le to
handle promptly and satisfactorily the large quantity of supplies
brought there for the expedition. Naval authorities said that they had
to wait for the army, while army officers maintained that they were all
ready to start, but were stopped and delayed by reports of Spanish
war-ships brought in by scouting-vessels of the navy.

That there was unnecessary delay, as well as great confusion and
disorder, there seems to be no doubt. As one competent army officer said
to me, in terse but slangy English, "The fact of the matter is, they
simply got all balled up, and although they worked hard, they worked
without any definite, well-understood plan of operations."

The principal trouble seemed to be in the commissary and quartermaster's
departments. Many of the officers in these departments were young and
inexperienced; army supplies from the North came down in immense
quantities on two lines of railway and without proper invoices or bills
of lading; it was often utterly impossible to ascertain in which, out of
a hundred cars, certain articles of equipment or subsistence were to be
found; and there was a lack everywhere of cool, trained, experienced
supervision and direction. It was the business of some one somewhere to
see that every car-load of supplies shipped to Tampa was accompanied by
an invoice or bill of lading, so that the chief commissary at the point
of destination might know the exact nature, quantity, and car-location
of supplies brought by every train. Then, if he wanted twenty-five
thousand rations of hard bread or fifty thousand pounds of rice before
the cars had been unloaded, he would know exactly where and in what cars
to look for it. As it was, he could not tell, often, what car contained
it without making or ordering personal examination, and it was almost
impossible to know how much of any given commodity he had on hand in
trains that had not yet been unloaded or inspected. As the result of
this he had to telegraph to Jacksonville at the last moment before the
departure of the expedition for three or four hundred cases of baked
beans and forty or fifty thousand pounds of rice to be bought there in
open market and to be sent him in "rush shipment." It is more than
probable that there were beans and rice enough to meet all his wants in
unloaded trains at Tampa, but he had no clue to their car-location and
could not find them. Such a state of things, of course, is wholly
unnecessary, and it should not