There was a shade of significance in the few words of the Admiral that he would not go ashore until he must.  He has from the first been persistent in staying at Manila.  There has been nothing that could induce him to abandon in person the prize won May 1st.  His order from the President was to destroy the Spanish fleet.  It was given on the first day of the legal existence of the war, counting the day gained, in crossing the Pacific Ocean from the United States to the Philippines, when the 180th degree of longitude west from Greenwich is reached and reckoned.  It was thus the President held back when the war was on; and the next day after Dewey got the order at Hongkong he was on the way.  The Spaniards at Manila could not have been more astonished at Dewey’s way of doing, if they had all been struck by lightning under a clear sky.  They had no occasion to be “surprised,” having the cable in daily communication with Madrid, and, more than that, a Manila paper of the last day of April contained an item of real news—­the biggest news item ever published in that town!  It was from a point on the western coast of the island of Luzon, and the substance of it that four vessels that seemed to be men-of-war, had been sighted going south, and supposed to be the American fleet.

What did the Spaniards suppose the American fleet they knew well had left Hongkong was going south for?  If Admiral Dewey had been a commonplace man he would have paused and held a council of war nigh the huge rock Corregidor at the mouth of Manila Bay.  There is a channel on either side of that island, and both were reputed to be guarded by torpedoes.  The Spaniards had an enormous stock of munitions of war—­modern German guns enough to have riddled the fleet of American cruisers—­and why did they not have torpedoes?  They had the Mauser rifle, which has wonderful range, and ten millions of smokeless powder cartridges.  Marksmen could sweep the decks of a ship with Mausers at the distance of a mile, and with the smokeless cartridges it would have been mere conjecture where the sharpshooters were located.  There are rows of armor-piercing steel projectiles from Germany still standing around rusting in the Spanish batteries, and they never did any more than they are doing.  It is said—­and there is every probability of the truth of the story—­that some of these bolts would not fit any gun the Spaniards had mounted.  The Admiral paid no attention to the big rock and the alleged torpedoes, but steamed up the bay near the city where the Spaniards were sleeping.  He was hunting the fleet he was ordered to remove, and found it very early in the morning.  Still the thunder of his guns seems to thrill and electrify the air over the bay, and shake the city; and the echoes to ring around the world, there is no question—­not so much because the Americans won a naval victory without a parallel, as that Dewey improved the occasion, showing that he put brains into his business.