On February 15, 1898, the U.S.S. Maine blew up and sank in Havana’s harbor killing 268 officers and sailors. The armored cruiser had come to protect American citizens after Spanish officers’ riots three weeks earlier.
In 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover conducted an inquiry into the cause of the Maine’s demise. The result of his investigation, published in his bookHow the Battleship Maine was Destroyed, points to an accident caused by coal spontaneously igniting and the resulting fire spreading to the adjacent ammunition storage bunker, causing it to explode. The bituminous coal used by the American Navy was highly volatile and ignitable by accidental combustion. Before an after the Main disaster, several U.S. warships suffered from spontaneous fires in their coalbunkers, including the armored cruiser New York.
Another theory holds that a mine detonated under the ship’s keel blew up the forward part of the cruiser, sinking the ship.
Sigmund Rothchild was an eyewitness to the explosion. A passenger on the liner, City of Washington, anchored nearby; Rothchild was on deck facing the warship. “I looked around and I saw the bow of the Maine rise a little, go a little out of the water. It couldn’t be more than few seconds…then there came in the center of the ship a terrible mass of fire and explosion…the whole ship lifted out, I should judge about two feet. As she lifted out, the bow went right down.”
Some experts have reservations about Admiral Rickover’s theory, pointing to the large hole beneath the Maine’s hull, where the keel metal was folded sharply into an inverted V, with the apex thrusting upward, suggesting an external explosion. A few days after the disaster, Spain and the U.S. sent naval experts to determine its cause. The American team concluded that it had been an external explosion that detonated the magazine. The Spaniards coincided with Admiral Rickover conclusion, finding that the internal explosion was due to a tragic combustion of the volatile bituminous coal. By this time, the question of how it happened had become moot.
The American “yellow press” went into a frenzy of incendiary headlines and did not bother to seek a fair answer. They had already decided that Spain was guilty and war inevitable.
Still today a definite explanation of this terrible explosion remains elusive.
