Glory In The Name

by James L. Nelson

  This was news to Samuel. His father had never said a word to him in that regard, beyond a single “Well done, Samuel.”

  “It was no more than luck, sir. I foolishly risked my life and those of my men in my youthful exuberance.”

  Mallory smiled. “You are your father’s son, I see. That does much to recommend you. In any event, I hope the years and the United States Navy have not worn all of the exuberance out of you. We will need it. Let us hope it can take the place of ships. What sort of position were you seeking?”

  “I should be happy to take up at my former rank in the U.S. Navy.” Bowater handed Mallory his commission and sundry other relevant papers. “Wherever I might be of use.”

  Mallory leafed through the papers. “Our cause has much in common with the War for Independence fought by our forefathers,” Mallory said without looking up. He finished with Samuel’s papers, set them aside, met Samuel’s eyes. “One of the similarities I find, in the naval line, is that we have plenty of men who wish to be officers and damned few who wish to sail before the mast. What if I were to tell you that the only position I can offer you is able-bodied seaman?”

  Samuel pressed his lips together, waded through this unexpected development. The thought of living in the uncouth, half-civilized world of the lower deck was abhorrent to him. But honor demanded that he serve where he was needed, and honor would be satisfied before any concern for his personal comfort.

  “If that is the only position available to me, then I would be grateful to accept it, sir.”

  Mallory nodded his head, and Samuel had the idea that his declaration had not come out as sincere as he had hoped.

  “Well, sir, as it happens, I believe I can offer you something better. Not in terms of rank, I’m afraid. You’ll have to remain a lieutenant. But I can offer you a command of your own. Then you would be a captain by courtesy. How would you like that?”

  “There is nothing I should like better, sir.” Samuel felt a bit dizzy, and the room took on a vaguely dreamlike air. It was hard to keep his mental footing as Mallory jerked his thoughts first one way and then another. Could he have heard right? A command of his own? After a dozen years as a lieutenant he had resigned himself to never having his own ship.

  Did he say a command of my own?

  Mallory was shuffling around his desk, flipping through piles of documents, some preprinted forms, some letters, some official-looking reports. “Here she is…” he said, pulling a couple papers free from a stack. “She is the CSS Cape Fear. Eighty feet in length, eighteen feet on the beam, draws seven feet aft. Screw propulsion. She is, in fact, a tugboat. Current armament…none. What say you, sir?”

  Bowater could not help but smile. He was aware that there were plenty of very senior captains from the old navy who were commanding vessels not much better than this. Men who had owned the quarterdeck of some of the most powerful steam warships in the world were now scrambling to command converted riverboats and steam packets.

  “I would be honored, sir, to command this vessel.”

  “Well, you are in luck. She was already given to another, but he seems to have come down with some sort of fever, no doubt brought on by the terrific reduction in the size of his command. I haven’t time to root out another captain.”

  “However it comes about, I am pleased to have her, Mr. Secretary.” Samuel Bowater had found even the midshipman’s berth on his first ship to be a nearly intolerable den of barbarous behavior. For one who just a moment before was facing the possibility of life on the lower deck, the thought of command, any command, was welcome indeed.

  “Good, good…” Mallory was hunting around for yet another document. His tone suggested that the interview was over, but Samuel did not know if he should take his leave.

  “The Cape Fear is in Wilmington, North Carolina, as you might have guessed. Crew is all in place…” Mallory looked up. “Where are you staying, sir?”

  “The Exchange,” Bowater said.

  “Very well. I’ll have your commission and orders drawn up. Come by here tomorrow afternoon to fetch them and then you must make the best of your way to Wilmington. No time to lose.”

  Mallory stood for the first time since the interview began and stuck out his hand. “I congratulate you, Lieu…Captain Bowater. I have faith that you will do honor to our nation.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The genuine sentiment of the moment took Samuel aback, and he did not know what to say. “Thank you, sir,” he said again, then he turned and left.

