ned standing showed that Admiral Sampson's
gunners found no difficulty in hitting a target ten feet by thirty at a
distance of more than a mile. The captain of the Spanish cruiser
_Vizcaya_ told Lieutenant Van Duzer of the battle-ship _Iowa_ that, at
the height of the naval engagement off the mouth of the harbor on July
3, his vessel was struck by a shell, on an average, once a second. He
spoke as if he had been greatly surprised by the extraordinary accuracy
of our gunners' fire; but if he had taken one look at that Morro
lighthouse before he ran out of the harbor he would have known what to
expect.

After examining the shattered barracks and the half-demolished
lighthouse, I walked on to the so-called "eastern battery," a strong
earthwork on the crest of the ridge about one hundred and fifty yards
from the castle. Here, in a wide trench behind a rampart of earth
strengthened with barrels of cement, I found four muzzle-loading iron
siege-guns of the last century, two modern mortars like the one that I
had seen on the skids near the head of the Estrella cove, one
smooth-bore cannon dated 1859, and two three-inch breech-loading rifles.
The eighteenth-century guns were no more formidable than those on the
roof of Morro, but the mortars and three-inch rifles were useful and
effective. It was a shell from one of these mortars that killed or
wounded eight sailors on the battle-ship _Texas_. One gun had been
dismounted in this battery, but all other damage to it by the fleet had
been repaired. Owing to the fact that its guns were in a wide trench,
six or eight feet below the level of the hilltop, it was extremely
difficult to hit them; and although Admiral Sampson repeatedly silenced
this battery by shelling the gunners out of it, he was never able to
destroy it.

The only other fortifications that I was able to find in the vicinity of
Morro Castle were two earthworks known respectively as the "western
battery" and the "Punta Gorda battery." The western battery, which was
situated on the crest of the hill opposite Morro, on the other side of
the harbor entrance, contained seven guns of various sizes and dates,
but only two of them were modern. The Punta Gorda battery, which
occupied a strong position on a bluff inside the harbor and behind the
Estrella cove, had only two guns, but both were modern and of high
power. In the three batteries--eastern, western, and Punta Gorda--there
were only eight pieces of artillery that wou