vasion, when it finally left Tampa Bay for the Cuban
coast, consisted of 803 officers and 14,935 enlisted men.[2] With its
animals and equipment it filled thirty-five transports. It comprised (in
addition to regular infantry) four batteries of light field-artillery,
two batteries of heavy siege-guns, a battalion of engineers, a
detachment of the Signal Corps, twelve squadrons of dismounted cavalry,
and one squadron of cavalry with horses. All of the troops were regulars
with the exception of three regiments, namely, the First Cavalry (Rough
Riders, dismounted), the Seventy-first New York, and the Second
Massachusetts. The command was well supplied with food and ammunition,
but its facilities for land transportation were inadequate; its
equipment, in the shape of clothing and tentage, was not adapted to a
tropical climate in the rainy season; it carried no reserve medical
stores, and it had no small boats suitable for use in disembarkation or
in landing supplies on an unsheltered coast. Some of these deficiencies
in equipment were due, apparently, to lack of prevision, others to lack
of experience in tropical campaigning, and the rest to lack of water
transportation from Tampa to the Cuban coast; but all were as
unnecessary as they afterward proved to be unfortunate.

When the army of invasion sailed, the Red Cross steamer _State of
Texas_, laden with fourteen hundred tons of food and medical supplies,
lay at anchor in Tampa Bay, awaiting the return of Miss Barton and a
part of her staff from Washington. As soon as they arrived, the steamer
proceeded to Key West, and on the morning of Monday, June 20, after a
brief consultation with Commodore Remey, we sailed from that port for
Santiago de Cuba. In the group assembled on the pier to bid us good-by
were United States Marshal Horr; Mr. Hyatt, chairman of the local Red
Cross committee; Mr. White, correspondent of the Chicago "Record," whose
wife was going with us as a Red Cross worker; and Mrs. Porter, wife of
the President's secretary, who had come with Miss Barton from Washington
to Key West in order to show her interest in and sympathy with the work
in which the Red Cross is engaged. About ten o'clock the steamer's lines
were cast off, the gang-plank was drawn ashore, the screw began to churn
the green water into boiling foam astern, and, amid shouted good-bys and
the waving of handkerchiefs from the pier, we moved slowly out into the
stream, dipped our ensign to the _Lan