  Samuel wandered through the high halls, through the crowds of harried men, through the big doors under the portico. My own command… He was having a hard time coming to grips with the idea. My own command…

  He stepped out from under the portico and the sun seemed very bright and he was not sure of which way to go.

  5

  Events of recent occurrence, and the threatening attitude of affairs in some parts of our country, call for the exercise of great vigilance and energy at Norfolk.

  – Gideon Welles, Secretary of the United States Navy, to Commodore G. J. Pendergrast

  Engineer in Chief of the United States Navy Benjamin Franklin Isherwood sat down on a wooden tool crate at the forward end of the engine room and rested his head against the softest thing available, which was a ten-inch-by-ten-inch oak stanchion supporting the deck above. He closed his eyes and sleep washed over him, warm and lovely, and he did not possess the power to stave it off. He did not move-could not, with the weight of his arms and his legs-and soon his thoughts, which were generally honed to exact tolerances, began to dissolve into so many soft and discordant impressions.

  It was not a particularly quiet place to sleep. The hot space was filled with a hundred different sounds, the hiss of building steam, the tapping and clanking of pipes coming to life, the drip of water in condensers and hot wells, the crunch of shovels in coal, the clang and bang of iron doors and dampers opened and shut. And under it all the low rumble of the boilers as they got up steam.

  But those noises were as much a part of Isherwood’s existence as the rattle of cart wheels to a teamster or cannon fire to an artilleryman. Isherwood could not have counted the number of times he had taken a caulk in some dark corner of an engine room, oblivious to the cacophony of the machinery.

  So once again he drifted off to the sounds of a steam engine at work, as familiar as the house in which he grew up. But this time he could not rest. Something was bothering him, tugged at him, and he forced himself to open his eyes.

  He looked around him, dull and uncertain. He was in the cavernous engine room of the steam frigate Merrimack, staring at the round faces of the five tubular, Martin’s-type boilers. Thoughtlessly his eyes traced the maze of pipe rising up from their steam domes and off to two massive engines-double-piston-rod, horizontal, back-acting, condensing engines-and the seventy-two-inch-diameter cylinders housing the pistons that would turn the great screw somewhere beyond the confines of the hull.

  There were lanterns hanging everywhere, and tools and parts and debris scattered over the deck and stacked on benches against the outboard sides of the engine room. It looked like a disaster, but it still looked better than it had three days before.

  Isherwood listened to the thump, the twenty seconds of silence, the thump again of the pistons and realized that that was what had waked him. The thumping, the heartbeat of the ship. Slow, just three revolutions per minute, dockside, but there it was. Merrimack was alive.

  On the day that Fort Sumter had surrendered, on the day that Samuel Bowater had boarded the train to Montgomery, Benjamin Isherwood had taken the Bay Line steamer from Washington, D.C., to the Gosport Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth on a secret mission.

  He stepped off the little steamer and onto the docks of Portsmouth and was greeted with the sensation that his secret orders were now none too secret. There were ugly glances thrown his way, fingers pointed with no attempt at discretion, conversations interrupted and immediately resumed in hushed tones as he hurrie
d by, head down, eyes front.

  The Gosport Naval Shipyard was surrounded by a brick wall, ten feet high and eighteen inches thick. In terms of real defense it was meaningless, but it gave Isherwood some sense of relief as he passed through the iron gate. He had seen no overt signs of hostility or preparations by the Rebels to storm the naval yard, but he could sense it was coming, and he was not alone in that thought.

  The yard’s commander, Commodore Charles S. McCauley, had looked displeased to see him, and he probably was. He looked a bit drunk, and he probably was that as well.

  “Ah, Isherwood, yes. Got Welles’s note just today, said you were coming…” The old man-he was sixty-eight-searched his desk as if he was looking for something, then sat back, looked at Isherwood, said, “Ah…”

  “Sir, as the Secretary related to you, it is his desire to see the Merrimackis brought to Philadelphia. He has asked that I personally oversee the refit of her engines.”

