It was on May 11, 1898, that Cardenas Bay became the scene of an engagement between blockading vessels of the United States fleet and the Spanish batteries, in which Ensign Worth Badgley was killed, he being the first officer to lose his life in the war. The exportation of sugar from the rich lands tributary to this bay has always given Cardenas importance as a shipping point and rendered it, for a city of only 30,000, quite a wealthy and prosperous community. Many beautiful residences have been built along its stately avenues, and the great henequen industry recently started in the great fields to the west will add, undoubtedly, to the wealth of the locality. Splendid stone warehouses line the shore for a mile or more, with a capacity sufficient to hold in storage while necessary the enormous crop of sugar that is produced in the province. The presence of naphtha and many surface indications of oil deposits south and east of the City of Cardenas have rendered that section attractive as a field of exploration. Up to the present time, however, no paying wells have been found, although many expert oil men are still confident that the entire district from Cardenas to Itabo, and even further east, will some day prove a valuable field for petroleum products. Midway between Cardenas and the City of Matanzas, just north of the beautiful highway connecting these two cities, rises a range of low serpentine hills, whose altitude is approximately five hundred feet. These peculiarly symmetrical, round, loaf-like elevations above the level surface of the surrounding country, are covered with a short scrubby growth of thorny brush, and several varieties of maguey, of the century plant family. Nothing else will grow on these serpentine hills; hence in most respects they are decidedly unattractive. Since the beginning of the international war, however, and the great demand for chrome, some local mineralogists noted that little streams and rivulets running down these hills left deposits of a peculiar black, glistening sand. This sand, when analyzed, proved to come from the erosion of chromite, the mineral so much in demand by the smelting industry of the United States for hardening steel. In the spring of 1918 two well-known mining engineers and geologists, with instructions from Washington, visited several of these serpentine hills and found valuable deposits of chromite that will probably furnish a very profitable source of this much sought-for mineral and add greatly to the mining industry of this province.