Forget the Maine

On the night of Feb. 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine mysteriously exploded and sank in Havana Harbor, where it had gone to protect American lives during the Cuban revolt against Spanish rule. Out of 354 men aboard the Maine, 260 died. Though the Spanish denied any responsibility, jingoistic U.S. newspapers charged that a Spanish mine had caused the explosion. "Destruction of the Maine was the work of an enemy," charged William Randolph Hearst's newly founded New York Journal as it offered a $50,000 reward for conviction of whoever had done the deed. Scarcely two months later, the U.S. declared war on Spain, and one of its battle cries was "Remember the Maine!"

Last week Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, 76, head of the Navy's nuclear-propulsion department, said it was all an accident. In his preface to a 173-page book entitled How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed, which is based on a resurvey of the evidence by two prominent Navy scientists, Rickover argues that there is no sign of the kind of "rupture or deformation which would have resulted from a contact mine." What did cause the blast? Probably, says Rickover, a spontaneous combustion of bituminous coal in the Maine's fuel hold, and then an explosion of its ammunition.

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