She spent her first few years performing research and demonstrations vital to the evolution of steam-powered warships, before sailing to the West Indies, where she became the flagship of her construction overseer, Commodore Perry. In the right place at the right time during the war with Mexico, Mississippi engaged in actions against Tampico, Panuco, Alarado, and several other coastal ports, blockading incoming commerce. She was also heavily involved with the amphibious operations at Veracruz, where she landed vital military matériel for Winfield Scott’s army. She also supplied heavy guns, and the crews who fought them, all the way to Mexico City, where they bombarded fortifications and helped bring about the city’s surrender in only four days. Throughout much of the war, Mississippi conducted a series of raids on coastal towns before helping to capture the important town of Tobasco.
After the war, she cruised with the American fleet in the Mediterranean for two years before returning to America in preparation for Commodore Perry’s celebrated voyage to Japan. Mississippi was his flagship on most of the expedition to open Japan to Western trade. In one of the most studied and admired naval and diplomatic operations in history, Perry negotiated a treaty with the emperor, and the nation that had been utterly opposed to outside influence opened its ports to international trade.
Mississippi sailed for New York and later returned as Commodore Josiah Tatnall’s flagship. Commodore Tatnall “went south” at the beginning of the Civil War and was in command of Merrimack/Virginia during her lengthy battle with Monitor.
From 1857 to 1860, the now-aging ship supported and protected America’s booming trade in China and Japan. She was also with the British and French ships during the attack on Taku and landed her marines at Shanghai when the American consul requested Tatnall’s help in quelling the rioting in the city.
The veteran steamer sailed back to Boston and was laid up until it was reactivated at the beginning of the Civil War. Now under the command of Melancthon Smith, she was employed in blockading Pensacola, Florida. After capturing two Confederate blockade runners off Key West in late 1861, she joined Admiral David Farragut for the assault on New Orleans. When she passed over the bar at the South Pass, she became the largest ship ever to enter the Mississippi River.
As previously related, during the battle, as Farragut’s fleet ran the gauntlet between Forts St. Philip and Jackson, Mississippi battered the Confederate ironclad Manassas after it made an unsuccessful attempt to ram and sink her. Surviving the hail of shot and shell from the forts, Mississippi triumphantly entered New Orleans with the rest of the fleet and aimed her guns on the buildings along the shore until the city capitulated.
Nearly a year after, Farragut ordered Smith to take Mississippi and join the ships that would attempt to pass the Confederate guns of Port Hudson to Vicksburg to help General Grant in his siege of the city. The battle of the bluffs would prove to be her final moment of glory.
JUST AS RICHMOND, the second ship in line, was turning the bend and within a hundred yards of safety, a shot ripped into her engine room and shattered her steam valves and pipes. Unable to maintain pressure and make headway with Genesee tied to her port side, her captain had no choice but to reverse course and retreat back down the river out of the range of Confederate guns.
Monongahela fared no better. A shell struck the rudderpost of Kineo, the gunboat making the run at the frigate’s side, and jammed it. Unable to steer against the current while maneuvering both ships, Monongahela ran aground. The sudden stop tore away the lines gripping the ships together. While under a devastating fire, Kineo struggled valiantly to get a hawser to the big frigate before pulling Monongahela free of the bottom mud.
The two ships endeavored to resume their course upriver, but shots incapacitated the frigate’s engines, and both ships had to drift helplessly back down the river while sustaining heavy fire from the enemy gun batteries.
Alone and bringing up the rear, Mississippi now became the prime target. Concentrating their fire on the lone warship, the Confederates poured shell after shell into the old frigate. She soon became enveloped in a pall of swirling smoke.
Captain Melancthon Smith paced the bridge, calmly smoking a cigar, seemingly oblivious to the hail of shot and shell bursting on and around his ship. Mississippi’s paddle wheels were beating the water, propelling her past the bluffs alive with cannon fire. Her top speed of eight knots was cut to four from the equally fast speed of the current, and it seemed to the crew who were working their guns in furious haste that the passage was taking an eternity.
They were moving slowly, the pilot feeling his way through the heavy smoke. Believing that they were safely past the jutting point of the west bank and its shoals, the pilot called out, “Starboard helm! Full speed ahead!”
In the words of the Mississippi’s executive officer, George Dewey, “As it turned out, we were anything but past the point. We starboarded the helm right into it and struck just as we developed a powerful momentum. We were hard aground and listing.”
