Bayonets, Balloons & Ironclads: Britain and France Take Sides With the South

by Tsouras, Peter G.

  The pickings had indeed been rich, a half-dozen vessels in a single day had been taken. When the Kalevala’s lookout reported four British warships steaming out of Esquimalt with their guns run out, it was clear that the Royal Navy had picked up the gage regardless of the odds. Popov was happy to oblige with his seventy guns to the British forty-two.13

  Capt. E.W. Turnour of the Charybdis commanded the little British squadron. As word of the appearance of the Russian ships raiding the approaches to the strait, he did not take long to weigh his options. He was clearly outnumbered and outgunned two to one, even if he used his two small gunboats that were designed for shore bombardment, not actions at sea. The prudent thing was not to risk his ships in such an unsure fight and thereby leave this British colony at the Russians’ mercy. But this was a man whose boyhood hero was Lord Nelson; he had immersed himself in the life of that great fighting sailor. He had fashioned his life around the Socratic admonition to be what you admire most. So it was not surprising that Nelson’s words came to mind: “Our Country will, I believe, sooner forgive an officer for attacking an enemy than for letting it alone.”14

  He had the immediate advantage of being in formation line ahead with Charybdis in the lead followed by Alert and the gunboats. Popov’s ships were scattered for a dozen miles in their wide-cast net to snare enemy shipping. Turnour headed for the closest Russian ship, Bogatyr, with his engines wide open. Through his glass he could see that the Russian naval ensign bore a red stripe along the bottom, signaling that it was Popov’s flagship. Bogatyr’s captain, Piotr Afansievich Chebyshev, tensely waited for Popov’s decision; he was just as eager to engage, advantage or no, as Turnour. The ship’s very name demanded it, for bogatyr meant gallant, heroic knight in Russian. Popov realized that unless he ordered the captain to sail away from the British in order to gather up the rest of the squadron, he would be the one outgunned. “You will engage the enemy, Captain.” Chebyshev almost leapt forward to give the order. Bogatyr turned toward the British as its signal flags flew up ordering the rest of the squadron to converge on it.

  The first shots were fired by the pivot bow guns of both Charybdis and Bogatyr and missed, but as the range closed Charybdis counted the first hit. Bogatyr’s mainmast splintered, groaned, and fell like the giant of the forest it was once to fall over the side. The Russian ship slowed as the mast with its sails and rigging acted like a drag on its engines. The debris also masked most of its portside guns. And it was on this side that Charybdis came up while Alert split off to rake its starboard side. Turnour brought his ship to pointblank range to let his 8-inch smoothbores disembowel the Russian, their shells exploding across the gundeck in clouds of wooden splinters and iron fragments or punching through the hull to burst inside.

  Still Bogatyr fought, honoring its namesake. Chebyshev strode over the shattered deck through the splinters, oblivious to the danger, encouraging his men, as the surviving gun crews worked their pieces to the command of “Ogon! Ogon, bogatyri moi! Ogon!” (“Fire! Fire, my heroes! Fire!”) The years of exacting training that Popov had imposed were paying off as the men stood to their guns, half their crews dead or dying. Chebyshev knew that between the mast dragging in the water and the damage to his ship, the Englishman would win. He would have to strike or go under. Russian captains were not allowed to strike, and he had no intention of going under.

  If Turnour had his hero, so did Chebyshev—the Adm. Pavel Nakhimov, who destroyed the Turkish fleet at Sinope and then brilliantly commanded the defenses of Sevastopol. Chebyshev had served under him, and mourned his death at the siege as if he were his own father. He did not even have to ask himself what Nakhimov would do. He grabbed the naval infantry lieutenant, “Petya! Get your men together. We board the Englishman. The man’s eyes grew wide, then he exclaimed, “Xhorosho, Kapitan!” and was off. “Boys, boys,” the captain shouted to the remaining men on the deck. “Arm yourselves, my boys!” He grabbed a powder boy by the arm. “Go to the engineer and tell him he must give me all power in three minutes.” The frightened boy scampered off below decks wending his way through the debris and bodies. Somehow the grapnels were found and cast over the few yards to hook onto Charybdis where the Russian bow and the English stern were closest.15

