my hands, and I had great aid from
Captain McCormick, who had been acting with me as adjutant-general of
the brigade. I had profited by my experience coming down, and as Dr.
Church knew his work well, although he was very sick, we kept the ship
in such good sanitary condition, that we were one of the very few
organizations allowed to land at Montauk immediately upon our arrival.

Soon after leaving port the captain of the ship notified me that his
stokers and engineers were insubordinate and drunken, due, he thought,
to liquor which my men had given them. I at once started a search of
the ship, explaining to the men that they could not keep the liquor;
that if they surrendered whatever they had to me I should return it to
them when we went ashore; and that meanwhile I would allow the sick to
drink when they really needed it; but that if they did not give the
liquor to me of their own accord I would throw it overboard. About
seventy flasks and bottles were handed to me, and I found and threw
overboard about twenty. This at once put a stop to all drunkenness.
The stokers and engineers were sullen and half mutinous, so I sent a
detail of my men down to watch them and see that they did their work
under the orders of the chief engineer; and we reduced them to
obedience in short order. I could easily have drawn from the regiment
sufficient skilled men to fill every position in the entire ship's
crew, from captain to stoker.

We were very much crowded on board the ship, but rather better off
than on the Yucatan, so far as the men were concerned, which was the
important point. All the officers except General Wheeler slept in a
kind of improvised shed, not unlike a chicken coop with bunks, on the
aftermost part of the upper deck. The water was bad--some of it very
bad. There was no ice. The canned beef proved practically uneatable,
as we knew would be the case. There were not enough vegetables. We did
not have enough disinfectants, and there was no provision whatever for
a hospital or for isolating the sick; we simply put them on one
portion of one deck. If, as so many of the high authorities had
insisted, there had really been a yellow-fever epidemic, and if it had
broken out on shipboard, the condition would have been frightful; but
there was no yellow-fever epidemic. Three of our men had been kept
behind as suspects, all three suffering simply from malarial fever.
One of them, Lutz, a particularly good soldier, died; anothe