WARM-UP QUESTION:
Which account do you find more believable? Why? (Read each source below, then answer the questions in the notebook. Ask your teacher for an inquiry organizer worksheet to help you think about the ways that the sources support and contradict each other.)SOURCES:
- Journal
- Times
READ: New York Times
Head Note: Established in 1851, the New York Times provided investigative coverage of local New York issues and events, as well as national and international news.
MAINE’S HULL WILL DECIDE
Divers to Find Whether the Force of the Explosion Was from the Exterior or Interior.
SHE WAS AFLOAT FOR AN HOUR
Spontaneous Combustion in Coal Bunkers a Frequent Peril to the Magazines of Warships – Hard to Blow Up the Magazine.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 – After a day of intense excitement at the Navy Department and elsewhere, growing out of the destruction of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor last night, the situation at sundown, after the exchange of a number of cablegrams between Washington and Havana, can be summed up in the words of Secretary Long, who when asked as he was about to depart for the day whether he had reason to suspect that the disaster was the work of the enemy, replied: “I do not. In that I am influenced by the fact that Capt. Sigsbee has not yet reported to the Navy Department on the cause. He is evidently waiting to write a full report. So long as he does not express himself, I certainly cannot. I should think from the indications, however, that there was an accident – that the magazine exploded. How that came about I do not know. For the present, at least, no other warship will be sent to Havana.”
Capt. Schuley, who has had experience with such large and complicated machines of war as the New York, did not entertain the idea that the ship had been destroyed by design. He had found that with frequent and very careful inspection fire would sometimes be generated in the coal bunkers, and he told of such a fire on board of the New York close to the magazine, and so hot that the heat had blistered the steel partition between the fire and the ammunition before the bunkers and magazine were flooded. He was not prepared to believe that the Spanish or Cubans in Havana were supplied with either the information or the appliances necessary to enable them to make so complete a work of demolition, while the Maine was under guard…Source: Excerpt from New York Times, February 17, 1898.
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