The Explosion That Sank the Maine -- and Started a War
When the battleship USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 266 crewmen, the tragedy became the spark that drew America into war with Spain.
At 9:40 on the night of February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine was swinging quietly at anchor in Havana Harbor when the night tore open.
The explosion lifted the forward part of the ship into the air. Most of the crew was asleep in the forward berths, directly above the blast. In the end, 266 men were dead -- sailors and Marines, most of them young, killed in an instant on a peacetime night.
The Maine had been sent to Havana only weeks earlier, in January 1898, to protect American interests during Cuba's war of independence against Spain. Her captain, Charles D. Sigsbee, survived the blast and cabled Washington urging that public judgment be suspended until the facts were known. But facts were in short supply, and patience was shorter.
A naval board of inquiry -- the Sampson Board, reporting on March 21 -- concluded the ship had been destroyed by a mine, though it fixed blame on no one. Spain denied any involvement. But America's sensationalist press had already rendered its verdict, and "Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!" became the rallying cry of a public hungry for war.
On April 25, 1898, Congress declared war on Spain. The Spanish-American War lasted barely four months, but it remade the map: Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and the United States stepped onto the world stage as an overseas power.
The Maine herself lingered as a ghost. In 1911 and 1912, Army engineers built a cofferdam around the wreck, raised what remained, and prepared the hulk for a final voyage. On the afternoon of March 16, 1912, with flowers on her deck and an American flag strung from her jury mast, she was towed four miles off the Cuban coast. Before a crowd of more than 100,000 watching from the shore, her sea cocks were opened; just over twenty minutes later she sank bow-first, to the sound of Taps and a twenty-one-gun salute. The cause of the explosion was argued for a century: in 1976, a study led by Admiral Hyman Rickover suggested an internal coal-bunker fire had set off the magazines -- a reminder that the "mine" America went to war over may never have existed.
The Maine is a lesson in how tragedy becomes narrative. A disaster at 9:40 on a February night, its cause still debated, was converted within weeks into a cause for war -- proof that what a nation believes about an event can matter as much as what actually happened.
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