Assassin's Honor (9781561648207) (47 page)

Admiral David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) was the adoptive brother of Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, a famous Civil War naval officer, a formidable leader, senior admiral of the navy from 1870 to 1891, an accomplished author of history and novels, and mentor of Peter Wake.

The maritime wind force scale was designed by Irish-born Royal Navy officer James Beaufort (later Rear Admiral) in 1805. It standardized various previous reporting practices. The scale is still used today and goes from Force One, a dead calm, to Force Twelve, a hurricane, and includes descriptions of waves and effects seen on land. I have been at sea in a Force Nine, gusting to Force Ten, and do not recommend the experience.

In the 1800s about 20 percent of Key West's people came from the Bahamas, many from the Abaco Islands there, which to this day are renowned for their sailors and boat builders.

La Guardia Costera
is Spanish for “coast guard.”

The Yucatán Channel is also known as the Yucatán Strait. The current is extremely fast, having been blown there for hundreds of miles across the Caribbean Sea by the trade winds. I know from personal experience it can be vicious in an opposing wind from the north against that current.

For more about Wake's ordeal when he relieved his captain from command in 1869, read
A Dishonorable Few
.

Wake is using the 1885 version of
Principal Characteristics of Foreign Ships of War
, which is still available in reprint. It was used by all American naval officers. Later, they also used the famous British naval ship books begun annually by
Brassey
in 1886 and
Janes
in 1898.

Xel-ha is about five miles north of the more famous ruins at Tulum.

Blau's rank was the equivalent of a commander, and Eichermann's rank was that of a lieutenant, in the U.S. Navy.

Wake's perilous clandestine mission in Samoa is detailed in
Honors Rendered
.

Many people, particularly foreigners, referred to the U.S. capital as “Washington City” in the 1800s. This practice faded by the turn of the century.

Wake first met José Martí (1853–1895) in 1886 in New York City. This encounter led to a close friendship, for Wake admired the Cuban writer and orator. They also were mutually beneficial to each other, for Wake's intelligence activities inside Cuba coincided with Martí's pro-independence efforts. The initial phase of their relationship is detailed in
The Darkest Shade of Honor
, and their 1888 collaboration on a mission in Havana is described in
Honorable Lies
.

The
Cuerpo Militar de Orden Público
was a Spanish paramilitary police battalion formed in 1875 and consisting of about four hundred men. It was stationed primarily in Havana and charged with maintaining law and order, and also counterinsurgency
operations. There is no record of Colonel Isidro Marrón and his clandestine special section of counterinsurgency agents. Wake and Marrón's unit clashed several times in the 1880s at Cuba, Florida, and New York City.

Senior officialdom in Washington hated the hot, humid summers and did their best to get out, from the inception of the place as the national capital in the 1790s until the 1940s, when modern air conditioning made it more bearable. The annual Congressional recess in August is a legacy of this practice.

For details on how Wake came to receive the legendary French award of the Legion of Honor for his mission inside Africa, read
An Affair of Honor
.

“
Doña
” is the Spanish feminine version of the honorific “
Don
.” It is loosely equivalent to “Lady” in Britain.

Majorca is the largest of the Balearic Islands, a Spanish archipelago in the Mediterranean Sea.

Wake's foreign medals are rare among officers in the U.S. Navy.
An Affair of Honor
describes how he was awarded France's Legion of Honor for his actions in Africa. For details about Wake's mission in Peru, read
A Different Kind of Honor
, which I am proud to report won the highest national literary award in the genre. For his mission inside French Indo-China, read
The Honored Dead
. His exploits in Hawaii are described in
Honors Rendered
.

Antonio Maura (1853–1925) and Práxedes Sagasta (1825–1903) were political leaders in Spain who favored a more lenient attitude toward the Cubans, who were dissatisfied with the Spanish status quo in Cuba. Maura, who was born in Majorca, ended up prime minister five times: 1903–1904, 1907–1909, in 1918, in 1919, and 1921–1922. Many of his descendants are famous. There is no record of Maria Ana Maura y Abad.
Sagasta was prime minister eight times between 1870 and 1903, including during the Spanish-American War, when he had to preside over the loss of Spain's last two possessions in the new world, Cuba and Puerto Rico.

The United States offered to buy Cuba several times from the 1850s to the 1890s. Spain declined each time. Martí did not want Cuba to become part of the United States—he wanted her to be a fully independent nation.

The San Carlos Institute still exists at 516 Duval Street and is a fascinating place to visit, just a few doors down from Jimmy Buffet's famous Margaritaville restaurant. For more information, visit
www.institutosancarlos.org
and be sure to stop by when in Key West.

Martin Herrera and José Poyo were civic leaders in Key West and also leaders of the Cuban pro-independence movement. They were close friends of Martí and are regarded as heroes to this day.

Gardiner's future commanding officer up in Boston is an interesting figure in American naval history. Captain Thomas O. Selfridge, Jr., (1836–1924) was a well-known naval officer who had seen a lot of combat during the Civil War. Unfortunately, that included being aboard three ships when they were sunk by the Confederates:
Cumberland, Cairo
, and
Conestoga
—commanding the last two. This led some in the navy to call him a “Jonah,” or bad-luck sailor. Others said he was in actuality the luckiest man in the navy to have survived at all. After forty-eight years of honorable service, he retired as a rear admiral in 1898.

Useppa's unusual name comes from the island where she was born in 1864. It is near Pine Island, and very close to Patricio Island, which Wake bought in 1883. All of them are on the southwest coast of Florida.

Read
The Darkest Shade of Honor
for more about Useppa's murdered fiancé.

