ocean, near the sail of the _Flying Dutchman_, and sent a column of
white spray thirty feet into the air. Then I understood what it all
meant. The _Wilmington_, was engaged in night gun practice. For half an
hour or more the war-ship threw solid shot and explosive shells into
that illuminated strip of green water, and the thunder of her cannon,
which could be heard all over the island, suggested to the startled
negro and Cuban population that the Spanish fleet had arrived and was
bombarding the city. Then the _Miantonomoh_ hung out another string of
colored lanterns, the uproar ceased, and the pallid, ghostly canvas of
the _Flying Dutchman_ suddenly vanished as the search-lights left it and
resumed their slow, sweeping exploration of the harbor, the channel, and
the open sea.

CHAPTER IV

WAR CORRESPONDENTS AND DESPATCH-BOATS

Few things impressed me more forcibly, in the course of my two weeks'
stay at Key West, than the costly, far-sighted, and far-reaching
preparations made by the great newspapers of the country to report the
war. There were in the city of Tampa, at the time of my arrival, nearly
one hundred war correspondents, who represented papers in all parts of
the United States, from New England to the Pacific coast, and who were
all expecting to go to Cuba with the army of invasion. Nearly every one
of the leading metropolitan journals had in Tampa and Key West a staff
of six or eight of its best men under the direction of a
war-correspondent-in-chief, while the Associated Press was represented
by a dozen or more reporters in Cuban waters, as well as by
correspondents in Havana, Key West, Tampa, Kingston, St. Thomas,
Port-au-Prince, and on the flagships of Admiral Sampson and Commodore
Schley. Every invention and device of applied science was brought into
requisition to facilitate the work of the reporters and to enable them
to get their work quickly to their home offices. The New York "Herald,"
for example, paid fifty dollars an hour for a special leased wire
between New York and Key West, and set up, in the latter place and in
Tampa, newly invented, long-distance phototelegraph instruments, by
means of which its artist in the field could transmit a finished picture
to the home office every twenty minutes.

In their efforts to get full and accurate news of every event at the
earliest possible moment, the war correspondents shrank from neither
hardship nor danger. A week or two before my arrival in