Upon the record of such an achievement as this most men would have been satisfied, for a time, to rest; but Mr. Scovel, with untiring energy, went from Key West to the coast of Cuba and back three times in the next seven days. On the last of these expeditions he joined a landing force carrying arms and ammunition to the insurgents, participated in a hot skirmish with the Spanish troops, wrote an account of the adventure that same night while at sea in a small, tossing boat on his way back to Key West, and filed six thousand words in the Key West cable-station at two o'clock in the morning.
I speak of this particular case of journalistic enterprise, not because it is especially noteworthy or exceptional, but because it illustrates the endurance and the capacity for sustained toil in unfavorable circumstances, which are quite as characteristic of the modern war correspondent as are his courage and his alert readiness for any emergency or any opportunity.
Owing to the distance of the seat of war from the American coast and the absence of telegraphic communication between Cuba and the mainland, newspapers that made any serious attempt to get quick and exclusive information from the front had not only to send correspondents into the field, but to furnish them with means of moving rapidly from place to place and of forwarding their despatches promptly to an American telegraph office or a West Indian cable-station. Every prominent New York paper, therefore, had at least one despatch-boat for the use of its correspondents, several of them had two or three, and the Associated Press employed four. These boats were either powerful sea-going tugs like the _Hercules_ and the _Premier_, or swift steam-yachts of the class represented by the _Wanda_, the _Kanapaha_, and the _Bucaneer_. Exactly how many of them there were in West Indian waters I have been unable to ascertain; but I should say not less than fifteen or twenty, with almost an equal number of naphtha-and steam-launches for harbor and smooth-water work. In these despatch-boats the war correspondents went back and forth between Key West and Cuba; watched the operations of the blockading fleet off Havana, Matanzas, or Cardenas; cruised along a coast-line nearly a thousand miles in extent, and, if necessary, went with Admiral Sampson's squadron to a point of attack as remote as Santiago de Cuba or San Juan de Porto Rico. Whenever anything of importance happened in any part of this wide area, they were expected to be on the spot to observe it, and then to get the earliest news of it to the nearest cable-station--whether that station were Kingston, Cape Haitien, St. Thomas, Port-au-Prince, or Key West. All of the newspaper despatch-boats were small, many of them had very limited coal-carrying capacity, and some were nothing but sea-going tugs, with hardly any comforts or conveniences, and with no suitable accommodations for passengers. The correspondents who used these boats were, therefore, compelled to live a rough-and-tumble life, sometimes sleeping in their clothes on benches or on the floor in a small, stuffy cabin, and always suffering the hardships and privations necessarily involved in a long cruise on a small vessel in a tropical climate and on a turbulent sea. The Florida Strait between Key West and the north Cuban coast is as uncomfortable a piece of water to cruise on as can be found in the tropics. It is the place where the swiftly running Gulf Stream meets the fresh northeast trade-winds; and in the conflict between these opposing terrestrial forces there is raised a high and at the same time short, choppy, and irregular sea, on which small vessels toss, roll, and pitch about like corks in a boiling caldron. I was told by some of the correspondents who had cruised in these waters that often, for days at a time, it was almost impossible to get any really refreshing rest or sleep. The large and heavy war-ships of the blockading fleet rode this sea, of course, with comparatively little motion; but it is reported that even Captain Sigsbee was threatened with seasickness while crossing the strait between Havana and Key West in a small boat.