Remember Cervera!
Pascual Cervera, the man of Philippines
Cádiz is the cradle of great sailors, which is not strange either. Two seas meet in Cádiz and there, in the bay that bears the name of its capital, the main base of the Navy has been located for centuries. That Pascual Cervera y Topete came into the world in Cádiz has, therefore, a certain Cartesian logic.
He did so at the end of the regency of María Cristina de Borbón, shortly after the province was created. His father was a soldier, he had fought in the War of Independence against the French, but on land. What called his son Pascual was the sea. At only 13 years old he entered the Naval Academy, at 19 he was already a first-class midshipman, and at 21 a ship's second lieutenant.
The Spain of Isabel II preserved a small but very dispersed overseas empire. To the west the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico. To the east, the Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands on the edge of Asia, to which were added countless islands, islets, and talons scattered throughout the Pacific Ocean.
Spain needed ships and sailors to govern them. Pascual Cervera wanted to be one of them. So, after being promoted to officer in Havana, he was assigned to the Philippines, where he served until 1865. He returned to Spain to train midshipmen, but the country he found himself in was different from the one he had left when he left. Only three years after his return the glorious revolution broke out, which cost Isabel II the throne and brought six years of political instability in which there were several provisional governments, the brief reign of Amadeo I, and the mad First Republic.
In all the challenges that history gave Cervera, a young Navy officer, he remained loyal to the Government. He had, of course, political opinions like any neighbor's son, but he understood that a naval sailor was not up to politics. During the cantonal uprising of 1873, the fire caught him closely, but he did not lose his head, he limited himself to defending the La Carraca Arsenal so that it did not fall into the hands of the mutineers as had happened in Cartagena.
With the country calmer and the Bourbons back in Madrid, he was sent again to the Philippines in command of a corvette. Once there he was promoted to colonel of the marine infantry and was appointed governor of the Joló archipelago, in the extreme south of the Philippines, very close to the Malay coast. A strait infested with pirates whom he had to fight. In Joló he contracted malaria and was on the verge of dying, but he did not ask for relief. He had been ordered to keep the strait clear of privateers and he was willing to carry out the orders to the last consequences.
He soon became well-known in the Philippines for his discipline and sense of duty. Some of that must have reached Madrid because Cánovas del Castillo, now president of the Government, asked him to report on the situation in the remote colony. Cervera, a seasoned sailor with thousands of miles behind him, made a pleasant impression on Cánovas, so much so that he offered him a position in the Ministry of the Navy.
The new duty
Cervera fought with the very slow bureaucracy whose procedures delayed the delivery of the ship again and again. And he managed to defeat it because he managed to have Pelayo, a true fortress, built in just two years. Cervera would also be his first captain. This feat did not go unnoticed by the Court, which entrusted him with an even greater undertaking: the technical direction of the Nervión Shipyard in Bilbao to build three state-of-the-art cruise ships: the Infanta María Teresa, the Vizcaya, and the Almirante Oquendo. The three would get lost in Santiago de Cuba.
By 1890, Cervera's name was already much talked about in the political circles of Madrid. The Cádiz native had a reputation as a man of honor, disciplined and decisive. The Queen Regent Maria Christina of Habsburg called him to be her naval advisor. Before that, he was promoted to Rear Admiral. His star continued to shine brighter. Segismundo Moret, leader of the Liberal Party, wanted to score a point and offered to keep Marina's portfolio as soon as the Liberals came to power. Cervera was not interested in politics. He responded to Moret that it was not convenient to have him as a minister since "as a modest officer of Mariana I think he could be of more value. Commanding squadrons, naval departments, or any other destination that does not have a political nature."
But it happened that the liberals came to power in 1892. Sagasta, an old dog who knew everything, made the envelope. He suggested to the queen that Pascual Cervera, her privy advisor on naval affairs, would make a great naval minister. The queen thought it was an excellent idea and so she let Sagasta know, who with the royal pleasure in hand went to Cervera indicating that this was the express wish of the Palace.
Thus, at 53 years old, 40 of them in the Navy, he was appointed Minister of the Navy. He would only last three months. Politics became indigestible for him very quickly. Before accepting the ministry he placed only one condition on Sagasta: while he was minister the Government would not reduce the Navy's budgetary allocation by a single cent. But Sagasta, a politician after all, deceived him. The following year he reduced the budget. Someone else would have sheathed it but not Cervera. He resigned not once, but three times until the prime minister had no choice but to accept it.
From the Ministry of the Navy, he went to the Naval Commission in London and from there to La Carraca, where he was assigned as commanding general of the Arsenal. He was there when the Cuban war began with the cry of Baire. The Government wanted to tackle the problem as soon as possible and opted for a heavy hand. He sent General Valeriano Weyler, who imposed a regime of terror on the island, especially in the countryside.
The Weyler solution
The Weyler solution was a catastrophe. Not only did he fail to contain the rebels, but he turned the civilian population against the metropolis. The United States, which had already tried to buy the island as it had bought Florida decades before, remained on standby, providing support to the insurgents. The Government changed its strategy by granting Cuba broad autonomy, something similar to what the British had done in Canada.
But it was too late. On February 15, 1898, the US Navy battleship Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. Cervera, like all sailors of his generation, knew Cuba and the Philippines well. Much of his life had been spent sailing between the Caribbean and the China Sea. He knew closely the many weaknesses and the few strengths of Spain in both corners of the world.