  Chebyshev and the barely twenty men he could muster, naval infantry and sailors armed with pikes and cutlasses, huddled on the bow as the ship lurched forward. Bogatyr ran into Charybdis, and as the captain leapt over the small space to land on the English quarterdeck. A Royal Marine lunged for him before he could get his balance; he felt the blades slide through the skin of his ribs and out the back of his coat. He twisted away, tearing the rifle from the man’s hands. The red coat disappeared in a flood of Russian naval blue as his men poured aboard. It was all he could do next to parry the sword of a British officer, then strike back himself. In that suspension of time when the mind can think as clearly as if was a detached observer while animal-like the body reacts, he realized it was the English captain.

  Now Rydna was coming up into the fight to find the gunboats had interposed themselves. Kalevala was only few miles behind. Miles to the east, the Russian clippers unaware of the battle raced toward a group of sails coming their way, eager for more prizes. It would not be long before they discovered that they were twenty-three merchant ships in convoy with a Royal Navy escort.16 Rear Adm. Sir E.T. Long aboard HMS Hastings, a fifty-gun ship-of-the-line, ordered his ships forward to engage. Long was that sort of fighting admiral who the Royal Navy seemed to sow like dragon’s teeth. He had run down and hanged slavers off West Africa, taken his squadron of gunboats in the Crimea almost onto the shore to bombard Russian forts, and in China had led his gunboat flotilla up a river into the teeth of the Chinese defenses and been severely wounded. Now he led a strong squadron from the Royal Navy’s Australian Station, escorting five infantry regiments from New Zealand and Australia. The Russian clippers turned and fled west to warn Popov.

  Before long all they had to do was follow the pall of gunpowder smoke that hung over the battle. Kalevala was now in that same unequal fight with Charybdis and Alert. Rydna had sunk little Forward and was turning Grappler into firewood, when Turnour’s lookout reported the appearance of the Russian clippers. He signaled Alert to turn about and engage. Minutes later the lookout reported a forest of sails coming behind the clippers. When the chase was done, and Long rowed over to Charybdis to congratulate Turnour on his splendid action, he found him kneeling amid a corpse strewn quarterdeck over a dying Russian officer. Long stood in silence as the man clutched at his sword to offer it to Turnour, blood frothing at his lips from the wound in his lung. “No, Captain, I could not accept the sword of such a gallant man.”

  When news eventually reached Britain of the victory of the battle of San Juan de Fuca, Britain went wild. The bells pealed from Inverness to Dover. The newspapers, which had had little good to report for a long time, christened Turnour a new Nelson and made much of the last dramatic moment on Charybdis’s quarterdeck as an exemplar of British chivalry. For his intrepidity Captain Turnour would return home a national hero be knighted by the queen. In his heart of hearts, though, he valued the comparison to Nelson far more than the knighthood.

  9

  General Grant’s Army of Invasion

  NUMBER 10, DOWNING STREET, SUNDAY, 4:40 P.M., APRIL 3, 1864

  Disraeli’s Sunday afternoon had already been turned into chaos before Derby’s telegram was rushed into him. Meagher’s seizure of Dublin had not prevented a number of loyal men from fleeing the city to race up and down the coast to find any craft able to put to sea. These had made for Liverpool, and their alarm had cleared all traffic from the telegraph lines. One telegram after another was sped up to the Prime Minister’s residence. The authorities in Liverpool had not direct knowledge or confirmation, but the Royal Navy’s ships in port were preparing to take the morning tide.

