In the Spanish-American War, Admiral Dewey was able to enter Manila Bay and destroy the Spanish squadron there because its commander “had repeatedly asked for torpedoes (mines) from Madrid, but had received none and his attempts to make them had been failures.”[20] It was the mine-fields and not the feeble shore batteries that kept Sampson’s fleet out of Havana and Santiago. At Guantanamo, now a United States naval station, the _Texas_ and the _Marblehead_ each “struck her propeller against a contact mine, which failed to explode only because it was incrusted with a thick growth of barnacles. Gratitude for the vessels’ escape may fairly be divided between divine care to which the gallant and devout Captain Philip attributed it in his report, and the Spaniards’ neglect to maintain a proper inspection of these defenses. A number of these torpedoes, which were of French manufacture, and contained forty-six and a half kilograms (one hundred and two pounds) of guncotton, were afterward dragged up in the channel.”[21] [Illustration: From Scharf’s History of the Confederate States Navy. A Confederate “Buoyant Torpedo” or Contact-mine.] At the siege of Port Arthur in 1904, the Japanese fleet planted mines outside the harbor to keep the Russians in, and the Russians came out and planted mines of their own to entrap the blockaders. While engaged in this work, the Russian mine-layer _Yenisei_ had a mine which had just been lowered through her specially constructed sternports thrown by a wave against her rudder, and was blown to atoms by the consequent explosion of three hundred more in her hold. The flagship _Petropavlosk_, returning from a sortie on April 13, struck a Japanese contact-mine and went down with the loss of six hundred men, including Vereshchagin, the famous painter of war-scenes, and Admiral Makaroff, who was not only the commander but the heart and soul of the Russian fleet.[22] A month later, another mine cost the Japanese their finest battleship, the _Hatsuse_. Nor was the loss confined either to the belligerents or to the duration of the war. Nearly one hundred Chinese and other neutral merchant vessels were sunk by some of the many mines torn loose from their anchors by storms to drift, the least noticeable and most terrible of derelicts, over all the seas of the Far East, long after peace was declared.