Tampabay: Team says they found the Maine, no answers

ST. PETERSBURG -- The video footage is grainy, full of shadowy shots of deep blue water and aged gray metal, the images sometimes obscured by fluffs of sediment churned up by the robot craft that carried a camera six fathoms down.

Yet what they show is unmistakable: a large steel ship resting on its side on the bottom of the sea, largely intact except for its missing bow.

On Tuesday at the University of South Florida's St. Petersburg campus, researchers displayed the first pictures taken in 88 years of the battleship Maine.

They discovered the wreckage last month in 3,700 feet of water about 4 miles north of Havana and formally announced the discovery Monday. Among those in attendance at Tuesday's news conference: the editor-in-chief of National Geographic.

"We know the Maine story is a good one," said National Geographic Society spokeswoman Barbara Moffet.

But the researchers who spoke Tuesday shied from the tantalizing possibility that makes finding the Maine so fascinating: using the wreckage to resolve the century-old controversy over what sank the ship.

"This is senseless," contended Paulina Zelitsky, president of the Canadian company that is working with USF marine scientists in exploring the ocean bottom off Cuba. "It's better to move forward."

Yet naval historians say it is impossible to discuss the ship without delving into the debate about whether it was sunk by accident or design.

The discovery of the wreckage has "tremendous historical significance," said naval historian Tom Allen. "This will raise all the issues again of the Maine and who blew it up."

President William McKinley dispatched the Maine to Spanish-ruled Cuba to protect U.S. interests during a simmering insurrection. As it lay at anchor in the Havana harbor on the night of Feb. 15, 1898, the ship was rocked by a massive explosion in its forward sections.

Of the 350 men on board, 266 died. The survivors were brought to Tampa. Sensationalistic newspaper coverage immediately blamed Spain. The Spanish contended the blast must be an accident.

A U.S. Navy court of inquiry, based on testimony from a diver who said that he had seen the ship's bottom bent inward, declared that the Maine had been blown up by a large mine. Congress declared war on Spain, and the battle cry of the troops who swarmed into Tampa was, "Remember the Maine!"

After what one U.S. official dubbed "a splendid little war," Spain surrendered and the United States found itself a global superpower. To their consternation, the Cuban insurgents now found themselves subjects of the United States.

Between 1911 and 1912 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a cofferdam around the area of Havana harbor that contained the wreckage and pumped the water out, enabling the recovery of the remaining bodies. They also cut apart the bow and another Navy board examined it, once again determining the ship had been sabotaged.

Yet a 1976 review by a special board declared the blast was an accident, the result of storing ammunition too close to the coal for fueling the ship. Two years ago, National Geographic commissioned a report that once again raised the possibility that a mine blew up the ship. Cuban schoolchildren are taught that the Americans blew up their own ship.

New technology could help settle the argument by examining what Zelitsky's researchers found last month, some historians say.

"If they were able to do a metallurgical examination of the hull, they might be better able to determine the stresses put on it by an explosion," Allen said. "Or they could do an X-ray analysis of the metal."

But Zelitsky's son, Ernesto Tapanes, insisted "the evidence is not there anymore." That's because, after the 1911-1912 examination of the ship's wreckage, the engineers scattered the bow pieces around Havana harbor.

Then, after the engineers patched up the hole in the ship with a makeshift bulkhead, the Navy towed it backward 3 miles out and scuttled it with full military honors.

That's where the researchers from Zelitsky's company, Advanced Digital Communications, stumbled on it while testing their side-scan sonar equipment about 10:45 a.m. on Oct. 18. At first it was just an odd black shadow on their monitors.

But when they sent down a camera on their robot craft, they captured six hours of ghostly video of the wreckage -- propellers, boilers, hawsers and chains. The ship had drifted about half a mile from where Navy records said it went down, partially burying itself in the soft bottom, Tapanes said.

They have no further plans to exploit the site, Zelitsky said, noting that "we wouldn't do that to a U.S. war memorial." But the research team has already located other wrecks, including a wooden ship that Zelitsky and Tapanes refused to discuss.

That's because the company is one of several Canadian concerns that have cut a deal with Cuba to hunt for the rich bounty of lost treasure believed to be resting in the deep waters off the Communist island.

Cuban waters might contain the richest concentration of sunken Spanish gold anywhere. If the Canadians find anything, the financially strapped Cuban government gets 50 percent off the top.

Making the announcement about the Maine, Zelitsky said, was a way to show everyone -- Cuban government officials as well as the company's Canadian and Australian investors -- "we can do what we promised to do."

- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.

Interested?

For a report from Naval History magazine on the competing theories about what sank the battleship Maine, click on: http://www.usni.org/navalhistory/NHallen.htm

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