When they sailed for Cuba in spring 1898, Spanish sailors assigned to a fleet commanded by Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete figured they would return home after defeating an upstart United States Navy squadron meddling in Spanish-Cuban affairs.

Instead, more than 1,500 Spanish sailors experienced a less-than-cordial visit to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard - and their three-month sojourn convinced American Navy officers that Kittery was a great place to build a prison.

After the USS Maine mysteriously blew apart and sank while moored off Havana on February 15, 1898, politicians beat the war drums to avenge the battleship’s 260 dead crewmen and to restore American honor. Spain had crudely ruled Cuba for almost 400 years, milking that island’s natural resources and crushing the occasional rebellion. Many Americans clamored for Cuban freedom - and some influential Americans suggested that the United States should annex Cuba.

Spanish perfidy had destroyed an American warship and shed American blood, these passionate patriots proclaimed. “Remember the Maine!” they cried.

Events moved rapidly to land Spanish sailors in a makeshift Kittery brig. Congress recognized an independent Cuba on April 19, 1898; a day later, the United States severed diplomatic ties with Madrid. Avoiding any hint that he lacked a martial fire in his belly, President William McKinley sought a declaration of war from Congress on April 21.

He got it.

The United States pounced immediately, dispatching Commodore George Dewey and the Navy’s Asiatic fleet from Hong Kong to the Philippines. The American warships quietly sailed into Manila Bay after dark on April 30 and, after dawn on May 1, attacked and annihilated a large Spanish squadron commanded by Rear Admiral Don Patricio Montojo y Pasaron. Watching from aboard his flagship, the USS Olympia, as his ships bore down on the moored Spanish warships, at approximately 5:40 a.m. Dewey muttered his immortal line, “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.”

Scratch one Spanish navy squadron.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy’s North Atlantic Squadron, commanded by Rear Admiral William T. Sampson, partially blockaded Cuban ports while awaiting the Spanish fleet commanded by Admiral Cervera. Receiving orders that essentially sent him sailing off to the New World with no firm goal to achieve, Cervera departed Spain in early April 1898, about two weeks before the United States officially declared war.

Spain had badly neglected its navy during the 1890s; the ships that Cervera led on a round-about transatlantic route to Cuba could not match their American counterparts, a fact that Cervera had pounded home before sailing. Spanish honor dictated that, no matter its fate, a fleet should sail for Cuba; swallowing his own pride, Cervera led his ill-equipped ships and sailors into Santiago de Cuba on May 19.

Sampson’s North Atlantic Squadron quickly blockaded the port. Some 15,000 American troops started landing near Santiago de Cuba on June 22; the ensuing fighting would hurl Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders into American legend and would essentially cut off Santiago de Cuba by land, thus trapping Cervera’s warships.

Believing that national honor required him to fight, Cervera did so, sallying forth against the North Atlantic Squadron on July 3. The naval battle lasted about four hours, with the U.S. Navy losing one sailor killed and two wounded. Cervera lost all six warships, including his flagship Maria Teresa, and 323 sailors killed (some sources claims the Spanish lost 474 sailors).

The U.S. Navy gobbled up approximately 1,700 Spanish sailors as prisoners of war. Within 24 hours or so, the War Department decided to send Admiral Cervera and approximately 150 Spaniards to a temporary prison at Annapolis, Maryland. Two American ships, the USS Harvard and USS St. Louis, deposited the remaining 1,562 Spanish sailors at the Portsmouth Navy Yard in Kittery.

According to the yard’s Shipyard Museum, the Navy erected “eight barracks, a large cookhouse, officer’s quarters and other service buildings” inside a 10-foot stockade, all placed on the former site of Fort Sullivan, a Revolutionary War fort dismantled after the Civil War. The makeshift prison was dubbed Camp Long.

Eerily predicting the “Spanish flu” that would sweep the civilized world after the Great War, influenza sickened many Spanish prisoners. They lacked clothing; to stay warm on Maine summer nights that definitely rated cooler than those experienced in Cuban waters, some Spaniards “lifted” blankets from the Harvard and St. Louis and huddled inside the Camp Long barracks. Thirty-one Spaniards would die at Kittery; their bodies were not be returned to Spain until April 1916.

With the war going the Americans’ way, Navy officials decided the decrepit Spanish sailors presented no imminent threat to national security. The Shipyard Museum indicates that the prisoners were allowed parole; “many of the men took advantage of the fifteen days of liberty, which allowed access to Seavey’s Island, the Navy Yard, and ... Portsmouth” (and thus Kittery, of course), the museum reports.

If the Spaniards impressed any Maine girls, the official histories do not say. In fact, the Spaniards remained prisoners for only three months. With the war over, the Spanish sailors departed Kittery aboard the City of Rome on September 12, 1898.

With Camp Long dismantled, Navy officials decided to build an official prison on the site. Construction started on the infamous Portsmouth Navy Prison on 1905 and continued into World War II. A unique turreted design garnered the prison an unofficial nickname as “The Castle” - and an infamous reputation as America’s toughest naval prison. Thousands of convicted Navy and Marine personnel would do hard time at The Castle, which also housed captured German submariners late in World War II.

The Navy abandoned The Castle in 1974. Today, lifting its four turrets against the Maine sky, the decaying prison rises starkly on the Kittery shore. Proposals to economically develop The Castle have not accomplished that goal, and the prison stands as a mute reminder to the time when hapless Spanish sailors briefly called a Kittery brig their home.