A crippled torpedo boat was drifting toward the Cuban shore. Spanish shells were falling around her, her steering and engines were wrecked, and men lay dead and wounded on deck. Then a 94-foot revenue cutter came hard through the smoke—not to escape the guns, but to pass a towline.
On May 11, 1898, the Revenue Cutter Hudson entered the Battle of Cárdenas Bay as a small harbor vessel temporarily serving with the U.S. Navy. She left it with one of the defining rescues in Coast Guard history. Her captain, First Lieutenant Frank H. Newcomb, and a crew that had never before faced enemy fire showed what disciplined seamanship looks like when every safe option has disappeared.
A small cutter sent into a shooting war
Hudson was not built as a battleship. Completed in 1893, she was the Revenue Cutter Service’s first steel-hulled vessel—a compact, tug-like cutter designed for work around New York Harbor. She measured just over 94 feet, displaced 128 tons, and could make about 12 knots. When war with Spain came in April 1898, the Revenue Cutter Service transferred Hudson to Navy control.
At Norfolk, the cutter received two six-pounder rapid-fire guns, a Colt automatic gun, ammunition, and armor around her pilothouse and deckhouse. Underneath the wartime fittings, though, she remained a shallow-water working vessel. That practical design soon mattered more than size or glamour.
Newcomb brought Hudson south to Key West and joined the blockade off Cuba. By May 9, the cutter was scouting the approaches to Cárdenas Bay, where three Spanish gunboats sheltered behind shoals, channels, and shore batteries. Newcomb sounded the water and found a narrow route that shallow-draft vessels could use at high tide.
Winslow backs toward the guns
Near midday on May 11, Hudson entered the bay with the gunboat USS Wilmington and the torpedo boat USS Winslow. The larger USS Machias drew too much water to follow them through the passage.
Winslow, commanded by Lieutenant John Baptiste Bernadou, was ordered toward the waterfront to investigate the Spanish gunboats. The little torpedo boat backed in, keeping her stern weapons toward the enemy and preserving a route out. But the city’s defenders had already placed range markers in the water. Once Winslow entered the measured zone, concealed shore artillery and the Spanish vessels opened fire.
Shells tore down Winslow’s smokestack and ventilator, pierced her conning tower, and disabled her steering gear and engines. Bernadou was wounded. An onshore wind began pushing the powerless boat toward shallower water and the enemy-held waterfront.
Hudson had been searching the eastern side of the bay when the firing began. Newcomb drove back at full speed, asked permission to assist, and took his cutter into the close action. At 1:50 p.m., according to his official report, Hudson opened with both six-pounders. At 2:20, Bernadou reported that Winslow was totally disabled and asked for a tow.
The first hawser parts
Getting close was only the beginning. Winslow was drifting shoreward through shoal water while Spanish gunners concentrated on her. Newcomb had to place Hudson near enough to pass a heavy line without grounding his own cutter or colliding with the disabled boat.
As Ensign Worth Bagley and sailors on Winslow prepared to receive the line, a shell exploded among them. Bagley and one enlisted sailor were killed immediately; three more men were mortally wounded. Bagley became the first U.S. naval officer killed in the war.
Hudson’s crew got a three-inch hawser across and began to pull, but an incoming shell severed it. Newcomb did not withdraw. He maneuvered deeper into the mud, backing and filling while his engineers answered rapid engine orders. The deck crew passed another line and brought Winslow alongside in tugboat fashion.
This time the tow held. After roughly half an hour in the hottest part of the fire, Hudson hauled the torpedo boat beyond the effective range of the Spanish guns. Her gunners had kept shooting throughout the rescue, firing 135 six-pound shells during the action. Bullet marks and small-projectile scars showed on the cutter, but she suffered no serious damage.
A crew—not one hero—made the rescue
Newcomb’s judgment put Hudson where she needed to be, but the rescue worked because every station answered. Gun crews maintained covering fire without protective shields. Engineers translated bells into precise changes of speed and direction. Deck hands managed heavy line while exposed to enemy fire. Newcomb later wrote that every member of the crew did his duty “cheerfully and without the least hesitation.”
Two Black enlisted men, Steward’s Mate Henry Savage and Cook Moses Jones, fed ammunition to the cutter’s guns. When Congress later honored Hudson’s people, Savage and Jones became the Revenue Cutter Service’s first minority members recognized for heroism in combat.
After the ships cleared the bay, Hudson took Winslow’s dead and wounded aboard and steamed through the night to Key West, arriving shortly after 7 a.m. In a single day, Newcomb’s crew had reconnoitered an enemy harbor, fought a close-range action, rescued a disabled vessel, and delivered casualties for medical care.
The medals of Cárdenas
President William McKinley praised the rescue performed “in the face of a most galling fire” and asked Congress to recognize the crew. Congress awarded Newcomb a gold Congressional medal, Hudson’s officers silver medals, and her enlisted crew bronze medals. The specially struck Cárdenas medals were the only such bravery medals awarded for the Spanish-American War.
The medal matters, but the towline tells the story better. A small cutter used the strengths she actually possessed—shallow draft, responsive machinery, practiced teamwork, and a crew willing to stay at their stations. Hudson did not win her reputation by being the biggest ship in the bay. She won it by going where another vessel could not get out.
That same rescue-first instinct runs through the service’s later history, from Douglas Munro’s boats at Guadalcanal to the everyday courage behind the Coast Guard’s long blue line. For another remarkable Revenue Cutter Service operation from the same year, read the Overland Relief Expedition of 1898, or explore more true sea stories in the Fair Winds journal.
Fair winds—and when the bell rings, make the line fast.