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unusual facts about Portsmouth Naval Prison


Pascual Cervera y Topete

After the destruction of his fleet, Cervera was briefly imprisoned at Camp Long in the United States with his surviving officers before being returned to Spain.


Battle of Santiago de Cuba

The 1,612 Spanish sailors rescued, including Admiral Cervera, were sent to Seavey's Island at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, where they were confined at Camp Long from July 11, 1898 until mid-September 1898.

John R. Rathom

Rathom waited until just ten days before the election to go public with new and outrageous charges against Roosevelt and another high-profile Navy official, Thomas Mott Osborne, Commandant of Portsmouth Naval Prison, former warden of Sing Sing and the most famous penal reformer of the era.

Seavey's Island

In 1908, the Portsmouth Naval Prison was completed on the southern side of Seavey's Island at the former site of Camp Long, a stockade named for Secretary of the Navy John Long, where 1,612 prisoners of war from the Battle of Santiago de Cuba were confined from July 11 to mid-September 1898 during the Spanish-American War.

Thomas Mott Osborne

In 1916 Josephus Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy at the likely suggestion of Assistant Secretary Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an ally of Osborne from his years in New York State reform politics, commissioned a report on conditions at the Portsmouth Naval Prison in Kittery, Maine.


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