosts, either via the Red Sea, or up the Nile, past the point, at Khartoum, where the Blue Nile and White Nile combine, past the six cataracts that separate Upper Egypt from Lower, and north to Pelusium, Alexandria, and the Mediterranean.

“As with much else, the Mediterranean is the key to understanding the unique status of Y. pestis, and the disease it carried. Bacterial pathogens had been afflicting humanity for tens of thousands of years before the sixth-century arrival of those bubo-ridden corpses at the mouth of the Nile. But none of them ever swept across what amounted to the entire known world, ending tens of millions of lives, and stopping tens of millions more from ever being born. The reason, simply put, was a mismatch of speed.

“Until the arrival of the demon at the mouth of the Nile, at Pelusium, the disease of civilization had spread at roughly the same pace as civilization itself. Local populations could and did grow, even creating empires of many thousands of square miles – Akkadian, Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Persian – but the pace at which their merchants and armies traveled was, in general, slow enough to place a brake on the spread of disease. Like a fire, any virulent pathogen would either be tamed, or would consume all available fuel but it could not sustain itself for long. Overland trade was so slow until early modern times that the only reliable way to spread a new disease faster than coevolutionary adaptation was by water, either an inland sea or rivers.

“It was, therefore, probably inevitable that the first pandemic would strike a Mediterranean civilization, rather than a Mesopotamian or Chinese one. The great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote floridly, though accurately, ‘Of all the features of that wonderful human structure [i.e., the Roman Empire], the most striking, and also the most essential, was its Mediterranean character. . . . In the full sense of the term, Mare Nostrum was the vehicle of ideas, and religions, and merchandise.’ A more mundane look at the enormous advantage in time and money of moving goods by water than land – it cost less to ship a bushel of wheat from Palestine to Spain than to send it seventy-five miles by oxcart – suggests not merely the critical character of the inland sea, but also the decisive importance of inland waterways. Egypt was the imperial granary for five centuries not merely because of its farms’ productivity, but their location: none of its cultivated land was far from either the Nile or a canal.

“In the year 540, at the terminus of the ancient world’s greatest riverine complex, the delta of the Nile awaited the arrival of a conqueror greater than Alexander himself.”

Hope for Animals and Their World

Lord Howe Island Stick Insect (Australian Museum)

The September 2009 Discover magazine reprints a delightful short excerpt from Jane Goodall’s Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink in “Jane Goodall on the Lazarus Effect.” Included is a quick review of the revival of the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect (“they sleep at night, in pairs, the male with three of his legs protectively over the female beside him”), and the amazing story of the preservation of the diminutive Caspian horse.

Catching Fire

The London Telegraph reviews Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Sounds as though it might be a delightfully good read.

A Dog’s World

Cathleen Schine, writing in the New York Times, reviews Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know by Alexandra Horowitz. The Times thoughtfully includes an excerpt from Chapter 1 of the book.

Greenlike Spree: EnviroChic

“During the past few years, one book after another has organized itself around some nouveau-Thoreauvian conceit. This might consist of spending a month eating only food grown in an urban back yard, as in ‘Farm City’ (2009), or a year eating food produced on a gentleman’s farm, as in ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’ (2007). It might involve driving across the country on used cooking oil, as in ‘Greasy Rider’ (2008), or giving up fossil fuels for goats, as in ‘Farewell, My Subaru’ (2008).

“All of these stunts can be seen as responses to the same difficulty. Owing to a combination of factors—population growth, greenhouse-gas emissions, logging, overfishing, and, as Beavan points out, sheer self-indulgence—humanity is in the process of bringing about an ecological catastrophe of unparalleled scope and significance. Yet most people are in no mood to read about how screwed up they are. It’s a bummer. If you’re the National Academy of Sciences or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the Pope or Al Gore, you can try to fight this with yet another multivolume report or encyclical. If not, you’d better get a gimmick.”

Writing in, of all places, The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert examines the pretensions of EnviroChic as represented by Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man in“Green Like Me”.

