4. The climate is unhealthful, and unless men from the North are well fed, suitably clothed, securely sheltered, and furnished with boiled water for drinking purposes, they are almost certain to suffer from calenture, the characteristic fever of the region, as well as from yellow fever and dysentery. This, in the briefest possible summary, is the information that General Shafter had, or might have had, before he sailed from Tampa. What preparation did he make to meet the difficulties suggested by this knowledge, and how far is the influence of it to be traced in the organization and equipment of his command? Take, first, the problem of disembarking an army of sixteen thousand men, with the supplies necessary for its maintenance, on an unsheltered coast. In 1847, when General Scott had in contemplation the landing of an army of twelve thousand men on the open beach at Vera Cruz, he caused sixty-seven surf-boats to be built for that particular service, each of them capable of holding from seventy to eighty men. Every detail of the disembarkation had been carefully considered and planned; every contingency that could be foreseen had been provided for; and the landing was successfully made in the course of two or three hours, without a single error or accident. When General Shafter sailed from Tampa, on June 14, with an army considerably larger than that of General Scott, his equipment for disembarkation on an exposed, surf-beaten coast consisted, according to his own report, of only two scows! One of these went adrift at sea, and the loss of it, the general says, "proved to be very serious and was greatly felt." I don't wonder! Two scows, for an army of sixteen thousand men and ten or fifteen ship-loads of supplies, was a sufficiently economical allowance; and when that number was reduced by half, and a whole army-corps became dependent upon one scow, I am not surprised to learn that "the disembarkation was delayed and embarrassed." There is a reference in the report to certain "lighters sent by the quartermaster's department," and intended, apparently, for use on the Cuban coast; but when and by what route they were "sent" does not appear, and inasmuch as they were lost at sea before they came into General Shafter's control, they can hardly be regarded as a part of his equipment. All that he had with him was this flotilla of two scows. I heard vague reports of a pontoon-train stowed away under hundreds of tons of other stuff in the hold of one of the transports; but whether it was intended to supplement the flotilla of scows, or to be employed in the bridging of rivers, I am unable to say. I do not think it was ever unloaded in Cuba, and I am quite sure that it never was used.