Before we had fairly come to anchor, a great crowd had assembled on the pier nearest to us, and in less than five minutes half a dozen small boats were alongside, filled with people anxious to know whether we had brought food and when we would begin to distribute it. Many of them said that they had not tasted bread in weeks, and all agreed that there was nothing to eat in the city except rice, and very little of that. We told them that we should begin discharging the cargo of the _State of Texas_ early on the following morning and should be in a position to feed ten thousand people within the next twenty-four hours. The normal population of the city at that time was about fifty thousand, but a large part of it had fled to Caney and other suburban villages to escape the bombardment, and more than half the houses were closed and deserted. General Shafter had entered the city with a single regiment--the Ninth Infantry--at noon, and had raised the American flag over the palace of the Spanish governor. CHAPTER XV THE CAPTURED CITY We lay at anchor all Sunday night off the foot of the street known as Calle Baja de la Marina, and early on Monday morning steamed up to the most spacious and convenient pier in the city, made fast our lines, and began to discharge cargo. The dock and warehouse facilities of Santiago are fairly good. They are not so extensive as those of an American seaport of equal importance, but so far as they go they leave little to be desired. The pier at which the _State of Texas_ lay was spacious and well built; an iron tramway ran from it to the customs warehouse, and, with the help of one hundred stevedores, Mr. Warner, of Miss Barton's staff, found it possible to unload and store from three hundred and twenty-five to three hundred and fifty tons of foodstuffs per day. As soon as the steamer had made fast her lines a great crowd of forlorn-looking men and children, clothed in the loose, dirty white-cotton shirts and trousers and battered straw hats which make up the costume of the lower classes, assembled on the pier to stare at the newcomers and watch the unloading of the ship. They were of all ages and complexions, from coal-black, grizzle-headed old negroes leaning on canes to half-starved and half-naked Cuban children, whose tallowy faces and distended abdomens were unmistakable evidences of fever and famine. They were not, as a rule, emaciated, nor did they seem to be in the last stages of starvation; but the eagerness with which they crowded about the open ports of the steamer, and watched the bags of beans, rice, and corn-meal as they were brought out by the stevedores and placed on the little flat-cars of the tramway, showed that at least they were desperately hungry. Now and then a few beans, or a few grains of rice, would escape from one of the bags through a small rip or tear, and in an instant half a dozen little children would be scrambling for them,