Napoleon Aboard Bellerophon

Napoleon as Emperor

(From The War of All the Oceans by Roy and Lesley Adkins)

With Napoleon a captive aboard the Bellerophon at Brixham on Torbay after his final defeat at Waterloo, The Times of London published the following letter on July 26, 1815:

“What is to be done with him? Is he after all his crimes to be suffered to go unpunished; or in what way is he to be brought to justice? . . . What punishment can be just, if the condemning him to death be cruel? He has, for a long succession of years, deluged Europe in blood, to gratify his own mad vanity, his insatiable and furious ambition. It is calculated, that every minute he has reigned, has cost the life of a human being. He has desolated the earth in its fairest portions. He has not only darkened the palace and the crowded mart with terror and dismay, but he has carried unutterable distress into cottage, and the mountain solitude.”

The Star Spangled Banner

The Star Spangled Banner -- A flag of 15 stars and 15 stripes adopted in 1794

A brief excerpt from Roy & Lesley Adkins’ superb The War for All the Oceans: From Nelson at the Nile to Napoleon at Waterloo, concluding their discussion of the British attack upon Washington and Baltimore in the War of 1812:

“Francis Scott Key became famous for having observed the bombardment [of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry]. He was a lawyer who worked in Georgetown, a small settlement adjacent to Washington. At the time of the attack on the capital he was a volunteer in the light artillery, and he found out that his friend Dr. William Beane had been taken prisoner by the British. Beane was a physician at Upper Marlborough and had himself been involved in capturing marauding British stragglers from the army. Because it was feared that Beane might be hanged, President Madison gave his approval for Key to go to Baltimore on board a vessel (the Minden) that was used as a flag of truce. He was accompanied by John Skinner, the American agent for prisoner exchanges, and the pair had caught up with the British fleet at the mouth of the Potomac, preparing for the expedition against Baltimore.

“Because of the kindness shown to the wounded British prisoners, it was agreed that Beane could be released, but for the time being they all had to stay on board a frigate in case they leaked news of the plan of attack. Once the fleet neared Baltimore they were allowed to return to the Minden, with a guard of marines, from where they witnessed the bombardment. The previous year two new flags had been commissioned for Fort McHenry, including one that measured 30 by 40 feet with fifteen stars and eight red and seven white stripes (the official United states flag authorised in the Flag Act of 1794). As the three Americans watched they had no idea whether or not the town had surrendered, but in the morning the smaller flag was still flying over the fort, and as the British left, it was replaced by the huge one that so impressed Barrett. It survives today in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington.

“During the assault Key began to jot down a poem, which he finished when back at Baltimore. The red glare of the rockets and the bombs bursting in the air of the first verse refer to the bombardment. Copies were printed in the Baltimore Patriot newspaper on 20 September, with an editorial comment that the song ‘is destined long to outlast the occasion and outlive the impulse which produced it.’ It was sung to the tune of ‘To Anachreon in Heaven’, a British drinking song, and was adopted as the national anthem in 1931.”

(For more information on the flag itself, see “The Star Spangled Banner, the 15 Star Flag” at USFlag.org.)

The Dodo . . . and Moa

The Dodo of Mauritius (Raphus cucullatus), extinct since c. 1681 (Vanished Species)

A new discovery reported in today’s Science Daily suggests that the Araliaceae tree of New Zealand has developed an elaborate camouflage defense that varies depending upon the age of the tree. Most intriguing is the credible hypothesis that this camouflage protection evolved specifically to discourage predation by the Moa, the large flightless bird driven to extinction by Maori hunting 750 years ago.

The discovery brings to mind the marvelous tale of the dodo and the tambalacoque tree related by Stephen Jay Gould in his exquisite book of natural history essays, The Panda’s Thumb, nearly thirty years ago:

“. . . the dodo stands alone, the first recorded extinction of our era. The dodo, a giant flightless pigeon (twenty-five pounds or more in weight), lived in fair abundance on the island of Mauritius. Within 200 years of its discovery in the fifteenth century, it had been wiped out – by men who prized its tasty eggs and by the hogs that early sailors had transported to Mauritius. No living dodos have been seen since 1681.

“In August, 1977, Stanley A. Temple, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, reported the following remarkable story (but see postscript for a subsequent challenge). He, and others before him, had noted that a large tree, Calvaria major, seemed to be near the verge of extinction on Mauritius. In 1973, he could find only thirteen ‘old, overmature, and dying trees’ in the remnant native forests. Experienced Mauritian foresters estimated the trees’ ages at more than 300 years. These trees produce well-formed, apparently fertile seeds each year, but none germinate and no young plants are known. Attempts to induce germination in the controlled and favorable climate of a nursery have failed. Yet Calvaria was once common on Mauritius: old forestry records indicate that it had been lumbered extensively.

