Spanish-American War (18981900) On 25 April 1898,
Congress declared war on Spain, beginning the Spanish-American War. An immediate objective was to defeat Spain in the
Caribbean, taking
Cuba and Puerto Rico. The
US Navy began patrolling off the islands. On 8 May 1898
Rita was sailing from Liverpool to Puerto Rico with a cargo of coal when she encountered
USS Yale off
Culebra Island. A chase ensued, but
Yale was somewhat faster, and armed with 6-inch guns. Several warning shots were fired which
Rita ignored, but when a shell exploded over the head of her captain, the ship was surrendered. A nine-man prize crew, under the command of ''Yale's'' first officer, W. B. Porter, took her in to
Charleston, South Carolina.
Rita was purchased by the
US Army Quartermaster's Department from the U.S.
Prize Court on 9 July 1898 for $125,000 and assigned to the
Army Transport Service. The Army reckoned her capacity at 15 officers and 700 men. The day after her purchase she began her new career as a troop transport. On 10 July 1898
Rita sailed for Cuba with reinforcements for the American campaign. She was filled to capacity with the 2nd and 3rd battalions of the 6th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment, less Companies D and M. She sailed from
Tampa to
Ponce, Puerto Rico on 27 July 1898. Over the next two years the ship made numerous trips between the American mainland, Cuba, and Puerto Rico laden with personnel, food, medical supplies, and other equipment for the Army. To mark her transition to military service, the ship was renamed in February 1899.
Rita became United States Army Transport
Burnside, named for
Civil War General
Ambrose Burnside. Prior to the Spanish-American War there was a Cuban revolutionary army on the island seeking
independence from Spain. This army assisted American forces to defeat the Spanish. Spain's ceding of Cuba to the United States did not address the fate of the 30,000 revolutionary soldiers still in the field and owed substantial back pay. Seeking to buy peace on the island, the United States offered to pay each Cuban soldier $100 in return for the orderly disbanding of this Cuban Army.
Burnside found herself with $3 million in cash aboard, including 2,500,000 dimes and 200,000 nickels, anchored in
Havana harbor on 18 March 1899. Cuban officials sought more money for their soldiers, so
Burnside sat at anchor while negotiations continued. On 4 April 1899 the Cuban Military Assembly voted to disband the Cuban Army.
Burnside circumnavigated the island with two Army paymasters aboard to distribute the funds.
Cable ship in the Philippines (19001904) When
Commodore Dewey defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on 1 May 1898, there were two undersea cables which landed in
Manila. One provided telegraph communication from the Philippines to the rest of the world via
Hong Kong, and the other connected the city to major islands of the archipelago. Both belonged to the British firm
Eastern Extension, Australasia, and China Telegraph Company (Limited). The day after his victory, Dewey approached the British Consul in Manila to arrange for American use of the telegraph service. The Spanish, who still controlled Manila, refused to allow the Americans to send telegrams. Dewey replied by cutting the cables in Manila Bay. The link to Hong Kong was cut on 2 May 1898, and
Capiz on 23 May 1898, isolating
Luzon from the rest of the world. Undersea cables became a military priority for the Army commanders in the Philippines. While the British cables were ultimately repaired, they did not reach all the major islands.
General Otis, and
General MacArthur complained of communication difficulties. The Army in the Philippines was dependent on slow, ship-borne mail for communications to many locations. To build its own inter-island telegraph system, the Army sent the cable ship USAT
Hooker to Manila. She was wrecked on
Corregidor in August 1899 before she was able to commence her work. Much of ''Hooker's
cable laying machinery and testing equipment was salvaged, and was installed on Burnside'' when she arrived in Manila. On 30 June 1900, the Army contracted with the
Morse Iron Works shipyard in
Brooklyn, New York to convert
Burnside into a cable ship. The reported cost of this conversion was $130,000.
Burnside was chosen as ''Hooker's'' replacement because of her relatively shallow draft for her size. Three large copper tanks were built in her cargo holds in which submarine cable could be coiled. The tanks were in diameter and deep. Each had an iron core at its center to hold the cable in position while it was unspooled. Each tank had capacity to hold 250 miles of cable.
Burnside departed New York on 26 September 1900 with 553 miles of deep-sea cable and 8 miles of the thicker, more heavily-armored shore-end cable aboard. As she was sailing into a war zone, she was armed with three 6-pounder and four 1-pounder rapid-fire guns.
Burnside reached Gibraltar on 10 October 1900. She stopped at
Malta,
Port Said,
Aden,
Colombo, and
Singapore, before arriving in Manila on 7 December 1900. She sailed from Manila on 23 December 1900 to begin laying cable. The first segment connected
Dumaguete on
Negros Island to
Misamis on
Mindanao, approximately 100 miles away. In the first six months of 1901, Burnside completed seven cables which were, in aggregate, 447 nautical miles long. Between July and November 1901 she laid another 14 cables of 607 miles and repaired 13 cables. While in the Philippines, she was not employed continuously as a cable ship, but spent part of her time as a transport. A notable aspect of the ''Burnside's
operations was the large number of Filipino crew. Her job in the Philippines was not merely to lay submarine cable, but to trench the cable ashore, build cable offices, and do whatever else was required on land and sea to make the links work in wilderness locations. The ship needed more manpower, so the bosun went ashore in Manila to hire whoever he could. These men stuck with the ship and gained cable-laying skills. There were 116 Filipino crew aboard in 1904 when the ship came to Seattle. They were highly regarded by their officers, but were paid roughly two-thirds of what the Army would pay a white crew. Filipino crew worked on Burnside'' until at least 1912 despite the fact that the ship left the islands in 1904.
