THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR. 262 the islands theLigera came upon an American torpedo boat which was watching the port. The twoships exchanged six or seven shots. One of them went through the funnel of the Ligera, which received no other damage. The United States ship then went off under full steam, and the Spaniards claimed a first success. Which was the American torpedoboat has never been officially stated. It is only certain that the dishing, one of the few torpedo craft attached to Sampson's fleet, ran intoKey West with her engines so badly damaged that she had to goto Norfolk for repairs. The official account of her injuries was that the young officer incharge had overstrained her engines by putting her to too high a speed. The Spaniards claimed that she had been disabled by the fire of the Ligera. The American account is the morelikely of the two to have been correct. TheLigera andher consorts at Cardenas showed later on that they could shoot with deadly accuracy at even so small a target as a torpedo boat;but, on the other hand, if the Cushing had shown any shot marks when she came into Key West, all the censorship in the world would not have prevented the enterprising local reporters from giving a full description of her injuries. The presumption is that she showed no such traces of Spanis'a shell fire, and the experience of even thebest-trainednavies goes to show thatnothing is easier than to disableby overwork thedelicate machineryofa torpedoboat's engineroom.

if he had forced the pass, he could not take possession of a city held by 50,000 regulars without the co-operation of a large land force; and though the newspapers talked gaily of an army being ready in a week or ten days, the men at the head of affairs knew that it would require a much longer time. Itis true that the Admiralmight have bombarded Havana;but to inflict any real injury on the place would have meant the expenditure of an enormous amount of valuable ammunition,which would take some time to replace, and, alter all, would give no result that could seriously affect the course of the war. To burn a number of houses, shops, and warehouseswouldnot make MarshalBlanco relinquish his hold upon Havana. In familiar phrase, Havana was not bombarded because " the game wasnot worththe candle."

The first exchange of fire between a Spanish and an American ship took place on Tuesday, April 26th, outside Cardenas. What exactly happened is not easy to say with certainty in the face of contradictory accounts. In anycase it was a very insignificant affair, only worth notingbecause in all wars a certainimportance attaches to the first exchange of shots,just as in the storyof the Franco-Germanwar one turns with some interest to the little skirmishbetween cavalry patrols outside the village inn at Niederbronn.

Amongst the Spanish ships in the Cuban ports were half a dozen little steel gunboats, each seventy-five feet long, andcarrying a small Nordenfeldtquick-firer and a Maximgun. The}-had been built in 1895 at Wivenhoe,in Essex, for patrol duty on the Cuban coasts. One of these, the Ligera, was at Cardenas. Outside the bay there is a perfect network of coralreefs, islands, and rocks, forming a natural breakwater extendingfor miles. Slipping in and out among Such was the bloodless skirmish of Cardenas. Next day there was a more serious pie work;for the growing feeling that the fleet should do something more than capture coasting craft, and the unreasonable outcry against Sampson's inactivity before Havana, made the Admiral decide to trvhis guns upon the seaward batteriesofMatanzas.