  “Ah, yes, Merrimack. She is in dreadful shape, Mr. Isherwood, you will find. Her engines were nothing to crow about in her best days.”

  “So I understand, sir.” Isherwood was not overly interested in McCauley’s opinion. McCauley had told the yard’s chief engineer, Robert Danby, that it would take a month to get Merrimack underway, which was absurd. But most of the officers at the yard were Southerners, and they were influencing McCauley, and the old man was neither strong-willed enough nor sober enough to make up his own mind.

  “Very well, Mr. Isherwood, do what you will…”

  And so he had. He and Danby, working around the clock, twelve-hour shifts, supervising whatever men they could scrape up to swing a hammer or turn a wrench.

  The machinery was in a bad way. The braces had been pulled out of the boilers, the engines torn apart, air pumps disabled, their components scattered around the machine shops and blacksmith shops that crowded the huge shipyard.

  Night and day for four days they labored, and now he heard the giant’s heartbeat, the steady thump of the pistons. The ship was stirring. In order to get to sea now, they needed only permission.

  Isherwood stood with a groan and tried to shake the kinks out of his legs.

  “What do you say to that, Chief?”

  Isherwood turned. Danby was there, his face smeared with grease, his hands black, a filthy bandage with a dark spot of dried blood tied around one finger. “Don’t she sound fine?”

  “She sounds like hell, Mr. Danby, but she’ll do. Let me go talk to the old man.”

  They had gone to visit McCauley the day before, he and Danby, and reported the machinery ready in all respects. They had hoped for the order to fire her up and go. But McCauley had hesitated, told them they would be in season the next morning to get up steam.

  Now it was next morning. The fires had been lit around midnight, and sometime around daybreak the water in the huge boilers began to produce steam. Now the engines turned slowly, and the only things keeping Merrimack in Norfolk were the chain and rope fasts holding her to the dock, and McCauley’s orders.

  Wearily, like soldiers in the aftermath of battle, Isherwood and Danby climbed the ladder from the engine room, emerging into the blessed coolness of the tween decks, then climbed up the scuttle and onto the main deck.

  It was nine o’clock and the sun was brilliant in the spring sky, and Isherwood was a little disoriented. It had been full night when he had gone down into the bowels of the Merrimack.

  He paused and took a moment to look around and realign himself. Merrimack was an awesome vessel, 275 feet long and thirty-eight feet on the beam. She normally carried forty guns: fourteen eight-inch guns, two ten-inch, and twenty-four nine-inch, a powerful battery. The guns were off her now, making her deck seem even more expansive.

  She was too much ship to let her fall into the hands of the Rebels rumored to be massing outside the walls and setting up batteries across the river. With Merrimack alone, the Confederates could cause real trouble for the Union navy. Time to get her out of there.

  Isherwood and Danby walked down the brow from the Merrimack’s deck to the shore and across the big shipyard, their shoes loud on the cobblestones in the quiet morning. It should not have been quiet-the yard should have been in full production at that hour, with hammers falling and forges and heavy machinery and capstans and draft animals all filling the air with noise-but it was not. Most of the civilian workers were gone, either unwilling to work for the old government or unwilling to let their neighbors see them doing so. Those still reporting to work spent the day lolling around their work stations or doing desultory chores. They all seemed to be waiting. Waiting for orders, waiting to see who it was who would be giving orders come the end of the day.

  The engineers walked past the looming twin ship houses with their odd A-frame shape, a third one under construction, past the foundries, machine shops, boiler shops, sail lofts, timber sheds, burnetizing house, riggers’ lofts, and ropewalk.

  It was no wonder that the Rebels were starting to gather like vultures, ready to fall on that place. Gosport was the most extensive and valuable shipyard in the country.

  Isherwood and Danby walked past the huge granite dry dock, and Isherwood thought, The secessionists would dearly love to have hold of that… There were only two in the country, and no real navy could be without one.

  They arrived at last at McCauley’s office. There was no one in the outer office. McCauley’s door was open. Isherwood stepped across the room, rapped lightly on the doorframe.

