Bowater nodded. You will make contact with one Captain Robley Paine, a civilian, who has undertaken to build the ironclad Yazoo River at his own expense. You will engage Captain Paine as pilot of the Yazoo River. Orders, direct from Stephen Mallory, Secretary of the Navy.
“This Paine, he is a riverboat captain? A pilot?”
“He’s a planter, like all the gentlemen lives along the river here. He ain’t no pilot, don’t know a damned thing about boats, as far as I know.”
Bowater nodded. He felt sick.
Down from the wheelhouse, back over the brow to the hard-packed dirt landing where his men stood huddled, braced against the wind. “All right, men. Follow me,” Bowater said, led them south along the dirt road the captain had pointed out, the one that would lead to the work docks, the side-wheeler Yazoo River.
With each step Bowater’s heart sank deeper. The dilapidated machine shops, the boatyards whose buildings were in need of basic carpentry themselves, the tall grass shooting up around discarded engine parts, coils of rotten rope, rusted anchors, all made him depressed and angry.
They marched on, came at last to the dock to which the side-wheeler was tied, and now that he looked at it he saw that indeed she had a name board on her bow and the name board said Yazoo River. He had hoped, right up until that moment, that the captain had been mistaken, that the real, gleaming, powerful ironclad was somewhere upriver of them.
Bowater drew the men up at the bottom of the brow and no one said a thing. They hunched their shoulders against the wind and looked. They saw the peeling black paint. They saw the twisted rails and shot-up superstructure, battle damage unrepaired. They saw the bales of cotton piled up on the deck, forming a sort of barricade around the bow and stern where the vessel’s three antique guns were mounted.
After a minute of that, Bowater saw a face peer out of the wheelhouse window. The face disappeared, and then a tall, gaunt man in a long coat stepped out onto the hurricane deck, sized them up, disappeared again.
A moment later he stepped out of the deckhouse, having apparently come down an inside ladder. He stood at the top of the brow. He held a shotgun in his hands, a heavy revolver on his belt.
“Ain’t this fella heard of Southern hospitality?” Taylor wondered out loud.
“Who are you?” the gaunt man demanded.
“I am Lieutenant Samuel Bowater, Confederate States Navy. I have come to assume command of the ship Yazoo River.”
The man was silent for a moment, scrutinizing the cluster of sailors. He set the shotgun aside, stepped down the brow, stopped five feet away.
“I’m Robley Paine. Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, I do.”
Paine was a frightening sight, not at all what Bowater had envisioned. Bowater had been thinking of a plump, jolly, well-dressed individual who was looking to play at sailors, a Southern version of a Henry Fielding squire. Paine was not that.
Thin in an unhealthy way, eyes sunk deep, peering out from dark circles, darting side to side. There was a nervous, agitated quality to him, and a deadness to his eyes that was unsettling. He had not shaved in some time.
Bowater had an instant dislike for the man, which made his anger at Paine’s deception that much greater.
“This is it?” Paine said at last. “This is all the men to crew the boat?”
“This is the boat?” Bowater asked, taking a step forward. “You represented to Secretary Mallory that she was an ironclad. What the hell is this?” It had been a long trip, and Bowater was tired. He was beginning to lose his reserve.
“She will be an ironclad. She is not yet. She is a cotton-clad.”
Taylor stepped up, which further irritated Bowater. “She is a what, sir?”
“Cotton-clad. She is not the only one on the river.”
“‘Cotton-clad’?” Taylor chuckled. “You mean to say that she is armored with the lightest, softest, most flammable material known to man? I’m not sure that would be my first choice. Iron, I would think…”
“The cotton is effective against small-arms fire.” Paine turned on Taylor like a snake striking. “We do not wait for everything to be perfection. We fight the Yankee with what we have. Men do. Cowards and weaklings hang back and complain.”
An ugly silence. Everyone waited for Taylor to respond, but Taylor just gave out a low whistle, made his eyes go wide, smiled, and wandered off, assessing the Yazoo River.