“Calvaria’s large fruits, about two inches in diameter, consist of a seed enclosed in a hard pit nearly half an inch thick. This pit is surrounded by a layer of pulpy, succulent material covered by a thin outer skin. Temple concluded that Calvaria seeds fail to germinate because the thick pit ‘mechanically resists the expansion of the embryo within.’ How, then, did it germinate in previous centuries?

“Temple put two facts together. Early explorers reported that the dodo fed on fruits and seeds of large forest trees; in fact, fossil Calvaria pits have been found among skeletal remains of the dodo. The dodo had a strong gizzard filled with large stones that could crush tough bits of food. Secondly, the age of surviving Calvaria trees matches the demise of the dodo. None has sprouted since the dodo disappeared almost 300 years ago.

“Temple therefore argues that Calvaria evolved its unusually thick pit as an adaptation to resist destruction by crushing in a dodo’s gizzard. But, in doing so, they became dependent upon dodos for their own reproduction. Tit for tat. A pit thick enough to survive in a dodo’s gizzard is a pit too thick for an embryo to burst by its own resources. Thus, the gizzard that once threatened the seed had become its necessary accomplice. The thick pit must be abraded and scratched before it can germinate.

“Several small animals eat the fruit of Calvaria today, but they merely nibble away the succulent middle and leave the internal pit untouched. The dodo was big enough to swallow the fruit whole. After consuming the middle, dodos would have abraded the pit in their gizzards before regurgitating it or passing it in their feces. Temple cites many analogous cases of greatly increased germination rates for seeds after passage through the digestive tracts of various animals.

“Temple then tried to estimate the crushing force of a dodo’s gizzard by making a plot of body weight versus force generated by the gizzard in several modern birds. Extrapolating the curve up to a dodo’s size, he estimates that Calvaria pits were thick enough to resist crushing; in fact, the thickest pits could not be crushed until they had been reduced nearly 30 percent by abrasion. Dodos might well have regurgitated the pits or passed them along before subjecting them to such an extended treatment. Temple took turkeys – the closest modern analogue to dodos – and force-fed them Calvaria pits, one at a time. Seven of the seventeen pits were crushed by the turkey’s gizzard, but the other ten were regurgitated or passed in feces after considerable abrasion. Temple planted these seeds and three of them germinated. He writes: ‘These may well have been the first Calvaria seeds to germinate in more than 300 years.’ Calvaria can probably be saved from the brink of extinction by the propagation of artificially abraded seeds. For once, an astute observation, combined with imaginative thought and experiment, may lead to preservation rather than destruction.”

It’s a truly wonderful story. But note that Gould adds a postscript which elaborates upon the ensuing controversy – see The Panda’s Thumb for more details – and then concludes: “The debate between Owadally and Temple is too close to call at the moment. I’m rooting for Temple, but if Owadally’s fourth point is correct, then the dodo hypothesis will become, in Thomas Henry huxley’s inimitable words, ‘a beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact.’”

Remember the Maine!

The Battleship USS Maine, 1898

Craig L. Symonds’ Decision At Sea: Five Naval Battles That Shaped American History is a superb little volume of considerable substance, which we will briefly review in the very near future. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt that will give you some notion of the work, Symonds’ description of the events leading up to the Spanish-American War and the Battle of Manila Bay:

“The sequence of events that brought Dewey’s squadron to Manila Bay at midnight on April 30, 1898, had begun a quarter of a century earlier and half a world away. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the enormous Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere, an expanse of territory that dwarfed the Roman Empire at its height, had all but disappeared. One by one, pieces of that empire had been stripped away as they secured their independence, cheered on by the Americans who saw in these revolutions Latin versions of their own struggle to break free of a colonial power. For the Spanish it was a cruel and painful process. It was a Spanish tradition that their American empire had been a gift from God for the Reconquista, the military campaign that in 1492 had driven the force of Islam from their toehold in Europe. Was it mere coincidence that in the very year of that victory Christopher Columbus had sailed under Spanish colors to ‘discover’ the New World? Yet four hundred years later the gift was all but gone. Of all that vast territory, only Cuba and nearby Puerto Rico were left. Though Cuba was a profitable colony, it was more for pride than greed that the Spanish clung to it, dubbing it ‘the Ever-Faithful Isle’ and resisting sporadic revolutionary outbreaks.

