Remember the Maine:
The Cámara Squadron
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2024

The rapid dispatch of Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete’s four armored cruisers to the New World in April 1898, at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, stripped Spain of most of her powerful, modern warships. The battleship Pelayo had been undergoing reconstruction at the La Seyne shipyard in France where she was built, and the new armored cruiser Carlos V had not completed fitting out. The protected cruiser Alfonso XIII had been commissioned in 1896, but never actually completed, and assigned to the Navy’s training division.

The naval war had not gone well. Cervera’s squadron had been bottled up in Santiago de Cuba. On the island’s south-western coast. The Philippine Squadron of aged gunboats and unprotected cruisers had been annihilated by the American Asiatic Squadron on 1 May. The Spanish Army in Cuba, though quite large with nearly 200,000 men, had been organized and equipped for a counter-insurgency campaign and lacked much in the way of field artillery or the logistics to oppose a peer adversary, even one stood up as hastily as the American expeditionary force. It would be up to the Navy to salvage something from this disastrous war, using the handful of leftover ships.

The new armored cruiser Emperador Carlos V. Cadiz, 1898.

These ships, the newly-appointed Navy Minister Ramón Auńón y Villalón decided in early June 1898, would form a second active squadron, and relieve the pressure on Cervera’s First Squadron with a series of raids against the United States’ Eastern Seaboard. Pelayo, summoned from La Seyne without her new 140mm guns or the old 120mm weapons they would have replaced, only carried her heavy guns and a handful of 57mm anti-torpedo-boat guns.

Emperador Carlos V, the largest warship built in Spain to date, was considered cursed by Spanish sailors, who strove to avoid duty aboard her. On the day of her launch in 1895, the protected cruiser Reina Regente had been sent to Tangier to return an embassy from the Sultan of Morocco to their homeland. Capt. Francisco Sanz de Andino, ordered to return to Cadiz in time for the Carlos V launching ceremony, drove his ship through a heavy storm in order to make it in time. Reina Regente suddenly lost power, according to a merchant crew that spotted the cruiser in distress, and the waves drove her under. All 420 men aboard perished; only one drunken sailor accidentally left behind in Tangier survived of her crew.

Birth of a curse: The last moments of Reina Regente.

Carlos V had fairly weak armor protection for a ship of her size, a pair of 280mm (11-inch) guns in single turrets fore and aft, and eight 140mm (5.1-inch) guns). She was quite fast for the time, though, able to make 20 knots. The naval dockyard at Cadiz built the ship, but she had to steam to La Seyne (just outside Toulon) to have her main gun turrets fitted, in 1897. Alfonso XIII, a copy of the unfortunate Reina Regente, had been built by the El Ferrol naval dockyard in northern Spain, and proved to be an even poorer imitation of a poor ship.

Auńón’s plan called for Admiral Manuel de la Cámara y Livermore to take the new second squadron into the Atlantic for a three-pronged attack on the United States. The admiral himself would take Carlos V and three armed merchant cruisers to Bermuda, there to receive the latest intelligence on American dispositions from Madrid. He would then steam for the U.S. coast, heading northward while ravaging merchant commerce and fisheries, to enter port at Halifax in Canada to take on coal and fresh intelligence. Three more armed merchant cruisers would attack American commerce off Brazil. Pelayo and the coast-defense battleship Vitoria, with three destroyers, would steam into the Caribbean and show themselves at neutral ports, to create a diversion.

The Cámara squadron in Port Said, Egypt. July 1898.

That plan had not ripened when Auńón began receiving reports from the Philippines. The Americans believed that they had cut off telegraphic communications to the archipelago, but Governor-General Basilio Augustin Davilio had routed his reports through a minor line stretching through the Visayas and reserved for officials of the royal postal service. Augustin asked for reinforcements, and provided a detailed description of the American squadron that had fought at Manila Bay.

