266 THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR.

stated that some projectiles had fallen into the city ; these must have been shells intended for Punta Gorda,but aimed fa/ toohigh. A subsequent report said that little or no injury had been done to the works; and as for losses, the only casualty was the death of a mule, unfortunately hit by a shot in the rear of one of the batteries. This story of the" sad death of a mule at Matanzas" was probably not meant to be takenseriously. It was a playful satire on the wildly-exaggeratedaccountsof the bombardment circulatedby the more sensational newspapers in the United States. Some of these werethe work of pure imagination. It so happened that only one of the numerous " press boats" was with the squadron when Matanzas was attacked. All the rest wereoff Havana,for Admiral Sampson had given no hint of his intentions. But the boat belonging to the New York Herald followed the flagship; its correspondentssaw the fight. Then the little steamer ranback to Key West through some veryrough weather,for in the eveningthere was a sudden gale. Soon after midnight the news was on the wires for New York. The Heraldhad next day the satisfaction of publishing the only complete and authentic narrative of the affair. Some of its rivals had, it is true, wonderfulstories of the bombardment;but they were highly coloured romances based on a small foundation of fact gleaned from telegraph operators, who could not help talking about the great news from Cuba.

He had silenced the outlying batteries,and was well satisfied with the conduct of his crews.

The bombardment showed that the gun practiceof theUnited States ships wasexcellent that of the Spanish artillerymen hopelessly bad. But onlya few days after,the Americans suffered severe loss through presuming that all Spanish gunners would shoot as wildly as those at Matanzas. As to the damage done, the inner forts were, of course, intact. They had not evenbeen in action. The damage done to the earthwork batteries at the harbour mouth was probably of a kind that could be easily made good. Only about sixty heavy shells had been fired from the fleet, the Spaniards replying with about half that number. Our own experience at Alexandria showed that amuch heavier and more prolonged bombardment does not suffice to demolish beyond repair even badly-constructed batteries. The results of the practice cannot be judged from the ships, unless large allowances are madefor misleading impressions. Thus a shell bursting a few feet in front of the parapetof a battery will send up a tremendous cloud of dust and sand, and an onlooker from the ship will think he has seen a lot of the breastwork itself blown into the air, though actually it has not been touched. Again, even when the shell bursts fairly on the breastwork, the earthit displaces mostly falls back into very nearlyits originalposition. In experiments at Lydd against earthwork batteries, it has been found that the only result of a prolonged bombardmentis to reduce to a moderate extent the height of the crest of the parapet, and to bring down the general level of its outer slope.

The fact that as the Americanships were-withdrawing a last shot was fired from RubalCaya shows that the batteries were not demolished. Apparently the chief damage done was to the unfinished work at Punta Gorda, on which the New York directed ahot fire, the destruction of thisbattery being the object that Sampson had chiefly in view. Altogether, the attack on the Matanzas batteries, though not an important affair, was very encouraging to the United .States. It was a welcome change from the capturesof tramp steamersandcoastingschooners that had so far been the only exploits of Sampson's fleet, and it helped to calm the impatience of American public opinion, which from the first day of the war hadbeen eagerly anticipating a fight. A few days more brought news of a more serious naval engagement,not in Cuban waters this time, but in the far-off According to these stories the Spanish batteries had been laid in ruins, hundreds of the enemy's gunnershad been blown to atoms;the crews of the warships had displayed the wildest enthusiasm, the meja cheering every shot, and the stokers down below running up to request permission to have a shot at the Spaniards. If these absurd newspaper touches had been true, it would not say much for the discipline of the American navy. In one paper an imaginative writer told how after each shot one could hear the rumbling fall of the earth displaced from the enemy's breastworks. Anyone who could hear this at a range of from two to four miles must have hadgoodears.

The plain facts were set forth in Admiral Sampson's brief official report next day. He had exchanged fire with the batteries at the entrance toMatanzas Bay, in order to ascertain the strength and position of the works, to get some idea of their armament, and to prevent'the completion of the new battery at Punta Gorda.