After passing Cayo Smith, the sunken collier _Merrimac_, and the dismantled wreck of the _Reina Mercedes_, we turned abruptly to the left, opposite the Estrella battery, and entered a deep, sheltered cove, directly behind the Morro promontory and almost under the massive walls of the castle itself. Landing at a little wooden pier on the northern side of the miniature bay, I walked up to the road leading to the Estrella battery, and there stopped and looked about me. The cove was completely shut in by high hills, and the only road or path leading out of it, so far as I could see, was the one on which I stood. This began, apparently, at the Estrella battery, ran around the head of the cove, and then, turning to the right, climbed the almost precipitous side of the Morro promontory, in a long, steep slant, to a height of one hundred and fifty feet. There it made another turn which carried it out of sight behind a buttress of rock under the northwestern corner of the castle. Near the mouth of the cove, on my right, rose the white, crenellated, half-ruined wall of the Estrella battery--a dilapidated open stone fort of the eighteenth century, which contained no guns, and which, judging from its appearance, had long been abandoned. It occupied, however, a very strong position, and if the Spaniards had had any energy or enterprise they would have put it in repair and mounted in it a modern mortar which lay on a couple of skids near the pier, and two or three small rapid-fire guns which they might have obtained from one of Admiral Cervera's cruisers. Antiquated and obsolete as it was, it might then have been of some use. Near the head of the cove was an old ordnance storehouse, or magazine, which proved upon examination to contain nothing more interesting than a few ancient gun-carriages, a lot of solid six-inch projectiles, an assortment of rammers and spongers for muzzle-loading cannon, and a few wooden boxes of brass-jacketed cartridges for Remington rifles. Three long smooth-bore iron culverins lay on the ground between this magazine and the pier, but they had not been fired, apparently, in a century, and were so eaten and pitted by rust that I could not find on them any trace of inscription or date. There was nothing really useful, effective, or modern, either in the Estrella battery or in the magazine, except the Remington rifle-cartridges and the unmounted mortar.