The points selected for the disembarkation of the army and the landing of supplies were the best, perhaps, that could be found between Santiago harbor and Guantanamo Bay; but they were little more, nevertheless, than shallow notches in the coast-line, which afforded neither anchorage nor shelter from the prevailing wind. There was one small pier erected by the Spanish-American Iron Company at Daiquiri, but at Siboney there were no landing facilities whatever, and the strip of beach at the bottom of the wedge-shaped notch in the precipitous wall of the coast was hardly more than one hundred yards in length. The water deepened so suddenly and abruptly at a distance of fifty yards from the shore that there was practically no anchorage, and General Shafter's fleet of more than thirty transports had to lie in what was virtually an open roadstead and drift back and forth with the currents and tides. The prevailing winds were from the east and southeast, and the long swell which rolled in from the Caribbean Sea broke in heavy and at times dangerous surf upon the narrow strip of unsheltered beach where the army had to land. All of these local conditions were known, or might have been known, to General Shafter before he left Tampa; but when he arrived off the coast they seemed to take him wholly by surprise. He had brought with him neither surf-boats, nor steam-launches, nor suitable lighters, nor materials with which to construct a pier. How he ever would have disembarked his command without the assistance of the navy, I do not know. I doubt whether a landing could have been effected at all. Fortunately, the navy was at hand, and its small boats and steam-launches, manned by officers and sailors from the fleet, landed the whole army through the surf with the loss of only two men. The navy then retired from the scene of action, and General Shafter was left to his own devices--and deplorably weak and ineffective they proved to be.