4                                  Stanley Wertheim

despite the corruption in its ranks revealed by the Lexow Com¬
mission report of 1895, and Crane suffered the consequences of
having brought it into further disrepute. He was harrassed, perse¬
cuted, and subjected to arrest on sight. His career as an effective
investigating journalist in the City was clearly at an end, and when
the Bacheller-Johnson Syndicate offered to send him to Cuba to
cover the rebellion, he eagerly seized the opportunity.

The wreck of the Commodore considerably damaged Crane's
chances of reaching the scene of the insurrection. Revenue cutters
enforced American neutrality laws by a relatively effective block¬
ade of the Florida coast. When Crane boarded the ill-fated Com¬
modore, she was making her fifth attempt to avoid interception.
Unable to find another ship to take him to Cuba, Crane languished
in Jacksonville, relieving the tedium by congregating with other
correspondents and adventurers at hotel bars and frequenting the
"pleasure resort" kept by the flamboyant Cora Taylor, with whom
he had begun a love affair shortly after his arrival in mid-Novem¬
ber. Cora was thirty-two years old, the veteran of two unsucces-
ful marriages, and the proprietress of the Hotel de Dream, the
finest house of assignation in the Jacksonville area. Crane could
no more bring her home to his staid, conservative iMethodist family
than he could challenge the wrath of the New York Police De¬
partment. Clearly, another flight was essential. On March 11, he
wrote his older brother, William Howe Crane, with considerable
hyperbole, that "I have been for over a month among the swamps
further south wading miserably to and fro in an attempt to avoid
our derned U.S. navy. And it cant [sic] be done. I am through
trying. I have changed all my plans and am going to Crete."'

Crane signed with Samuel S. Chamberlain, Managing Editor of
Hearst's New York Journal, as a correspondent to report the im¬
pending Greco-Turkish War. He also negotiated an independent
contract with the McClure Syndicate which sold his dispatches to
other American newspapers and to the Westminster Gazette. He
could not marry Cora since she was unable to secure a divorce