The Tribune

By ERIC WIBERG

Infanta María Teresa was the lead ship of her class of armored cruiser constructed for the Spanish Navy and fought at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba during the Spanish–American War.

The warship was built at Bilbao, northern Spain, and was completed in 1893 with two funnels; she was fast and well-armed, however the armor belt was thin and only ran two-thirds of her length, so that in battle her high, unprotected freeboard was badly damaged.

Infanta, as she was known, was the flagship representing Spain at the opening of the Kiel Canal in 1895 under Vice Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete, commander of the First Squadron.

The explosion and loss of the US battleship Maine in Havana in February 1898 prompted war between Spain and the United States, as the Infanta left Portugal for Puerto Rico that April.

In battle, she was to lead the squadron’s escape from a large bay, and sacrificed herself by attacking the fast armored cruiser USS Brooklyn. This allowed the rest of the squadron to avoid action and run westward for the open sea. The Spanish ships put seaward at 8.45am the next day, but the US ships sighted them in the channel at about 9.35am, initiating the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, with both sides firing at maximum rates.

One of the first shells fired from USS Iowa hit Infanta’s aft main-battery turret, killing or wounding its crew and knocking it out. USS Brooklyn and the battleship USS Texas began to pound Infanta, starting fires that threatened to blow up her stores of ammunition.

Wanting to save his crew and ship, Cervera ordered Infanta beached, and she ran aground at 10.25am, west of Santiago de Cuba. Then the warship’s colors were struck and ammunition magazines flooded to avoid ignition. However on shore Cuban insurgents shot Spanish survivors trying to scramble up the rocks, though others were rescued by American sailors.

Later that year the US Navy refloated Infanta, planning to put her into service. They towed it to their base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the ship was patched. She then set off in a salvage convoy led by ship USS Vulcan towards Viriginia, a voyage of over 1,000 nautical miles.

On November 1,1898, the four-ship convoy pulled the Infanta through Crooked Island Passage. Merritt; a salvage repair ship was attached USS Vulcan with over 1,000 feet of manila line, which was connected to Infanta by 1,400 feet of 15-inch chain. Less than a third of the way to Norfolk they were caught in a storm, and Infanta began to founder, with Spanish and American sailors as crew on board.

Early that morning a vicious squall hit, and their weather continued to worsen. “Near-cyclone winds blasted the patched-up wreck, she plunged her bows under the sea and buried her deck up to the forward turret. Then, water spouting from her hawseholes, she reared her ram bow skyward.”

Soon, Infanta’s crew abandoned ship, with the first surfboat launched at 1.30pm; everyone made it safely to the towing ships. As darkness fell, the Americans “could see she was low in the water and seemed to her settling. The salvage captain then ordered the towlines cut, with three spontaneous cheers from the men on deck. [Infanta] became a black spot on the horizon, then disappeared. In the morning, as the gale intensified there was no sign of her”.

But the Infanta had not sunk. “Somehow, freed of her tow-line, she had found an easier motion and her bulkheads had held—long enough at least for her to drift southwest some 55 miles, and she slipped into an opening between two coral reefs a mile south of Bird Point on the seaward coast of Cat Island, with a broken back. After the storm she was rediscovered when USS Vulcan and USS Potomac rendezvoused off Bird Point. Due to her fatal damage, [Infanta] “the only Spanish capital ship to survive a battle some consider more important than Trafalgar, was officially abandoned by the United States.”

In 1997 a SCUBA diving center on Cat Island found out about the ship. Waldemar Illing, a divemaster at the Greenwood Beach Resort, went looking and in December 1999 an engineer and SCUBA diver named John Seabury flew his single-engine Cessna from Colorado to Cat Island and was shown extensive research. “Intrigued, he planned a dive on the windy, Atlantic side, and made an exploratory flight over the area at 300 feet, during which he saw the faint outline of a ship.”

Using a 20-foot skiff and GPS for guidance, a team “motored over coral heads to the wreck site”. And there it was, its distinct shape and a recognizable bow and stern. The first diver to hit the water was astonished by the intact structure of the wreck and its armament. “There are three big guns,” he said afterward, “the largest is 21-feet long and 10-inch caliber!” Today, title to her ownership is unclear, since she never was commissioned by the US Navy, which holds scant record of her. The Bahamian and Spanish governments may have some legal claim to Infanta as well.

One historian wistfully writes how “at Bird Point, on a soft night when the surf is low and the wind whispers fitfully over her coral cradle, it is easy to picture her bursting from the mouth of Santiago harbor with a bone in her teeth, the doomed crewmen cheering as trumpets sounded the last glorious charge of the Spanish Empire”. After her sinking several cannons were salvaged by the United States. One of the 140mm guns is on display in Groton, Connecticut, and another is on display at a veterans’ park in Ottumwa, Iowa.

Sources: PBS documentary Crucible of Empire about the Spanish American War. John Seabury and Greenwood Resort, Cat Island: Pre-Dreadnought Preservation - The Infanta Maria Teresa, by Mark Howells. National Archives resource; a book of letters, etc. kept by Assistant Surgeon William S Thomas, MRC, USN, Spanish-American War, 1898, in Naval History and Heritage Command.