Meantime the Spaniards, alive to the dangers which our success has brought to all slaveholding countries, and fully aware of the wishes, if not of the plottings of the Creoles, are themselves looking to the slaves as allies for the coming struggle. The Captain-General, himself, declared within the week of our visit, that the time could not now be far distant when Spain would voluntarily decree the emancipation of her slaves. The negroes thus stand between two chances of freedom. An attempt at revolution, therefore, is certain to insure their emancipation; and that side will probably be successful, which secures their confidence, and thus their aid. Whether a rising of the Creoles, such as many of them now hope to bring about at some not very distant period, would or would not be successful, may admit of doubt; but it would seem that in either event, slavery in Cuba—the cruelest system of slavery now in existence—is henceforth doomed. Our Proclamation of Emancipation bore wider blessings than they knew who signed it. See appendix (D.) * * * * * All along the coast we had been hearing of the “Stonewall,” and, truth to tell, there seemed to have been no small panic about her.[25] She had recently been surrendered to the Spanish authorities, and was lying in the harbor of Havanna. Our party went on board and inspected her. Captain Merryman gave it as his opinion (and the Spanish naval authorities agreed with him), that a single one of our first-class wooden ships of war could have sunk her. The Rebel game of brag had been played in her case, even more conspicuously than usual, and an abortion of wood and iron that could neither sail, steam nor fight, and was only fit for decoying unarmed and unsuspecting merchantmen under her guns, had been magnified into an iron-clad, before which our whole South-Atlantic squadron was to be swept away! * * * * *