Auńón decided that Cámara’s squadron would be better deployed to the Philippines, as he believed it could defeat George Dewey’s American squadron and reverse the pending loss of the archipelago. The squadron would include Pelayo, Carlos V, the three destroyers plus two large armed merchant cruisers; Cámara flatly refused to take Alfonso XIII and Vitoria, which he considered floating death traps. Vitoria had just completed rebuilding at La Seyne and received a new armament of freshly-donated Austro-Hungarian guns, but she’d been built in 1865 as an iron-hulled broadside ironclad. Cámara had doubted that she could operate safely in the open Atlantic, and did not believe she would survive the trip to the Philippines.

Spanish troops of the Cámara expedition prepare to board their transports. June 1898.

Auńón ordered Cámara to sail to the Philippines on 15 June, and the admiral set out the next day with Pelayo, Carlos V, the two armed merchant cruisers and three destroyers, two transports bearing 4,000 troops, and four colliers with 20,000 tons of high-quality anthracite coal between them. They steamed through the Strait of Gibraltar, where American agents spotted them, headed for the Suez Canal and on to the Philippines.

The Americans reacted by forming a squadron of their own with orders to raid the coast of European Spain and force Auńón to recall Cámara to defend the homeland. The Americans leaked their intentions to the British, who leaked them to the Spanish. The British also leaned on their Egyptian puppets and the Suez Canal Company to deny Cámara the right to take on coal in Egyptian waters, even from his own colliers.

Unwilling to sit by and report the news, American newspaper magnate William Randolph “Rosebud” Hearst sent his own agents to Egypt, ordering them to buy a suitable vessel and scuttle it in the canal to block Cámara’s progress (and with it, a good deal of global commerce). This plan came to nothing, which is probably a good thing for all involved.

Monitor Monadnock crosses the Pacific Ocean. July 1898.

The U.S. Navy had already stripped the West Coast of its lone battleship, Oregon, but two aged monitors remained and these were dispatched on a perilous journey across the Pacific to join George Dewey. Monterey departed San Diego on 10 June, towed by the collier Brutus, arriving in Manila on 4 August. Monadnock followed on 23 June, arriving on 16 August.

Cámara, meanwhile, faced intense bureaucratic resistance from the British operators of the Suez Canal, who refused to allow passage while interfering with his attempts to refuel. The American vice-consul in Cairo, Ethelbert Watts, had bought up all of the coal in Suez. Finally, on 5 July Cámara managed to get his squadron headed through the canal, entering the Red Sea on the 7th. He was steaming toward the Indian Ocean on 11 July when ordered arrived recalling him to Spain. This time the British did not interfere with his passage and the squadron returned to Cadiz on 25 July to be disbanded.

Cámara had a great deal of combat experience, ranging from Mexico to Peru to Morocco, and a reputation as an excellent organizer stemming from the 1893-94 Rif War against the tribes of northern Morocco. The Americans feared the arrival of his squadron in the Philippines or the East Coast, claiming that Pelayo outmatched any ship in their fleet.

Another view of Emperador Carlos V at Port Said. July 1898.

That assessment overstated things. Pelayo had never been a very good fighting ship and was not a match for any of the latter American battleships. Carlos V was very large, and though the press conflated size and fighting power, this was a false impression. And those were Cámara’s only major combat units. He might have defeated Dewey in an open engagement, but he lacked the strength to sweep the Americans from the Philippines.

Likewise, the addition of two heavy ships would have strengthened Cervera’s hand in the Caribbean, but the advantage still would have lain with the Americans.

That doesn’t stop us from deploying Cámara and his squadron to the Caribbean in Great War at Sea: Remember the Maine. The Spanish could have won this war, and prompt deployment of Cámara to the decisive theater would have definitely helped. But it was not a move to change the outcome all by itself.

You can order Remember the Maine (Second Edition) right here.
Please allow an additional two weeks for delivery.

Sign up for our newsletter right here. Your info will never be sold or transferred; we'll just use it to update you on new games and new offers.

Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his new puppy. His Iron Dog, Leopold, could swim very well.

Want to keep Daily Content free of third-party ads? You can send us some love (and cash) through this link right here.