The Duval Hotel no longer exists, but in the 1890s was a premier lodging and dining room located at 117 Duval Street. That's halfway between Greene and Front streets, on the east side of Duval, right next to where Bagatelle Restaurant (one of my favorites) is today.

Sir Julian Pauncefote (1828–1902) was another fascinating character in history, working around the British Empire from the 1860s to the 1880s. His diplomatic career reached its zenith as a very successful British envoy and ambassador to the United States from 1889 until his death in 1902.

You can read more about Wake's friendship with Mu'al-lim Sohkoor in
An Affair of Honor
.

Force Majeure
is the French legal term for an unforeseen event that occurs due to an overwhelming force or act of nature. It has been well established in international maritime law for two hundred years. I have invoked
Force Majeure
myself, as master of a vessel needing refuge at a restricted dock during a storm in 1992. In the particular case described in this story, for Wake to employ it as a ruse was not at all professional or honorable—a notable lapse in his lifelong adherence to honor—and defendable only because Martí's life was hanging in the balance.

The code flags used are from the international code set of 1890. The signal meanings have changed since then.

Heliographs have been used as signaling devises by armies and navies from the 1700s until the modern era. Today, most people
usually have a perfect
ad hoc
heliograph with them—a CD or DVD—in case of emergency. It can be used to signal for help by reflecting the sun and can be easily seen by searching aircraft or vessels.

In my not so humble opinion, which is echoed by Wake, Matusalem is still the finest sipping rum of Cuba. Visit
www.matusalem.com
to learn more.

Passage Key Channel is still a tough one for deeper draft vessels. The currents there constantly shift the shoals.

Egmont Key has some interesting historical structures still existing and is well worth a visit—though it is only accessible by boat.

The town of St. Petersburg was founded in 1888 by Pyotr Alexeyevitch Dementyev, a Russian immigrant who went by Peter Demens when he got to Florida. Demens and his friend John Williams brought the railroad to the town. By 1892 it had a population of around three hundred.

The two large piers of Port Tampa are still in operation, but look nothing like they did in 1892, having been modernized. The two hotels on the wharves no longer exist. Much of the area has been landfilled in—Mr. Plant would hardly recognize it.

The nearby town of Port Tampa has several homes and buildings from the 1890s and a great little library. Its most celebrated former resident is the professional wrestler Hulk Hogan (Terry Gene Bollea), who grew up there. Just south of the port, Picnic Island still has the beach park (now a county park) that Henry Plant created for his workers and the tourists at his hotels.

A ship's donkey engine is a small engine used for powering
deck winches—weighing anchor, cargo hauling, line hauling, etc.

The term “Goat Locker” is from the early days of sail when chickens and goats (and the occasional pig) were kept aboard ship for fresh food. They lived forward in the ship, near the senior petty officers' quarters—hence the name. To this day, few aboard a warship are anything but respectful to a senior petty officer, for none want the retribution of those grizzled salts.

In 1892, there were only two bridges across the Hillsborough River at Tampa—the Lafayette Street Bridge for vehicular traffic and the railroad bridge. Both had been recently built, and both still exist in modern forms. Lafayette Street is now Kennedy Boulevard.

In the 1890s, Ybor City was reachable by road, steam train car, and electric street car. It is still connected with downtown Tampa by an electric railway, which is great fun to ride.

This magnificent building still exists as a focal point of the University of Tampa. It is also an iconic image of the city of Tampa. It is very much worth a visit to the museum there to get a glimpse into the lifestyle of the elite during the “Gilded Age.”

A landau was a carriage with two bench seats for passengers and a forward seat for the driver and footman. Many had a convertible canvas top. Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, still travels on state occasions in a landau. Of course, hers is quite ornate.

Vicente Martinez Ybor (1818–1896), the founder of Ybor City in 1886, is still revered as a community leader and progressive
businessman whose ideas regarding employee benefits were well ahead of his time. Born in Spain, he moved to Cuba, and later immigrated to the United States in 1869, just before the Spanish authorities could arrest him for supporting the Cuban rebel movement. A self-made success, he was the inspiration for many Cubans and Italians who came to Ybor City to start a new life.

The Ybor Cigar Factory building was built of brick due to lessons learned in the Great Fire of 1886 in Key West—(read
The Darkest Shade of Honor
)—and still exists. Renovated to its original exterior appearance, it now belongs to the Church of Scientology.

Bolita
(Spanish for “little ball”) is a traditional Cuban lottery gambling game where one hundred small balls, each with a different number, are tossed around in a sack. This system is prone to cheating by weighing the balls and other means. The number drawn out is the winner. The number three ball Wake chose was the traditional lucky number for sailors.
Bolita
was and is illegal in Florida, and became a moneymaking vice for the Mafia in Tampa for decades. Since Florida began its official state lottery,
bolita
isn't as popular as it once was.

Many Cubans came from Galician families. Galicia is the area of northwest Spain.

Paulina and Ruperto Pedroso were born in the mid-1840s in Pinar del Rio (the western end of Cuba) and moved to Havana in 1860. Trained as cigar workers, they subsequently immigrated to Key West and came to Ybor City in the late 1880s. Martí always stayed at their home when visiting the Tampa/Ybor City area, and considered the childless black couple to be his surrogate parents. Throughout the 1890s, they were leaders of the independence movement. They returned to Cuba in 1910 and lived in a rent-free home for the rest of their lives, courtesy of the Cuban people who appreciated their work for Martí. Paulina died in 1925. The house in Ybor City no longer exists,
but the plot of land where it stood is a private park dedicated to José Martí and Cuba.