Just 31 years ago, while Rough Riders drilled in Texas, German bands played "Dolly Gray" and U. S. Volunteers sweated in blue flannel shirts and tubular blanket rolls, the name of the Dutch island of Curaçao appeared in bold headlines. One hot morning, the U. S. Consul at Curaçao, gazing casually from his bedroom window found the normally peaceful harbor black with steel-snouted, round-turreted warships.
Hatless, breathless, he rushed to the cable office and signaled the world that the Spanish battle fleet of Admiral Cervera, long sought, imminently expected by nervous mamas at U. S. bathing beaches, had been found. The Spanish gunboats coaled and departed to face U. S. Admiral Schley. U. S. citizens looked for Curaçao in their atlases, found it off the coast of Venezuela, a tiny button in the bottom of the Caribbean.
For the next three decades Curaçao was no more, to the average citizen, than the name of a liqueur—an infusion of bitter orange peel so easily made and so eminently potable that to the fury of Dutch sour-orange growers, it is successfully imitated in nearly every country in the world.
Last week U. S. householders rethumbed their atlases, relocated the bottom button of the Caribbean. In Willemstad Harbor, Curaçao, a U. S. ship had been captured, Curacao's Dutch Governor had been kidnaped.
Capt. A. T. Morris of the American steamer Maracaibo, leaned over the ship's rail smoking an evening pipe, gazing at the placid harbor of Willemstad, Curaçao. A thin sliver of moon hung over the tanks of the Royal Dutch oil refinery on shore, shone on the yellow plaster façade of the Governor's Palace.