Spanish Prisoners of War (from Literature and Life)

One summer a pair of American cruisers arrived in Portsmouth, unloading hundreds of Spanish soldiers and sailors captured after Santiago de Cuba fell. The narrator, more intrigued by the scene’s poetic resonance than its brutality, rows out from a nearby summer colony to see the hulking, paint‑streaked ship anchored in the sparkling Piscataqua River. The bright New England sunshine highlights the stark contrast between the gleaming water and the grim vessel.

Reaching the narrow channel that leads to the island prison, he finds a landscape of rolling meadows, orchards brushing the shore, and weather‑worn cottages perched on breezy knolls. The tidy New England scenery reminds him of his own Catalan fishing villages, stirring a bittersweet homesickness. Yet amid this quiet beauty he reflects on the absurdity of war, where ordinary men become caught up in a conflict far removed from their own lives, imprisoned not out of hatred but as the cold by‑product of strategy.