“American interest in Cuba was more than a century old. Up to the time of the Civil War, one element of that concern had been the ambition of southerners to acquire Cuba as a new slave state to balance the growing power of the free states in the North. In 1848, at the end of the war with Mexico, President Polk had tried to buy the island from Spain for $100 million, but Spain was not interested. Another element of the American concern was strategic; the location of Cuba, corking as it did the bottle of the Gulf of Mexico, mad it of great interest to American strategic planners. In 1854 these twin interests combined when, in Ostend, Belgium, a trio of American diplomats announced what amounted to an ultimatum. They declared that Cuba was a natural part of the United States and that if Spain did not agree to sell it, the United States would be justified in seizing it. ‘The Union can never enjoy repose,’ these Americans declared, ‘nor possess reliable security, as long as Cuba is not embraced within its boundaries.’ The United States subsequently disavowed the Ostend Manifesto, however, and southern hopes for a slave state in Cuba died with the Civil War.

“While the United States struggled through the Reconstruction years after the Civil War, Spain survived a long and wasting revolution in Cuba that was subsequently named the Ten Years’ War (1868-78). When not distracted by their own internal problems, Americans watched with interest, and often with open sympathy, for the rebel cause. A few American citizens did more than sympathize. Motivated by ideology, by profit, or simply by the romance of it all, these sympathizers, known as filibusters, smuggled weapons to the insurrectos and even volunteered their own services. In the middle of the Ten Years’ War, in 1873, the Spanish navy stopped and searched a chartered steamer named Virginius that was headed for Cuba under the American flag. Its captain was a former US naval officer named Joseph Fry, the crew was a mixed group of Americans and Cubans, and the cargo consisted of arms that were certainly intended for the Cuban rebels. Though the men were unquestionably filibusters, it would have been hard to make an ironclad case against them, for their vessel was still on the high seas when it was intercepted. Nevertheless, the Spanish conducted a quick trial, condemned the officers and crew of the Virginius to death, and shot fifty-three of them before the protests of a British official halted the executions.

“It might have led to war. President Grant sought to make a statement of sorts by ordering a concentration of the US fleet at Key West, though there is no indication he intended any more than that. Instead, the US State Department obtained an apology from the Spanish, who also agreed to pay an indemnity. The fact that the United States was then wallowing in the worst financial crisis of the postwar years – the so-called Panic of ’73 – may have muted American outrage. Still, it was sobering to some when the attempted mobilization of the fleet betrayed the weakness of the US Navy in the 1870s. The monitors, called out of mothballs, were so crank and unseaworthy that they were a greater threat to their own crews than to any potential enemy. In short, the Virginius episode demonstrated that in 1873 the United States lacked the capability to express its outrage, even against a tired and fading empire such as Spain.

“That was no longer true in 1895, when a second round of revolutionary activity broke out in Cuba. By then, [Stephen B.] Luce had founded the [Naval] War College, [Alfred Thayer] Mahan had published his book [The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783], and the United States had begun building the steam-and-steel ships of the ‘New Navy.’ That very year, in fact, the United States launched the USS Olympia, the newest vessel of its expanding fleet. It was not that the United States had any particular opponent in mind when it constructed this ‘New Navy,’ just a vague sense that the time had come for the United States to possess a fleet worthy of a great nation. After all, the possession of modern weapons would give America options that were otherwise not available in a diplomatic crisis. A few skeptics noted that great-power status brought dangers as well as options, but they were largely ignored.

“The renewed insurrection in Cuba was led by the poet Jose Marti, who quickly became its first martyr, and by two gifted field generals, Antonio Maceo and Maximo Gomez, who focused their campaign on the sources of Spanish wealth in Cuba, especially the sugar mills and tobacco fields. By 1896, the scorched-earth policy of these rebel generals had caused so much damage to the Cuban economy that Spanish authorities turned to the ruthless Lieutenant General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau to bring order to the island. Weyler had served as a Spanish observer during the American Civil War and was a great admirer of William T. Sherman. He responded to the destructive tactics of the rebels by adopting a hard-line policy of his own designed to deprive the rebel armies of the wherewithal to continue the fight. In order to protect loyal Cubans from the rebels, Weyler relocated (or concentrated) them into armed camps, a policy remarkably similar to the ‘strategic hamlet’ program adopted by Americans during the Vietnam War seventy years later. Overcrowded and often unsanitary, these camps spawned both hunger and disease, and the term ‘concentration camp’ took on a very negative connotation. Outside the camps, the rebels took or destroyed whatever of value they could find that was unprotected. The Spanish controlled the cities and the harbors, the rebels controlled the countryside, and the people of Cuba suffered.