  On the face of it, the stories were fantastic; the American army and Russian navy had taken Dublin by coup de main. Disrae
li could believe that one rumor could be magnified, but not a half-dozen accounts from men closely questioned by the authorities in Liverpool. Derby’s telegram was the thunderbolt that made it all too real. He summoned the Russian ambassador and the cabinet. He knew that most of them were at their country homes on the weekend or guests elsewhere in the country. Even their deputies would be difficult to find. He must act on his own. His secretaries now took his dictation in relays as telegram after telegram went to fleet and army to stir every naval base, ship, regiment, the yeomanry and RVC in the Kingdom into a frenzy of activity. The civil authorities throughout the island were also notified to place in effect the measures necessary to ease military movements, increase security, and prepare the local population for invasion. The railways were ordered to be at the disposal of the government for the transportation of troops. All these measures had been put in place during the war scare with France of the late 1850s that had also created the RVCs. If there was a flaw in this planning, it was that measures had been directed primarily to counter a cross-channel invasion from France and not one aimed at Ireland.

  Nor from Essex. No word of Dahlgren’s raid had leaked out. Cutting the telegraph wires prevented any immediate warning even if people along the line were aware of the train full of Americans heading west, which they were not. By the time Disraeli was alerting the British military establishment of the danger in Ireland, Dahlgren had already seized Romford. Leaving half his men there to hold the station, cut the telegraph lines, and destroy the tracks up and down the main line from Colchester to London, he took the remaining two hundred into the late afternoon for ten-mile dash to Waltham Abby.

  Dash may not have been the right word as the afternoon light dimmed. A horse could do four miles at a walk in an hour and six miles in a trot, and twelve miles in a gallop. They could have galloped the whole way in less than an hour, but then their horses would have nothing left for the return ride. The usual method was to alternate a walk and trot and make six miles an hour.1 Dahlgren pushed them at less walk and more trot to get to the Abbey in an hour and a half. They skirted Hainault Forrest to the south of its high ground, turned north to pick up the main road through the Roding River valley, crossed the river and passed up into Epping Forrest. Just beyond was Waltham Abby and its powder mills and beyond that less than a mile was Enfield Lock and its factory. Luckily, the area was thinly inhabited and wooded. That’s where Dahlgren’s famous luck started to go thin. His guides rode up ahead and disappeared into the woods to divest themselves of their American uniforms. It took Dahlgren precious minutes to realize that they were not coming back. Now the early late-afternoon rays began to lengthen over the halted column.

  At Romford, things quickly began to get out of hand. The two hundred men that Dahlgren had left behind to secure the railway station and conduct mayhem up and down the tracks could not at the same time keep the town from leaking like a sieve. Riders carrying the news went in every direction, to wherever there was a local RVC, two miles south to Hornchurch and seven miles northeast to Brentwood, and to raise the alarm in every village and town. It took one rider only two miles on the way to London to find a functioning telegraph office at Brookham.

  WALTHAM ABBEY, ESSEX, 5:45 P.M., SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 1864

  Now it would be a race. Had Dahlgren known how the country was being raised behind him, he could not have acted with any more ruthless determination. Men were pulled at gunpoint out of the few cottages they passed and pressed into service as guides as the column galloped the last mile. Barely a half hour behind schedule, they rode through the little town with its ancient abbey. Troopers dismounted to break in doors to drag men from their dinner tables to the screams of their wives and children to press them as guides to the powder mills a short distance away. Patrols were set on the road leading out of town.

  It was not every Sunday night that two hundred cavalry rode through the streets of Waltham Abbey. If that had not been enough to bring the town into the streets from their Sunday dinner, the smashing in of doors certainly did. People had milled in the streets demanding to know who these strangers were. The troopers were only too happy to tell them that they were part of General Grant’s army of invasion that had already reached London and would soon have the town in flames and the queen their prisoner. It was worth the look of shock on their faces.

