Even officers
about to sail away were not allowed to telegraph their wives and
families. If they had a pre-arranged code, whereby a message could be
written in plain English, there was no way to stop their transmission.
Foreign messages were watched with eagle eyes and many and many a one
was gently consigned to the pigeon hole, when the contents and meaning
were not plain.
From Key West (which was shortly afterwards placed in my charge) there
ran the cable to Havana, and this line was the subject of an
extraordinarily strict espionage; not a message being allowed to pass
over it that was not perfectly plain in its meaning. Mr. J. W. Atkins
was sworn in as my assistant at Key West, and thus I had the whole state
of Florida under my control. All the lines from the southern part of the
state converge to Jacksonville, and not a message could go from a point
within the state to one out of it without first passing under the
scrutiny of either myself or one of my sworn assistants.
My office was in H. B. Plant's Tampa Bay hotel, and there, every day,
from seven A.
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