“Be that as it may,” Bowater said, “we were led to believe that we were manning an ironclad, and that you were a qualified pilot, and I am not pleased, sir, by what I see.” This was not going well at all.
“Nor am I, sir. I have sunk no small part of my fortune into this ship, I have driven her into combat already, and I intend to do so again. I gave her over to the navy because I wished to man her with men who would fight. I will not be happy to find officers and men of the Confederate States Navy who are backward in their willingness to do battle with the enemy.”
Bowater stiffened. Paine’s insinuations were coming very close to intolerable insult, and it was only the wild intensity with which Paine spoke-as if Paine was not responsible because he had no control over what came out of his mouth-that made Bowater hold his tongue.
Taylor came ambling back, and before Bowater could reply he said, “This here’s the Star of the Delta, ain’t she?”
“Pardon?” Paine said, the word shot out like a bullet.
“This here riverboat, she’s the old Star of the Delta, ain’t she? Used to run N’Orleans to Natchez, regular.”
“I believe that is her former name,” Paine said.
Taylor shook his head, grinned, stuck an unlit cigar in his mouth. “This jest gets better an better.”
Bowater rounded on Paine, ready to give him the full broadside; Paine rounded on Bowater, ready for the same. From up the road came the clomping of hooves on the hard-packed dirt. The men on the landing, as one, turned, looked, happy for some diversion.
A young man on a sorrel mare rode up, reined to a stop. “Mornin, Mr. Paine,” he said.
“Morning, Billy.”
Billy paused, as if he felt he should say more, but could think of nothing, and the moment became awkward. “Got a telegraph for ya.” Billy held out the note. Paine took it from him, unfolded it, read it in silence. Billy rode off.
“‘To Robley Paine,’” Paine read aloud from the paper. “‘From Stationmaster, Jackson, Mississippi. Sir, have received shipment eight hundred tons iron for you, stop. Please retrieve at earliest convenience, stop.’”
Paine looked up at Bowater, and there was a different look in his eye. In another man the look might have been triumph, but not in Paine. Paine seemed too far gone to appear triumphant over anything. “There is your ironclad, Lieutenant. It is on the siding in Jackson. Tomorrow we will go and fetch it.”
39
In conversations with the Secretary, I always have been under the impression that, for purposes of coast defense, he conceived that ironclad rams were the best vessels.
– Commander John M. Brooke, CSN
Robley Paine hunted wagons. He mounted his horse, rode the countryside north of Yazoo City, visited plantations he had first visited before he was old enough to walk. He spoke with fellow planters he had known since he was a boy.
They were polite. They kept their distance, did not invite him in. They had no wagons to lend.
Robley explained the situation. He had eight hundred tons of railroad iron, rolled and drilled, and another half ton of nuts and bolts, sitting on a railroad siding in Jackson. He needed wagons to haul it to the Yazoo River, to build his ironclad gunboat, to protect them, all of them, from the filthy hordes of shopkeepers and mechanics sweeping down from the north, and up from the south, closing in. He spoke emphatically and sometimes he caught himself speaking too loud, sometimes shouting.
The planters never took offense, which was the worst of it, as if it was pointless to be offended by the ravings of a madman. They nodded, shook their heads.
“Not like I don’t know about them damned Yankees, Robley,” they would say. “My boy’s with Beauregard right now.” But they had no wagons, and they thought he was mad. He could see it in their eyes.
He rode all day, plantation to plantation, talked with his oldest friends, who treated him with the wariness with which one treats an unfamiliar dog. He got no wagons.
The next day he dispatched five of Bowater’s men with a local boy to lead them back to Paine Plantation to retrieve the three serviceable wagons in the barn. He told them there had been horses once, and there might still be, or perhaps not, he did not know. Robley continued his search, covering the plantations south of town.
There were no wagons to be had.
He found himself rubbing the butt of his Starr as he talked with his reluctant neighbors, found himself imagining how it would be to jerk the gun from his holster, take horses and wagons at gunpoint, frighten some cooperation into his fellow planters.
Once, riding along the empty roads from one house to the next, he thought he had done so. He stopped, tried to recall if he had used his gun on someone.
