er on the bastion roof where they stood or in the vaults of the
castle below; there were no rammers or spongers on or about the
gun-platforms, where they would naturally have been left when the guns
were abandoned; and there was nothing whatever to show that they had
been fired in fifty years. But it could have made little difference to
the blockading fleet whether they were fired or not. They were hardly
more formidable than the "crakys of war" used by Edward III against the
French at the battle of Crecy. As for the mortars, they were fit only
for a museum of antiquities, or a collection of obsolete implements of
war like that in the Tower of London. I hope that Secretary Alger or
Secretary Long will have "El Manticora" and "El Cometa" brought to the
United States and placed at the main entrance of the War Department or
the Navy Department as curiosities, as fine specimens of artistic bronze
casting, and as trophies of the Santiago campaign.

When I had finished copying the inscriptions on the cannon and the
mortars, I went down into the interior of the castle to examine some
pictures and inscriptions that I had noticed on the walls of a chamber
in the second story, which had been used, apparently, as a guard-room
or barrack. It was a large, rectangular, windowless apartment, with a
wide door, a vaulted ceiling, and smooth stone walls which had been
covered with plaster and whitewashed. Among the Spanish soldiers who had
occupied this room there was evidently an amateur artist of no mean
ability, who had amused himself in his hours of leisure by drawing
pictures and caricatures on the whitewashed walls. On the left of the
door, at a height of five or six feet, was a life-sized and very
cleverly executed sketch of a Spaniard in a wide sombrero, reading a
Havana newspaper. His eyes and mouth were wide open, as if he were
amazed and shocked beyond measure by the news of some terrible calamity,
and his attitude, as well as the horror-stricken expression of his
elongated face, seemed to indicate that, at the very least, he had just
found in the paper an announcement of the sudden and violent death of
all his family. Below, in quotation-marks, were the words:!!! Que
BARBARIDAD.!!! Han apresado UN VIVERO." ("What BARBARITY!!! They have
captured A FISHING-SMACK!!!")

This is evidently a humorous sneer at the trifling value of the prizes
taken by the vessels of our blockading fleet off Havana in the early
days of the war. But