If they had remained loyal after the cataclysm of 1820, it was because both Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos were in favor of remaining Spanish. The moment they did not want to be, it could not be defended. Even more so with the destabilizing element of the United States, a rising power against which the Spanish army could do little.
In a letter addressed to Juan Spottorno, auditor of the Navy in Cartagena, he confessed the following: «It seems that the conflict with the United States is averted, or at least postponed, but it can revive unexpectedly, and every day I am more convinced of the idea that it would result in a great national calamity since we practically have no fleet, wherever it is sent, all its ships must go together because dividing them would be in my opinion the greatest of all errors; "But it would also be a mistake to send it to the Antilles, leaving our coasts and the Philippine archipelago without defense... I will be patient and fulfill my obligation but with the bitterness of knowing that my sacrifice is in vain."
The Spanish Navy was small and had major deficiencies resulting from abandonment by successive Governments. The crews were not adequately trained and the condition of the ships could be improved. During training, ammunition and fuel were rationed so as not to spend more than expected. Something similar happened with weapons. Suffice it to say that the cruiser Christopher Columbus, one of the most modern ships in the fleet, was sent to combat without its main artillery having been installed.
"Remember the Maine!"
After the explosion of the Maine, events accelerated, war was imminent. In the United States, the press cried out for revenge: "Remember the Maine!" They were repeated insistently in the diaries of William Randolph Hearst, a media magnate who made this war his best sales argument. It didn't matter that the explosion was fortuitous, the one in Cuba was the first war that was reported in the newspapers. And in that the United States also had the lead.
The Government ordered Cervera to embark and leave with a squadron towards Cape Verde, where he would receive more specific orders. In Washington, they assumed that Spain would send reinforcement ships to the Antilles, so they commissioned Admiral Sampson to seal the Caribbean. The orders from Madrid arrived: the fleet had to be led to Cuba, trying not to encounter the Americans along the way. A suicide, but Cervera could not disobey an order. That for someone like him was something unthinkable.
He crossed the Atlantic and evaded the Yankee blockade by penetrating from the south, near Martinique, he sailed to Curacao and there he turned north in demand of Santiago, which was a safer port than Havana or San Juan de Puerto Rico. On May 19 he entered Santiago, where he could take shelter and get the ships to safety. In Santiago, a city located at the bottom of a well-defended bay, Sampson could not enter.
The Americans, alerted by Cervera's risky move, went to the entrance of the bay to block it. They introduced the Merrimac steamship loaded with explosives into the bay to blow up the Spanish squadron in port. Cervera prevented her by sinking the Merrimac before she approached. The crew of the Merrimac were rescued by Cervera who, instead of shooting them, treated them chivalrously and by the laws of war. Later, these same men submitted a request to the United States Senate to recognize the exemplary conduct of the Spanish rear admiral.
The situation, however, was anything but exemplary. It was, in fact, distressing. Besieged by sea and land, on July 2, Ramón Blanco, captain-general of Cuba, ordered the fleet to abandon the bay. Cervera was facing the greatest challenge of his career. He had to leave because it was an order, but how to do it without surrendering and suffering as few casualties as possible?
At the mouth of the bay, eight American ships were waiting in a semicircle: the Indiana, the New York, the Oregon, the Texas, the Iowa, the Brooklyn, the Gloucester, and the Vixen. Cervera only had four: the Infanta María Teresa, the Vizcaya, the Cristóbal Colón, the Almirante Oquendo, and two smaller vessels. The ships headed in broad daylight in a line towards the mouth, but they did not go out into the open sea, where they would be quickly sunk and a large number of lives would be lost, they did so close to the coast to the west. The battle was lost beforehand, so at least they would save their honor and lives.
In four hours everything was over. Cervera was taken prisoner and transferred to Iowa where Captain Evans received him with honors from the officers and cheers from the sailors. Something understandable. Not all admirals were as considerate of the lives of their men as Cervera had been. Evans extended his hand and said, “Gentleman, you are a hero. He has performed the most sublime act recorded in the history of the Navy.
Cervera was transferred to Anápolis as a prisoner of war. There he became a celebrity. The Americans did not forget the Maine, but neither did the Merrimac. Thousands of letters were sent to him and American sailors lined up to meet him in person and shake his hand. The American Government even offered him freedom before the armistice was reached. But Cervera rejected it. He could not commit to what they asked of him in return: not to go to war against the United States again. Days later he ended the war and returned to Spain.
Calm after the waves
He was received coldly and was prosecuted... until the documentation that, before entering combat, he had wisely deposited in the hands of the archbishop of Santiago was made public. There was all the correspondence that he had maintained with the Government. Reading it, it was not very difficult to see who (or who) had been the real cause of the disaster. Cervera had behaved heroically in the face of the worst possible scenario. Because true heroes are not forged in victories, but in defeats.
Once his honor and good name had been restored, he was finally promoted to admiral and the king appointed him senator for life. In the United States, his good reputation persisted. They even offered him a substantial amount of money to give lectures around the country telling about his experience in the war. He declined his offer since he thought it was not worthy of a Spanish admiral to go around the world talking about the errors of his own country, and even less so for money.
He lived his last years between Ferrol and Cádiz. In the first as head of the maritime department, in the second as a simple retired military man in his house in Puerto Real, where he would die on April 9, 1909. Seven years later his remains were transferred to the Pantheon of Illustrious Sailors of San Fernando, where they have rested since then along with others of their race such as Jorge Juan, Federico Gravina, and Sánchez Barcáiztegui.
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