Capt. Charles Sigsbee, skipper of the U.S. Battleship Maine, was looking at the lights of Havana on the tropical night of Feb. 15, 1898. The ship's bell struck twice - 9 o'clock. Sailors danced to an accordion in the starboard gangway. Not far away, a crewman plucked the strings of a mandolin.
Not far from the 3-year-old warship, an American tobacco dealer named Sigmond Rothschild stood on the deck of the steamer City of Washington, his eyes transfixed on the white hull of the Maine. Rothschild commented to a friend that the warship was well protected "under the guns of the United States."Aboard the Maine, Sigsbee retired to his luxurious quarters on the foredeck. The Maine had been designed as a flagship, but since there was no squadron commander, Sigsbee utilized not only his own cabin but the unoccupied admiral's cabin, which connected to his own.
As the captain began a letter to his wife, he paused to listen to the ship's bugler sound taps. "I laid the pen down to hear the notes of the bugle, which were singularly beautiful in the oppressive stillness of the night," he later wrote.
Sigsbee finished his letter and was sealing it when a tremendous explosion shattered the silence. It was 9:40 p.m.
Within seconds, there was a second eruption, this one deafening. It splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn't battened down - and most that was - flying more than 200 feet into the air.
Bursts of flame and belches of smoke filled the night sky. Water quickly flooded the decks. Some sailors were violently thrown from the blazing ship into the harbor. Others, drifting off to sleep in hammocks, were vaporized or trapped between floor and ceiling by the sudden, intense heat.
In all, 266 of the 350 men aboard the Maine were killed, including the bugler. Each survivor had his own strange story - inching along dark hallways in rapidly rising water, fighting gases and smoke and wildly reaching for lifelines tossed by a rescue crew of the Alfonso XII, a Spanish ship.
Sigsbee sent a notably restrained cable to the secretary of the Navy from City of Washington, announcing the destruction of the Maine in Havana Harbor and advising that "public opinion be suspended until further report."
It was not to be.
The next day a few American newspapers tried to be discreet, but Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst began a genuine media frenzy.
Pulitzer's New York World ran a blaring headline giving readers a choice: "MAINE EXPLOSION CAUSED BY BOMB OR TORPEDO?"
Hearst's New York Journal screamed: "THE WARSHIP MAINE WAS SPLIT IN TWO BY AN ENEMY'S SECRET INFERNAL MACHINE."
Although Spain's authorities concluded the Maine had been destroyed by an internal explosion, U.S. Navy investigators argued that the blast was not accidental. Even though they could not fix responsibility, they said a mine had exploded beneath the ship.
They might have changed their minds had they known that one of the safest things an American ship could do was run into a Spanish mine. During the Spanish American War, the USS Texas and the USS Marblehead each ran into mines without any ill effect.
The final report, issued March 22, 1898, said the Maine's keel was bent up into an inverted "V," and one diver told naval investigators, "The skin of the double bottoms is curled over like a sheet of paper, inboard."
Some historians have said that given rising public opinion, the Navy panel "might as well have proclaimed Spain guilty of mass murder."
President William McKinley, in office just a year, asked Congress for $50 million to strengthen the military. After all, the jingoistic Teddy Roosevelt had already dismissed the president as being "spineless as a chocolate eclair."
"Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain" became the slogan of the day, and it was printed on peppermint lozenges, buttons and posters. It also appeared in theaters on Friday nights and churches on Sunday mornings.
On April 25, 1898, Congress formally declared war on Spain, a contest U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain John Hay called "a splendid little war."
Hundreds of songs were written about the ship and its fate, most of them titled "Remember the Maine." Some were vengeful, some mournful and others sang of a sailor's dying request.
After the war, it was impossible to forget the Maine, as its carcass protruded above the water in Havana Harbor as a macabre reminder of the war. By 1903, the Cuban government started complaining about the wreck to the United States.
In 1910, Congress finally got the hint and authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to dispose of the ship's twisted remains.
So they built a cofferdam around the Maine, a huge, watertight enclosure, then dewatered the ship itself. Then they made the Maine's skeleton seaworthy, flooded the cofferdam and had a tugboat haul the carcass into international waters where it would sink to the bottom of the sea.
They found parts of skeletons on the Maine from 70 additional bodies previously unaccounted for, as well as the bugle used for taps just before the fateful explosion.
Corpsmen also came up with Sigsbee's inkwell, pipe, overshoes, derby hat, typewriter and shaving mug. Some relics ended up at the Naval Academy and others at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
In 1911, a second inquiry was launched to re-examine the reasons for the Maine's explosion. Under the leadership of Adm. Charles Vreeland, a team of experts inspected the damage to the hull, the plates and the remaining bulkheads firsthand. The conclusion supported the original inquiry, 14 years earlier, that the explosion was external.
It was a mine explosion, they said, but a smaller one than originally thought.
On March 16, 1912, the Maine received its celebrated final burial. Johnny O'Brien, a local port captain, was the last to leave the sinking ship. He said, "Some thought that the Maine appeared to struggle against her fate, but to my mind there was not only no suggestion of a struggle but in no way could she have met a sweeter or more peaceful end."
But it still wasn't over.
Adm. Hyman Rickover decided as late as the 1970s to reinvestigate the Maine explosion. He had lingering suspicions of a Navy cover-up, so he assembled a panel of first-rate historians and engineers.
In 1976, the third panel concluded that the Maine's death was the result of a spontaneous fire in a coal bunker adjacent to a powder magazine.
Actually, this was not a completely new thought. In January 1898, the secretary of the Navy had reported on the dangers of bunker-to-magazine fires and said the crews of two ships, the New York and the Cincinnati, had discovered such fires in time to prevent disaster.
In any case, the panel was certain there had been no mine or external force responsible for the Maine's demise.
Just last year, the National Geographic Society commissioned Advanced Marine Enterprises, a marine engineering firm used by the U.S. Navy, to conduct still another investigation, using computer modeling and simulations not available to earlier investigators.
Using a heat transfer analysis, they found that within four hours, a fire in the Maine's coal bunker could have raised the temperature of the nearest cannister of gunpowder, only 4 inches away on the other side of a quarter-inch-thick steel plate, to 645 degrees.
That is hot enough to ignite the powder, triggering a massive chain reaction in the other magazines.
On the other hand, they said, even a small, homemade mine could have penetrated the ship's hull and triggered explosions inside. This means the investigation initiated by National Geographic was inconclusive, meaning the Maine could have been destroyed either by an internal explosion or by a mine.
If it was a mine, was it set by the Spanish? Military historians say no one puts mines in their own port. Was it, then, Cuban insurgents? They had no technical ability, and they were involved in a war for independence from Spain. Could the United States have done it? It would have been silly for the United States to destroy one of its biggest ships, even as a pretext.
The best historical analysis suggests that the Maine probably was destroyed by an accidental, internal fire that ignited an explosion.
But it's not a sure thing.
There is also just a chance that it was destroyed by a mine, meaning the reason to go to war was simple revenge, the need to retaliate quickly against Spain.
History can be counted on to change, based on new evidence or new interpretations. Like some other illusive chapters from our past, the true story of the Maine may never be known.
Additional Reading: John Taylor, "Remembering the Maine," American History Illustrated (April 1978), 34-43; Carmine Prioli, "The Second Sinking of the Maine," American Heritage (Dec. 1990), 94-102; Tom Miller, "Remember the Maine," Smithsonian Magazine (Feb. 1998), 46-57; Thomas B. Allen, "Remember the Maine?" National Geographic (Feb. 1998), 92-112; Michael Haydock, "This Means War," American History (Feb. 1998), 42-50; 62, 63.