  One man kept his presence of mind in the confusion and sought their commander. He knew a thing or two about soldiering and dismissed the troopers’ stories of an invasion as so much cock and bull. But the troopers were real soldiers, easy in their saddles and in that way a man carries his equipment. They just were not British soldiers, and though they spoke English, it was American-accented English. It crossed his mind that they might be Canadians, but no soldiers in this island had dared treat civilians this way since Cromwell, and these were clearly living up to that standard.

  All he had to do was look for the color bearer to find the commander. There it was, down the street, the lamplight from a window picking out its unmistakable white stars and red and white stripes. Yes, Americans. Next to him was a mounted sailor, also a color bearer. This flag he recognized instantly from its black double-headed eagle on an orange and black field. And Russians! He had seen those colors on too many Crimean battlefields. The implications were enough to stupefy an ordinary man, but Hope Grant had called him a “quick-witted fellow” who could take a situation in with a glance. Grant did not mention a man lightly in dispatches. Now he walked with a limp to those colors. As two of the townsmen were brought to the young blond officer evidently in command, the man focused on him. The officer leaned over slightly from his saddle to the clutch of prisoners. “Do you know the way to the powder mills and to the factory at Enfield Lock?” Both heads bobbed in frightened assent.

  The man was shocked when two soldiers marched another man up to the young officer.“Found him at the inn just like you said we would, sir.”

  “Ah, Mr. Abel,” the officer said, “Allow me to introduce myself—Colonel Dahlgren, United States Army. You, sir, are my prisoner. These two soldiers will be your escort.”

  Abel’s face turned red. He was a scholarly-looking man, clean-shaven but with fine sideburns. “I must protest, sir! I am a subject of Her Majesty, and . . .” His protest was cut short as the soldiers hustled him away.

  The man had heard enough. He had come to know Abel in his frequent visits to conduct research on propellants at the powder mills. Waltham Abby was a small place. He slipped away as the cavalry with its terrified guides trotted away to the powder mills. His servants had been waiting with great anxiety in the hallway for his return. He saw his groom and said, “Edward, saddle my horse immediately. And the bay for yourself.”

  He went to the study and took his Colt revolver from his desk drawer. The irony of using an American-made pistol on Americans was not lost on him. If it could do in a Russian, Hindu, or Musulman, an American was also game. He spun the chamber to check that it was fully loaded and stuck it in his waistband. He went out the back door to find his horse ready. “Here she is, Sir Robert,” the groom said as he pressed a knuckle to his forehead. The groom offered his intertwined fingers to help where the Russian bullet had stolen the spring from his leg. He then leapt onto the bay. Wilson took him by the arm. “Ride to the Colonel at Naseing and tell him to call out the Yeomanry. Tell him that American cavalry has been here and gone to the powder mills and then will go to the factory at Enfield. He must intercept them there. Do you understand?”

  The groom nodded quickly. He had been Wilson’s orderly in India. No one would ride faster than this old soldier of the Queen.

  It had taken barely minutes for the Americans to reach the entrance to the Royal Powder Mills. The watchmen at the gate offered no resistance. There were lights only in the main office building, another safety precaution. Leaving unattended oil lamps on buildings containing immense amounts of gunpowder was not a good idea. At least Dahlgren did not have to worry about hustling the workforce to safety. He s
aid to his ordnance officer, “Get to work, and join us at Enfield. I expect your success to announce itself even before you report in person.” The man grinned and disappeared with his team following the railway tracks that wound through the grounds from one well-spaced building to another, their chemical lanterns bobbing in the dark.

  Sir Robert Wilson, VC, late captain of the 9th Lancers, took the first road out of town in the direction of Enfield. Just as he cleared the last house, he was challenged by two horsemen who loomed out of the trees. He pulled his pistol and drove his spurs into the horse’s flank. The animal leapt forward straight for the Americans. Sir Robert fired first and emptied a saddle and then crashed his horse into the other trooper sending them careening into a ditch. He kept going, taking a hedge in one clean jump, shots from the other American’s Spencer flying around him as he sped through the dusk.