Just as the torpedoing of the _Lusitania_ by the Germans stirred the whole world, so the sinking of the American flagship _Maine_ in Havana harbour on February 18, 1898, stirred the people of the United States and led to the war with Spain. A giant explosion in the middle of the night carried the American battleship to the bottom with 266 officers and men, and it was asserted that the Spaniards had deliberately blown her up. The result was a war in which Spain lost Cuba and the Philippines. Long years afterwards, in 1910, Congress voted a sum of £60,000 and the work of investigating the wrecked battleship was put in hand. Tackling their task in a most masterly manner, the engineers decided to enclose the whole wreck in one huge coffer-dam built of steel piles driven down through the mud until they were embedded 13 feet in the solid clay. As the wreck lay in 37 feet of water, with 20 feet of mud below that, the piles would emerge 5 feet above the surface of the sea, providing a wall too high for the water to wash over. Knowing full well that they would find it difficult to create a plain circle of piles round the ship to withstand the pressure of the sea, the engineers decided to build what really amounted to a series of gigantic barrels, standing on end in the sea with their sides touching. These barrels, twenty-two in number, varied between 40 feet and 50 feet across. The staves of the barrels were formed by the steel piles which were made to interlock as they were driven in side by side, and where the barrels, or caissions, touched, further piles were driven to enclose the space and strengthen the junction. For months the hammer-blows of the pile drivers resounded over the harbour, and at last the coffer-dam--a most marvellous piece of work--was finished and filled with dredged clay. Within a year the salvage operations were completed at a cost of £135,000. The experts watched with keen eyes as the pumps lowered the water within the coffer-dam and the wreck slowly emerged from the slime. There the battleship lay, a twisted mass of metal, and, before patching up the afterpart and taking it out on March 16, 1912, to bury in the broad Atlantic, the specialists held their inquest, striving to discover whether the explosion that sank her was caused from inside or outside. Such a thing after a ship has been at the bottom for over twelve years is almost impossible to determine. It was said that the explosion came from outside, but the doubt will always exist that the Spanish American War may have been due to a grave error on the part of America, and that the _Maine_ instead of being blown up by the Spaniards, was destroyed by the spontaneous combustion of the explosives in her magazines, just as French, Japanese and British warships have been destroyed in the same accidental manner. INDEX Aberdeen, _Milwaukee_ wrecked near, 181. Accidents rare in salvage work, 8. Admiralty divers and _Laurentic_, 65–78.