  “Commodore?”

  “Ah, Isherwood, come in come in…damned secretary is gone, a damnable Democrat, took off with the secesh trash…ever since Lincoln called up them men, every damned one reckons it’s war…like rats, sir, rats from a sinking ship, if you’ll pardon the old saw…

  Isherwood and Danby exchanged glances. The commodore was not doing so well. His frock coat was tossed over the back of his chair, his hair was wild. There were stains on his shirt, from what, Isherwood could not tell. From the doorjamb he could smell the booze.

  “Commodore, I am here to report that the machinery aboard Merrimack is ready. We have steam up and the engines are turning now.”

  “‘Turning now,’ eh? Good, good. Good show. Haven’t quite made up my mind about sending her away…”

  Isherwood and Danby exchanged glances. “Pardon, sir?” Isherwood asked.

  “Haven’t quite decided whether or not I’ll send her away. It is a damned complicated situation, Mr. Isherwood, far more than just a matter of working engines.”

  Isherwood straightened and made an effort to contain his surprise and mounting dismay.

  He has been talking to some of these Southern gentlemen, I suspect. Or they have been talking to him.

  “Sir, might I remind you that the orders which I delivered to you were peremptory, that Secretary Welles was quite unequivocal about wanting Merrimack moved to Philadelphia. He does not generally dispatch the engineer in chief of the navy to fix a broken engine if it is not important.”

  “Yes, sir, I am aware of that.” McCauley was annoyed and he did not try to hide it, but he also looked uncertain and even fearful. “But it ain’t that simple. The Rebels have put obstructions in the river.”

  “The Merrimack can easily pass through them, Murray determined that, but if we wait another day they may sink more, and then the ship will be stuck.”

  McCauley shook his head. “We send the Merrimack out of here and the Rebels say it’s war and attack! And then we don’t have her battery for defense. We leave her and put her ordnance aboard and they say we are turning the naval yard into an armed camp, and that is an act of war! One damned officer tells me one thing, another something else. Damn it, man, it is not that damned simple!”

  McCauley slumped back exhausted, and he had a hungry look in his eyes, hungry for a drink. Isherwood felt pity for the old man. He had been fifty-two years in the navy. He may have been something as a young man, but now he was played out.

  “It is complicated, sir,”
Isherwood said. “But the orders from Secretary Welles are clear.”

  “Clear, clear, yes, yes…” McCauley straightened himself out somewhat. “I shall make my decision later in the day, sir. Right now we will leave things as they are…not so pressing now…”

  Isherwood tried to think of a reply, but he could see that any would be pointless. He was a stranger there, whereas the officers whispering in the commodore’s ear, those with South-leaning sympathies, were old and trusted colleagues.

  “Very well, sir,” said Isherwood crisply. “I shall wait your orders.” He turned and stamped out of the office, feeling like a petulant child, but he could not help it. Behind him, wordless, Danby followed.

  They stepped out of the granite building in which the commodore had his office and right into the path of Commander James Alden, who had been sent by Welles to take command of Merrimack.

  “Mr. Isherwood, good morning. Mr. Danby. I was just on my way to see the commodore.”

  Isherwood waved his hand, as if waving a mosquito from his face. “The commodore is drunk with indecision, and other things, I suspect. It’s no use talking to him. Come.”

  Isherwood walked off, and the other two men followed behind. They stepped quickly over the cobblestones, men with serious business to attend to. It was something new for Benjamin Isherwood.

  His time in the navy had been exciting, challenging, after a scientific fashion. But now, in some small way, a part of the fight for Union hung on his ability to transform a boiler full of water into the force necessary to turn a massive screw propeller and drive 3,200 tons of wooden frigate into open water.

  They made their way to the Merrimack and stamped up the brow and onto the deck, then down the scuttle to the tween decks and down again to the engine room, where the heat and noise were bad, but not nearly what they would be with the ship running at flank speed. The firemen and coal heavers looked up, their eyes white through black grime, expecting orders, but they would be disappointed.