Laying the Alaska cable (19031905) In the wake of the discovery of gold in the
Klondike and at
Nome, Since
Burnside was the only American cable ship in the Pacific, and fully engaged in the Philippines, little could be done immediately. Congress extended the availability of these funds through the 1903 fiscal year. A further $485,000 was voted to connect the Alaska network with continental America. Congress approved $321,580 in April 1904 for a cable between
Valdez and
Sitka, and another $95,000 in March 1905 for a cable between Valdez and
Seward.
Burnside laid all of these cables. In March 1903
Burnside sailed to Hong Kong for shipyard maintenance prior to crossing the Pacific. She departed Manila on 8 June 1903, made a coaling stop in
Nagasaki, and reached
Juneau on 11 July 1903. She laid a 17-mile-long cable connecting
Skagway and
Haines, and repaired the existing cable between Juneau and Skagway.
Burnside then sailed south to
Seattle surveying the proposed route of the cable to Alaska. She arrived in Seattle on 4 August 1903. The contract for 1,200 miles of cable for the
Alaska project was awarded to the Safety Insulated Wire and Cable Company of
Bayonne, New Jersey on 7 March 1903. It was the longest submarine cable manufactured in the United States at the time. The cable was shipped from New York to
Puget Sound via
Cape Horn in two sections. The first 580 miles shipped in June 1903 aboard the
American-Hawaiian Line steamer
Texan. She arrived in Seattle on 1 September 1903. This cable was loaded aboard
Burnside by the morning of 15 September. On 16 September 1903,
Burnside sailed for Juneau. She had aboard the
Chief Signal Officer of the United States Army, Brigadier General
Adolphus Greely, who supervised the laying of the cable. The trip began on a sour note when
Burnside hit an iceberg off
Admiralty Island and sustained damage to her hull. She arrived at Juneau on 22 September 1903. After making quick repairs to the ship, the cable from Juneau to Sitka, 291 miles long, was completed on 2 October 1903. Due to the lateness of the season, the days were getting shorter and the weather stormier.
Burnside laid cable from Sitka about 130 miles south before the need for repairs, and bad weather sent her back to Seattle. The end of the cable was buoyed so work on the Sitka-Seattle route could resume in 1904. During the winter of 1903-04,
Burnside was sent back to the Philippines where a number of outages had occurred in the telegraph cables laid by the ship in 1901. In areas of high current, cables were sawn apart by movement over rough, coral-encrusted seabeds. She left Seattle for Manila on 1 January 1904, carrying 200 tons of oats and 200 tons of hay. She stopped for coal in
Honolulu on 12 January 1904. After 48 days of cable maintenance in the Philippines, on 6 April 1904
Burnside sailed from Manila for Seattle, where she arrived on 18 May 1904. The second part of the Alaska cable, 780 miles, arrived at Seattle from New York on the American-Hawaiian Line steamship
American in November 1903, too late to be used that year. It was stored in
Tacoma. Other, shorter sections arrived from New York in forty freight cars. On her return from the Philippines,
Burnside began loading cable aboard on 9 June 1904 and finally sailed north to Alaska on 19 June 1904. Numerous difficulties were encountered. The buoy that marked the end of the cable in October 1903 had been washed away in winter storms, forcing the crew to grapple for the wire in of water. Some of ''Burnside's'' cable laying machinery broke down, and the weather was stormy. Nonetheless, the cable from Sitka to Seattle, 1,070 miles long, was completed on 28 August 1904. The final splice took place at a ceremony in
Elliot Bay which was attended by several hundred people. To commemorate the event, Mayor
Richard A. Ballinger of Seattle and Mayor Keller of Skagway telegraphed greetings to each other.
Burnside began laying the Valdez to Sitka link on 29 September and completed her work on 5 October 1904.
Maintaining Pacific Northwest cables (19051922) In addition to the Alaska cable system, the Army maintained a number of short cables between coastal defense installations. In Puget Sound,
Fort Casey,
Fort Flagler, and
Fort Worden were connected by fire-control cables. In the
Bay Area, there were cables between the
Presidio,
Fort Baker,
Fort Barry, and
Fort McDowell. At the mouth of the
Columbia, Army cables connected
Fort Stevens and
Fort Columbia.
Burnside was involved in maintaining all of these cables.The sea bed is a hostile environment and there were many interruptions in the cables
Burnside maintained. In 1905 a whale tangled the Sitka-Valdez cable in its jaws. As it thrashed to free itself, it broke the cable. The drowned corpse was still tangled in the cable when
Burnside arrived to fix the line weeks later. A February 1908 earthquake broke the two cables to Valdez in 11 places as the seabed faulted. Ships' anchors ripped cables from harbor bottoms. The ship was continuously busy. In fiscal year 1915, for example,
Burnside made five round-trips from Seattle to Alaska to fix nine breaks. Even though most of her efforts were for maintenance,
Burnside did lay additional cable to extend the system, and to replace outdated lines. Notably, at the end of 1906 new cable was laid to connect
Wrangell, Hadley, and
Ketchikan to the outside world. This enormous hole would likely have sunk the ship but for the fact that it opened a ballast tank which was already filled with water.
Burnside continued north to
Alert Bay where a quick inspection of the damage was made. The decision was made to return to Seattle for repairs. After an Army investigation of the accident, Captain Laffin was temporarily relieved of his command in January 1905 for being absent from the bridge at the time of the accident. The contract to repair the ship was won by Heffernan Engine Works which bid $31,482 for the work. In October 1911, the
Alaska Steamship Company's Edith went aground on Level Island in
Sumner Strait, heavily laden with 60,000 cases of canned salmon.
Burnside was able to pull her off undamaged, and
Edith was able to continue her voyage under her own steam. == Obsolescence, sale, and scrapping ==