No… he concluded. No… He had only dreamed of it. It worried him some, that he could not always differentiate.
On the third day, near desperation, Paine hired three teamsters in Yazoo City, all that were to be had. The sailors returned from Paine Plantation with two wagons, eight horses, the worst of what had once been there, but all that was left. Like some pathetic parade they rolled south toward Jackson. Five wagons to move eight hundred tons of gunboat iron over forty miles of mediocre road. It was not a job that would be quickly done.
And all the while, every minute, Robley Paine felt the snake, squeezing, squeezing.
Samuel Bowater was happy to see Paine ride off mornings, felt his stomach fall when Paine returned after sundown. The whole thing-Yazoo City, the Yazoo River, the ugly weather, the feeling that he had been shunted off to the end of the earth and left there-it all made his mood bleak and desperate.
But to have Robley Paine watching over him, those sunken, crazy eyes boring into him, to field the inquiries delivered with no inflection, no sense of curiosity or companionship, as if he was a different species from Robley Paine and not worth any empathy, made him edgy and depressed. Robley Paine struck him as a man who, for whatever dark reason, no longer cared in the least for his own life or for anyone else’s. And if he had no care for life, then he certainly had no care for more mundane things, such as courtesy or any of the niceties that allowed men to coexist.
Robley Paine was not an easy man to be around, and so, when he left, Bowater was, if not happy, then at least less miserable.
He stood on the hurricane deck, in huddled conversation. The weather had moderated quite a bit, the cold north wind backing and dropping. The sun fought its way through high haze, and the temperature climbed to near fifty degrees.
“Very well…” Samuel said. “Mr. Polkey, what do you have to report?”
Artemus Polkey was one of three shipwrights for hire at Yazoo City. Somewhere in his fifties, grizzled, fat, he did not inspire a great deal of confidence. The two missing fingers on his left hand inspired even less. But of the three ship’s carpenters, Bowater judged him most competent, based on the necessarily brief interviews he had conducted. And so Artemus Polkey was hired to oversee the refit of the cotton-clad Yazoo River into an ironclad.
“Wellll…” Polkey drew the word out, worked the plug in his mouth, spit artfully over the side. “Her bottom ain’t too bad, an that there’s the chief of your concern. Seen a couple o’ planks is a bit punky, but ain’t nothin I’d worry about. Deck beams, carlings, clamps, it all looks good to me.”
Bowater nodded. “Good. So how do we make her an ironclad?”
“Wellll…” Polkey spit again. “Reckon we take all the goddamn superstructure off her, jest strip her right down to the gunnels, jest leave the weather deck and a big damn hole where the fidley was. Build us a casement along the whole length where the deckhouse is now. ’Bout eight foot high. Build her out of live oak, say, foot thick on the sides, foot and a half fore and aft bulkheads. Bolt that ol’ iron right onto that.”
“Can you do that? Do you have the men?”
“Ah, shit…ain’t talkin but four flat sides, like a cabin. I don’t need no shipwrights to do that. Hire house carpenters. Even hire out some darkies, know how to swing a hammer.”
“The sides of the casement cannot be vertical. They must be sloped, say at a thirty-five-degree angle.”
Polkey chewed some, nodded. “Makes things a bit harder, now, but we can do that.” Bowater was beginning to like the man.
“Good. Chief Taylor?”
Taylor wore his battered cap back on his head, his uniform frock coat unbuttoned over a stained and coal-dust-smeared shirt, pants glazed with dirt. Since the sinking of the Cape Fear he had not enjoyed the silent insubordination of clean clothing.
“Me and the ol’ Star of the Delta go way back,” he said.
“Did you serve on board her?” Bowater asked.
“No. No. Towed her a bunch, when she was broke down, which was damn near a weekly occurrence.”
Bowater frowned. He thought he was over the stab of nausea that followed bad news, but he realized he was not. “What is the condition of her machinery now?”
“Seems someone gone over it recently. Someone who knows his business, I’m pleased to say. Overall it ain’t so bad. Burgess and me, we got steam up in both boilers, got turns on both her engines and they held together. Reckon they will for some time more. They’s a power of things I could do. You jest let me know how much time I gots to play down there.”
