The delivery of the Brazilian battleship “Riachuelo” in 1883 and the acquisition of other modern armored warships from Europe by Brazil, Argentina and Chile shortly afterwards, alarmed the United Sates government because the Brazilian Navy was now the most powerful in the Americas. The Naval Advisory Board now confronted with the concrete possibility of hostile ships operating off the American coast, began planning for ships to protect it in 1884. The ships had to fit within existing docks and had to have a shallow draft to enable them to use all the major American ports.

The U.S.S. Maine was commissioned in l895, and was the first U.S. Navy ship to be named after the state of Maine. She was built by the New York Naval Shipyard, Brooklyn, New York, at a cost of $4,677,788.75 and launched on Nov. 18, 1890. Her displacement was 6,682 tons, her length was 324 feet, her beam 57 feet, and her draft 2 feet, and she had an output of more than 9,000 horsepower.

Maine was the largest vessel built in a U.S. Navy yard up to that time. She and her nearsister ship, Texas, reflected the latest European naval developments. The Maine dispensed with full masts tanks due to the increased reliability of steam engines by the time of her construction. Despite these advances, Maine was out of date by the time she entered service due to her protracted construction period and changes in the role of ships of her type, naval tactics and technology.

The Maine was sent to protect U.S. interests during the Cuban revolt against Spain and the photograph shows her entering Havana harbor on Jan. 25, 1898. Three weeks later, on Feb. 15, without warning, she suddenly exploded and sank quickly, killing nearly three quarters of her crew — 374 officers and men were the full complement. The cause and responsibility for her sinking remained unclear after a board of inquiry investigated.

Nevertheless, popular opinion in the U.S., fanned by inflammatory articles by William Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, blamed Spain. The phrase, “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain,” became a rallying cry for action, which came with the Spanish-American War later that year. While not a direct cause for action, it served as a catalyst, accelerating the approach to a diplomatic impasse between the U.S. and Spain.

The cause of the sinking remains a subject of speculation. In 1898, the consensus of the Naval Board was that the Maine was destroyed by an external explosion from a mine. However, the validity of this has been challenged by George W. Melville, a Naval chief engineer, who proposed that a more likely cause was from a magazine explosion within the vessel. The Navy’s leading ordnance expert, Philip R. Alger took this theory further by suggesting that the magazines were ignited by a spontaneous fire in a coal bunker. The coal used in the Maine was bituminous coal. The nature of this is that it burns at a high temperatures and is known for releasing firedamp, a gas that is prone to spontaneous explosions. This was a more likely cause of the explosion rather than the initial hypothesis of a mine.