Remembering the Maine

On February 15, 1898, the Secretary of the Navy received an anguished telegram from Captain Charles Sigsbee: "Maine blown up in Havana harbor at nine forty tonight and destroyed." Two hundred sixty-seven American officers and enlisted men were killed in an explosion that was the immediate cause of the Spanish-American War and ended the short career of the first U.S. battleship built domestically with materials manufactured in the United States. At first ascribed to a Spanish mine, the Maine disaster has been scrutinized and challenged over the years, most notably in 1974 when Admiral Hyman G. Rickover employed naval engineers to demonstrate that the explosion was caused by spontaneous combustion in the ship's coal bunkers, adjacent to the gunpowder magazines. . In Remembering the Maine, Peggy and Harold Samuels reveal heretofore secret documents - including an 1898 report suppressed by President McKinley, and unpublished testimony of Cubans, Spaniards and Americans - which question the findings of the Rickover report and show that a mine set by Spanish extremists in Havana destroyed the Maine. This historical whodunit describes in detail the controversial evidence, political impediments, and faulty investigations that have confounded this military mystery for almost one hundred years. With investigative zeal, the authors review contemporary press coverage of the disaster, reveal inadequate scientific understanding (at the time) of spontaneous combustion, and scrutinize the findings of the blue-ribbon Rickover commission. They detail the Maine's architecture, analyze the properties of explosives carried on the ship, explain the political tensions between Spain and the United States, and bring to light the liaisons between Cuban rebels and newspaper magnates Hearst and Pulitzer. Among other pieces of evidence, the Samuels uncover an overlooked account by a man who manufactured mines for a group of Spanish extremists, witnessed the explosion, accused his employers of murder, and was subsequently imprisoned for many years. Sifting through myriad written sources, and meticulously reviewing Rickover's report, the authors demonstrate that radical followers of Spanish General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau - known as "the Butcher" - in hopes of engaging the United States in war set the mine that destroyed the battleship. As a result of the explosion's controversy, the watchword "Remember the Maine!" has echoed in American history as both a clarion call for military supremacy and a warning against unnecessary aggression. After almost a century, the mystery is solved and the men of the Maine are vindicated.