Famous Shipwrecks: American Battleship U.S.S. Maine, 1898

Warships are usually sunk as a result of the outbreak of war; rarely are their sinkings the reason for starting the war in the first place, but that’s exactly what happened when the small but powerful little battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor shortly after dusk on February 15, 1898, killing 261 of her 355-man crew. Though the cause of the explosion—which literally blew the ship in half—remains a source for some debate even to this day (a coal bin fire setting off ammunition in one of the ship’s magazines being considered the most likely reason), within weeks of the disaster investigators announced that the ship appeared to have been destroyed by a mine attached to her hull. Since relations between the United States and Spain were already pretty dicey as a result of Spain’s iron-fisted efforts at putting down a large-scale rebellion in Cuba, most Americans quickly jumped to the conclusion that the Spanish had destroyed the ship (despite the lack of logic in doing so) and demanded retaliation. Buckling to public pressure and spurred-on by the jingoistic flavor of the press of the day, a few weeks later the McKinley administration declared war on Spain, resulting in one of America’s shortest and most successful conflicts (the Persian Gulf War being the other). Fortunately for the largely under-armed United States, Spain was already in decline as a world power and lacked the means to adequately defend its overseas colonies, forcing her to surrender after just three months and cede Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States. The victory marked America’s entrance onto the world stage and her ascension as a genuine colonial power and the rest is, as they say, history. So what became of the demolished battleship? What was left of it was raised from the muck of Havana harbor in 1911 and towed out to open ocean, where she was sunk—again—but this time on purpose and with full military honors. Not much left of her today, of course, other than her legacy and the rarely heard battle-cry “Remember the Maine!”

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