Page:From Yauco to Las Marias.djvu/190

106 nothing in particular to do with General Schwan's campaign, I venture to make, in this place, a personal contribution to the discussion in the form of an extract from a letter, written by me from Mayaguez on September 15, 1898.

Our rations [on the transport "Comanche"] consisted of hard tack, coffee, canned baked-beans, canned tomatoes, and canned "roast beef." Before we arrived at Key West the baked-beans had all been eaten and the water in the tanks had gone rotten — we carried no condenser — so that we were reduced to the rather monotonous diet of tomatoes for breakfast, tomatoes and canned roast beef for dinner, and tomatoes again for supper; with a full allowance of coffee and hard tack at all three meals.

Anybody will be able to understand that we were pretty hungry at the end of the second day. We were thirsty too — I paid as much as fifty cents for a glass of ice-water from the cabin — but I will skip the mass of details. We had seen the piles of neat cans, labelled "roast beef," stacked up on the dock at Port Tampa, and we were impatient for the first mess-call that made us acquainted with the contents of those cans. I regret that I cannot adequately describe to you the appearance of the stuff. I will simply say that it looked filthy, was covered with a sort of slime, and emitted a nauseous odor. It was very hard to even gaze at it and remain unmoved, but we did more than that — we tried to eat it. - I managed to swallow three