Excerpt from Battles and Capitulation of Santiago De Cuba: Completed On the following day, the 19th, the Spanish eet, commanded by Rear Admi ral Cervera, entered with very little coal, which it was absolutely necessary to replenish. It did not require great power of penetration to understand that, owing to the scant resources available at this harbor, it 'would take more days to get the necessary fuel on board than it would take Admiral Sampson, Commander of the United States eet, to find out that circumstance, and that consequently the Spanish eet would be blockaded, as indeed it was; and as a natural and logical inference, that the enemy's objective would be the city and harbor of Santiago, where the only battle ships that Spain had in the Antilles, or at least in the Greater Antilla, had taken refuge. Thus, the arrival of the eet gave this city a military importance which without that event it would never have acquired, and changed it to the princi pal - not to say, the only scene of Operations in the island, the denouement of which would necessarily be of great interest and of powerful in uence on the result of the campaign and the war. Subsequent events have shown the truth of my assumption, which was also the assumption of everybody else in the city. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."