“Remember the Maine!”
Gunners Mate Clarence E. Safford, USN
By William F. Hanna
It’s unlikely that Gunners Mate First Class Clarence E. Safford even heard the explosion that killed him and approximately 259 of his shipmates, but almost everyone else within miles of Havana, Cuba knew that a disaster was unfolding in the city. Although the February sunset had brought darkness hours before, the heavens were fully lighted by the flames billowing up from Havana’s waterfront district. Buildings shook and residents poured into the streets even as a shower of fiery debris fell from the sky.
These were the last minutes of the USS Maine as it burned and settled into the mud of Havana Harbor. Commissioned in September 1895 as an armored cruiser, the ship, at 324-feet in length, and with a beam of 57-feet, was up to that time the largest vessel ever built in a U.S. shipyard. Assigned to the U.S. Navy’s North Atlantic Squadron the ship was based in Norfolk, Virginia, from where it regularly patrolled the East Coast of the U.S. as well as the waters of the Caribbean. The ship had arrived in Havana on January 25, 1898, with orders to monitor the tense political situation that existed between Spain and its Cuban colony. Ostensibly a “friendly visit,” the ship’s mission was to look after U.S. interests as well as to prevent the loss of American lives and property should widespread violence break out.
The Maine had been berthed in Havana for three weeks before the explosion destroyed it. With tensions in the city running high, Captain Charles Sigsbee had prohibited his sailors from taking shore leave, and thus all or most of the crew was aboard on the evening of February 15, 1898. The enlisted men’s quarters were located in the forward part of the vessel, close to where munitions for the largest guns were stored. That was where the young sailors were reading or talking or sleeping at 9:40 P.M., when more than five tons of explosives detonated nearby. The forward part of the ship was completely destroyed, and of the full complement of 355 sailors and marines aboard, 266 — three quarters — either perished in the blast or drowned in the aftermath.
A navy board of inquiry subsequently blamed the tragedy on an explosive mine allegedly attached to the bottom of the ship. This conclusion has been hotly debated over the past century, but in 1898 it boosted the credibility of both the “yellow press” as well as imperialists in Congress, and by the end of April 1898 the U.S. was at war with Spain.
As the explosion of the Maine echoed across oceans and continents news of the tragedy spread, and soon the names of the dead and missing reached the newspapers. Two days after the disaster, the Taunton Daily Gazette reported that Clarence E. Safford of this city was among the Maine’s crew and was “probably lost.” Confirmation came soon after. Originally from Central Massachusetts, Charles Safford and his sons, Clarence and William, had moved to Taunton in 1890. A house painter with considerable experience, Charles quickly became a familiar figure among those in the local building trades. That summer, his son Clarence wanted to enlist in the navy but because of his age needed his father’s written, notarized permission to do so. On July 10, 1890, Charles dutifully accompanied the boy to the Newport, R.I. Naval Training Station and signed a paper allowing him to enter the navy’s apprentice program to serve a five-year enlistment.
The navy’s apprentice system accepted boys as young as 14, so at 16 years, 10 months Clarence was not the youngest recruit on the base. It’s likely that at 5 feet, 5 ½ inches tall and 111 pounds, neither was he the biggest. His enlistment record, now kept at the National Archives, tells us that he had light brown hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion. The initial naval apprentice training lasted ten months. The boys lived aboard ships in Newport Harbor unless there was an influx of recruits and then some were assigned to a tent city on the base. No doubt that whenever Clarence got a weekend pass, he made the short trip back to Taunton to see his father and brother.
During his five-year enlistment as an apprentice, Clarence spent most of his time on routine assignments and in specialized training programs. He performed well during torpedo training at Newport and he also rotated through several navy receiving ships on the East Coast. He apparently enjoyed navy life; he grew 2 ½ inches and gained 16 pounds in his time as an apprentice sailor. His evaluations, with notations of only a few minor rule infractions, were good. Instead of accepting his discharge as scheduled in July 1895, he reenlisted as a full-fledged sailor for another three years.
