The Spanish ghost ship that spread panic in Boston, New York and terrorized the East Coast
The impact of the yellow journalism during the Cuban war created invisible enemies that never came, but filled the U.S. coastline with fear.
In 1898, a journalistic war unfolded in the United States that lit the fuse for the real conflict between that country and Spain. It was a disaster for the former imperial power, which lost its last overseas possessions, and marked the rise of a new power demonstrating its growing strength.
Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William R. Hearst’s New York Journal crossed many ethical boundaries to gain readers and political influence. Their scandalous and exaggerated headlines, manipulation of reality to shape public opinion, and fake news created a journalistic style that came to be known as yellow journalism. To understand the scale of the campaign, after the explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor, the Journal went from 400,000 copies to over one million newspapers sold in just one month.
Spanish ships attacking the U.S.
Their pages were filled with atrocities that the Spanish never committed in Cuba, and they gave the U.S. government the final push it needed to declare war on Spain. But they also invented other hoaxes that stirred hysteria and fear among the American public
One of those hoaxes involved the alleged presence of Spanish ships heading toward the U.S. coast, ready to attack merchant vessels and bombard Charleston, Boston, or even New York. Warships like the Terror, and later the Pelayo, regularly appeared in the galleys of the tabloids. The result was social unrest that forced the U.S. government to take action
Constant alarm on the East Coast
In Charleston, which was indeed a target in the counteroffensive imagined by the Spanish government, a blackout was ordered to make it harder to locate and shell the city from the sea. Similar measures were also discussed or partially implemented in New York, Boston, the naval base in Norfolk (Virginia), Key West (Florida), and Savannah (Georgia).
Across the Atlantic coast, National Guard units were activated and coastal patrols were organized. Watch posts were established, coastal artillery batteries were installed, and the defenses of major cities were reinforced. Evacuation drills were also conducted, and the U.S. Navy deployed ships to ensure constant surveillance of merchant routes...
During the three and a half months the war lasted, none of the attacks predicted by the yellow press ever occurred because, quite simply, they were talking about a ghost ship. There was never a Spanish vessel even remotely close to attacking the United States—except in the minds of Pulitzer and Hearst.
The reality of the Spanish navy
The Spanish navy made only two attempts to send a force by sea to defend Cuba. The first was Admiral Cervera’s squadron, which departed from the port of Cádiz on April 8 with four battleships and three destroyers. The condition of the ships was dire: one of them didn’t even have its main artillery installed. The Terror itself, whose name so inspired the U.S. yellow press, was operating at reduced capacity. Its 75 mm guns were dismounted, and it suffered a boiler failure near Martinique. Once repaired, it was unable to break the blockade of Santiago harbor and barely made it to Puerto Rico, where it was disabled in its first battle.Cervera’s fleet was destroyed by the U.S. Navy on July 3 in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, which decided the war.
The second squadron, commanded by Admiral Cámara, was an attempt to send the cream of the Spanish navy to the U.S. coast to bombard Charleston and force the American fleet surrounding Cuba to return and defend its own shores. Its flagship was the battleship Pelayo, the most powerful ship in the Spanish arsenal. However, the bold plan was eventually abandoned, and part of that fleet was sent instead to defend the Philippines. The voyage ended in the Suez Canal, where the Spanish squadron was held up by a British administrative blockade. In the end, it turned back to secure the defense of the Canary Islands against a possible U.S. attack.
Neither the Terror nor the Pelayo. The ship that caused so much anxiety among the inhabitants of the U.S. coast was a ghost ship, created by the fevered minds of Pulitzer and Hearst.
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