HAPTER XV

THE CAPTURED CITY

We lay at anchor all Sunday night off the foot of the street known as
Calle Baja de la Marina, and early on Monday morning steamed up to the
most spacious and convenient pier in the city, made fast our lines, and
began to discharge cargo. The dock and warehouse facilities of Santiago
are fairly good. They are not so extensive as those of an American
seaport of equal importance, but so far as they go they leave little to
be desired. The pier at which the _State of Texas_ lay was spacious and
well built; an iron tramway ran from it to the customs warehouse, and,
with the help of one hundred stevedores, Mr. Warner, of Miss Barton's
staff, found it possible to unload and store from three hundred and
twenty-five to three hundred and fifty tons of foodstuffs per day. As
soon as the steamer had made fast her lines a great crowd of
forlorn-looking men and children, clothed in the loose, dirty
white-cotton shirts and trousers and battered straw hats which make up
the costume of the lower classes, assembled on the pier to stare at the
newcomers and watch the unloading of the ship. They were of all ages and
complexions, from coal-black, grizzle-headed old negroes leaning on
canes to half-starved and half-naked Cuban children, whose tallowy faces
and distended abdomens were unmistakable evidences of fever and famine.
They were not, as a rule, emaciated, nor did they seem to be in the
last stages of starvation; but the eagerness with which they crowded
about the open ports of the steamer, and watched the bags of beans,
rice, and corn-meal as they were brought out by the stevedores and
placed on the little flat-cars of the tramway, showed that at least they
were desperately hungry. Now and then a few beans, or a few grains of
rice, would escape from one of the bags through a small rip or tear, and
in an instant half a dozen little children would be scrambling for them,
collecting them carefully one by one, and putting them into their hats
or tying them up in their shirt-tails and the hems of their tattered
frocks. In one instance half a bushel or more of corn-meal escaped from
a torn bag and lay in a heap on the dirty pier. One of the prowling
Cuban boys espied it, gathered up a hatful of it, and then looked around
for something in which he could put the remainder. Failing to see
anything that could be utilized as a receptacle, he seemed for a moment
to be in despair; but presently a bright thought fl