As he looked forward to continuing his navy career, Clarence received the rating of Seaman Gunner. His record specifically noted a recommendation that he be assigned to torpedo work, and there was another notation cautioning that he was physically disqualified from diving. Although his service record does not explain the disqualification, it may have resulted from his less than perfect eyesight, a condition that pre-existed his navy career.
Two weeks after reenlisting, Clarence was assigned to the USS Maine as a Gunners Mate 2nd Class. The heavily armed Maine carried four torpedo tubes but we don’t know where Clarence reported when the ship’s crew was called to battle stations. Although the ship had recently taken her place in the North Atlantic Squadron, the Maine had been plagued by a nine-year series of construction delays extending back to 1888. By September 1895, when she finally sailed from her berth at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, she was already obsolete.
As one of the first members of the ship’s crew, Clarence would have been familiar with the entire length of the East Coast, patrolling from Maine to the Caribbean. In 1897, as tension between the U.S. and Spain increased over Cuba, all eyes turned southward. In January 1898 the ship was first sent to Key West, Florida and then to Havana. It was there, on the fifteenth of February that misfortune struck.
Confusion reigned in Havana for several days after the disaster, and even today historical sources differ on the number of crew members who were killed and wounded, as well as on the number of bodies that were actually recovered. Most of the bodies taken from the wreck or pulled from the harbor could not be identified, and the violence of the explosion made the recovery of other victims impossible. It seems that the best estimate is that by April 3, seven weeks after the explosion, 166 dead had been buried in Havana’s Colon Cemetery, while another 24–27 victims were buried in Key West, Florida.
The Spanish-American War, fought over ten weeks from April to August 1898, interrupted work on the wreck of the Maine. At its close, plans were made to repatriate the bodies of the sailors buried in Havana. After months of deliberations, and upon orders of President William McKinley, the USS Texas was dispatched to Havana in December 1899 to retrieve the disinterred bodies of the Maine’s crew. Arriving back at Hampton Roads, Virginia on Christmas Day, the 151 coffins holding 166 men were brought to Washington, D.C. and buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on December 28, 1899.
The wreck of the Maine stayed in the mud of Havana Harbor for more than a decade as U.S., Spanish and Cuban authorities struggled to find a successful strategy for its removal. Finally, after years of abortive plans, authorities decided to try to refloat the wreck so that it could be removed from the harbor and either salvaged or scuttled. Preliminary work began in the fall of 1910 and in early 1911 engineers built a cofferdam around the ship. As the water was slowly pumped out of the dam the devastation wrought by the explosion became fully visible, as did the remains of more than 75 crew members.
The efforts to remove the Maine continued until March 1912, when loose pieces of wreckage were finally cleared from the harbor and the stern portion of the ship was refloated. On March 16, amid considerable pomp and ceremony, two U.S. warships, escorted by others, towed the wreck of the Maine beyond the Havana breakwater and into the open ocean. She was scuttled four miles out to sea in more than 3,500 feet of water.
Following closely behind during the Maine’s voyage to its grave was the USS North Carolina. Aboard were 34 coffins holding the remains of the crew members discovered during the salvage operation. They, like their lost shipmates of more than a decade before, were interred with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on March 20, 1912.
Today the salvaged mast of the USS Maine stands above Section 24 at Arlington, while beneath the beautifully manicured lawn rest the sailors who died so long ago. Cemetery officials state that the bodies of 229 crewmen are buried there, but that is just the best estimate and most of the dead are unidentified.
Somewhere there — or in Key West, or perhaps at sea — rests Gunners Mate 1st Class Clarence E. Safford, whose father had taken him from Taunton to Newport to enlist in the navy as a 16-year old. Dead himself less than a year after Clarence was killed, Charles Safford left only his youngest son, William, still living in Taunton. He died there in 1954 and is buried in the Westville Cemetery next to the body of his wife Violet. Across town, in St. Joseph’s Cemetery, rest the remains of their baby, just 17-days old when he died in 1901. They had named him Clarence, in memory of the uncle he would never know.