That was the question. How much time? If they never found more wagons for hauling iron from Jackson, the ironclad Yazoo River would not be underway for the next two years. But how might they haul it faster? How many men would they get to work on rebuilding the ship? Could he recruit from the nearby army units? Would Mallory send more men?
So many variables. Absolutely no way to know how long it would take to do anything. He did not know what move of the Yankees he needed to be ready to counter.
“Six weeks. We must be underway in six weeks,” Bowater said decisively. They needed a goal, a definite date, even if it was only one that he made up, right off the top of his head.
Incredible…
The word echoed around David Glasgow Farragut’s mind.
Incredible…
He was not sure to what specifically he might apply the word-there were so many things.
Incredible how swiftly a man’s fortunes could change.
Number 38 on the captains’ list of the United States Navy after fifty years’ service. A Tennessee man who had never blinked in his support of the Union, but who, he assumed, was still considered questionable thanks to his place of birth. Just two and a half months before, he had been festering away on the Navy Retirement Board, dying an interminable death. His nation was consumed by war-the one thing for which he had trained his entire life, boy to man-and he was behind a desk, shuffling papers.
But no more. He looked around the day cabin on his flagship, the USS Hartford, 225 feet long, forty-four feet on the beam, 2,900 tons. Solid. Indefatigable. His.
Incredible.
Farragut was sixty years old, his square jaw clean-shaven. The sun that came in through the aft windows glinted off the bands of gold braid that circled his cuffs, winked off the double row of buttons down the front of his dark blue frock coat. His lean, hard body was perfectly complemented by the frock coat. He had been wearing navy blue for forty years. It seemed very odd to him when, on one of those few occasions, he found himself in civilian clothing of a different color.
He read over the report, one of an endless stream of reports he was writing.
USS Hartford
Ship Island, March 5, 1862
DEAR SIR: The Pensacola arrived here on the 2d, just in time to escape a severe norther, which has now been blowing for nearly six hours. Had
she encountered it, God knows when she would have arrived. They represent the engines as perfectly worthless. The engineer is afraid for the lives of his men, and said it would not last an hour longer; that I will test.
He set the report aside. His eyes, which were not terribly strong, were starting to hurt. Reports, orders, requisitions, dispatches, he was sick of it all. He had come to fight the enemy and all he did was sit at his desk. For now.
He looked down at the sundry papers spread over the desk in front of him-newspapers, reports, personal correspondence. Stolen material, all. He felt a flush of guilt. Absurd. This was war.
Warm, briny air wafted through the open window, rustled the paper. A month before he had been in New York City, where bitter, numbing wind funneled in through the Narrows and made the waterfront a frigid misery. His hands, he recalled, had been so numb he was hardly able to hold a pen. But now he was riding at anchor at Ship Island, off the coast of Mississippi, lovely, semitropical, water the color of turquoise. He enjoyed the sun and the warm air. He enjoyed looking out over the ships under his command.
The warm air carried on it the smell of coal smoke. USS Colorado had arrived an hour before, was picking her way slowly though the anchorage. She was a big bastard, a forty-gun steam frigate, eight-to ten-inch Dahlgren pivots. She drew nearly twenty-three feet aft. Farragut did not know if he could get her over the bar and into the Mississippi River.
They would be fighting a river war with a blue-water navy, making ships do something they were never intended to do. Foote’s fleet, the “Pook Turtles,” they were made for this kind of fighting, perfect for the Western River Theater. But not the Hartford, and certainly not the Colorado.
The marine at the cabin door announced Henry H. Bell, captain of the fleet, responding to the summons Farragut had issued moments before. Farragut called, “Come!” and Bell stepped sharply across the cabin’s deck, stopped at the desk, saluted, crisp and businesslike.
“Captain,” Farragut said, returning the salute. He spread his hands, indicating the papers on the desk. “Here is the booty from our raid on the Biloxi post office.”
Glory In The Name Page 41