“Americans professed to be shocked by the brutality of the conflict. The major urban newspapers, especially the big New York dailies controlled by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, vied with one another to present horror stories of destruction and brutality. In almost every case, the Spanish were portrayed as the principal instigators of violence and the rebels as victimized patriots. A representative example is the report filed by a New York World correspondent in May 1896:

“‘The horrors of a barbarous struggle for the extermination of the native population are witnessed in all parts of the country. Blood on the roadsides, blood on the fields, blood on the doorsteps, blood, blood, blood! The old, the young, the weak, the crippled, all are butchered without mercy. There is scarcely a hamlet that has not witnessed the dreadful work. Is there no nation wise enough, brave enough to aid this smitten land?’

“Recognizing that Weyler’s tactics not only failed to suppress the rebellion but also produced bad publicity, Spain’s rulers dropped the reconcentrado policy and replaced Weyler with the moderate Ramon Blanco. It was too late. The momentum of outrage combined with Spain’s tendency to brush off US complaints, all of it fueled by the nearly hysterical popular press, had created a climate in which war became almost irresistible. Under these circumstances, another incident like the Virginius episode would very likely have far different consequences.

“Though the Spanish-American War is commonly associated with the presidency of William McKinley, who was elected in 1896 over the populist William Jennings Bryan, the new American president dreaded the prospect of war and found the mounting martial drumbeat a distraction from his primary goal of ensuring the continued prosperity of the nation’s business interests. Though his predecessor in the White House had suspended courtesy visits by US Navy warships to Cuban ports for fear of inciting a negative reaction, McKinley decided to renew them. In January he responded to a request from the US consul general in Havana, Fitzhugh Lee (Robert E. Lee’s nephew) to send the second-class battleship USS Maine to Havana Harbor.

“The Maine was America’s first ‘modern’ battleship, and as evidence of its transitional status, it incorporated a hodgepodge of design features. Like Perry’s Lawrence, it boasted a full set of masts and spars, though the sails for those spars were never delivered and throughout its short history it operated as a steam vessel. Like Buchanan’s Virginia (Merrimack), it was equipped with a forward ram, and like Worden’s Monitor, its main battery was housed in revolving armored gun turrets. But the Maine had a curiously unbalanced appearance. Its two main turrets were offset from the centerline: the forward turret overhung the starboard side, and the after turret was cantilevered over the port side. The idea was to allow the ten-inch guns of its main battery to fire both forward and aft, but the result was disharmonious, and only an especially proud captain ever would have called it a beautiful ship.

“Captain Charles Sigsbee was the Maine’s captain, and whether or not he thought his ship beautiful, he was very much aware of the sensitivity of his assignment. Even after bringing the Maine safely to anchor in Havana harbor at midmorning on January 25, 1898, he kept the ship on alert, with one-quarter of the crew on duty around the clock and two of the ship’s four boilers on line. Publicly, however, he carried on as if his presence in Havana Harbor were nothing more than a routine port visit. He greeted dignitaries on board and gave them tours of the ship; he allowed officers (though not the men) shore liberty; and Sigsbee himself attended a bullfight in Havana as the guest of Blanco’s deputy, Major General Julian Gonzalez Parrado. He later wrote that he ‘had but one wish’ and that was ‘to be friendly to the Spanish authorities as required by my orders.’

“Meanwhile, McKinley became the center of a new crisis when the Spanish minister in the United States, Enrique Dupuy de Lome, wrote an indiscreet private letter to a friend who happened to be the editor of a Havana newspaper. A worker in the editor’s office who was sympathetic to the rebels stole the letter and passed it on to others who made sure that it landed eventually on the desk of William Randolph Hearst. It was published on the front page of the New York Journal on February 9. In that missive de Lome referred to the new American president as ‘weak and a bidder for the admiration of the crowd.’ He was, de Lome concluded, a ‘common politician.’ It was a pretty astute analysis, but diplomats of foreign governments are not supposed to say such things. De Lome resigned and Spain apologized, but the damage had been done.

“Six days later the Maine blew up in Havana Harbor.”

Commodore Dewey's Flagship at the Battle of Manila, USS Olympia