Dewey would later become the hero of Manila Bay, where his fleet of warships decimated the Spanish fleet, and he would utter words that have come down through naval history, along with John Paul Jones’s “I have not yet begun to fight,” Oliver Hazard Perry’s “We have met the enemy and they are ours,” and James Lawrence’s “Don’t give up the ship.” As the great Spanish-American War sea battle was about to commence, Dewey turned to the captain of his flagship, Olympia, and calmly said, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”
Dewey was a handsome man with black straight hair, bushy sideburns, and a great mustache that he kept until his death in 1917.
With guns blasting, engines pounding with every ounce of steam the chief engineer could coax from them, and paddle wheels thrashing the water, old Mississippi refused to budge. The Confederates took happy advantage of the stationary target lit up by the nearby burning house, pouring in shells and a swarm of bullets from the rifle pits. As the ship struggled helplessly to back off the shoal, the number of dead and wounded climbed appallingly.
Dewey hunted for Captain Smith and found him lighting a cigar as coolly as if he were standing at a garden party. “Well, it doesn’t look as if we could get her off,” said Smith, almost indifferently.
“No, it does not,” Dewey replied.
At that moment, a fiery hot shot tore into the forward storeroom and set the inflammable supplies and matériel afire. A holocaust soon spread out of control as flames quickly reached the decks above. Looking around at the destruction and his mortally wounded command, Smith had to face the sad prospect of losing his ship.
“Can we save the crew?” he asked Dewey.
“Yes, sir.”
Shells had shattered the three boats on the side facing the enemy, but those on the port side were still seaworthy. Dewey directed a crew of able-bodied men to load the worst of the wounded into the first boat and directed the crew to row to one of the ships downstream.
Dewey supervised the loading of the lesser wounded and some that were unhurt. He was frustrated to see how slowly the boats returned. The oarsmen were decidedly unenthusiastic about making the trip back once they reached the temporary safety of the other ships. Unable to speed up the boats’ return to the burning ship, Dewey swung a line into a boat just as it was about to push off with a load of crewmen.
Though Dewey was reluctant to desert his ship, his decision turned out to be a wise one. He and the acting master, Joseph Chase, had to use their revolvers to make the men row back. If Dewey hadn’t slipped aboard, none of the boats would have been available to rescue the rest of Mississippi’s remaining crew.
Upon returning to the main deck, Dewey approached Smith and hastily explained his temporary absence. He motioned to the two empty lifeboats alongside, indicating that they would not be there save for his initiative and fortitude.
“We must make sure none is left aboard alive,” Smith said evenly.
What began as a compelling search soon turned into a grim nightmare. Dewey
quickly selected five men to accompany him throughout the disabled warship. Bodies had to be closely examined in the dark and smoke to see if any of the men were still alive. They were very careful to make certain no spark of life remained, or the poor man might lie there, powerless to move, as the flames crept closer and closer.
They moved belowdecks, shouting that there was little time left to abandon the ship. Luckily, they found a young cabin boy who was still breathing despite being buried under a pile of dead bodies that had been cut down by bursting shells. Satisfied that only the dead remained on board, Dewey was then ordered by Smith to make absolutely certain that old Mississippi would be totally destroyed before falling into Confederate hands.
Dewey ran to his stateroom, snatched off the mattress from his berth, and dragged it to the wardroom, where he sliced it open with a dress sword, piled chairs and tables on top of it, and then threw an old oil lantern into the debris, igniting a roaring fire almost immediately. Only then did he and the few men left on board join Captain Smith in the last lifeboat.
They pushed off from the hull aft of the paddle wheels and immediately were caught in the powerful current and swept downriver. As they looked back, a giant torrent of flame burst through the skylight of the wardroom that Dewey had set ablaze. The Confederate guns fired away at the lifeboat but fortunately failed to score a hit. At the sight of the flaming ship, the entire bluff above the river broke into a rebel yell. The victory was theirs.
Farragut’s fleet had come within an inch of total disaster.
Smith seated himself in the stern of the lifeboat, still puffing nonchalantly on a cigar while Dewey manned the tiller, and the men rowed through the splashing shells until they reached the safety of the battle-scarred Richmond, anchored downriver out of reach of the Confederate guns. During their flight, Smith took off his sword and revolvers and threw them into the river.
“Why did you do that?” Dewey asked him.
“I’m not surrendering them to any rebel,” he said haughtily. It was a hasty decision Smith would come to regret.
A humorous episode occurred when the men of Mississippi boarded Richmond. While Dewey was setting the fire in the wardroom on board the doomed ship, Ensign Dean Batcheller snatched up a dress uniform coat hanging in the cabin he shared with Ensign Francis Shepard. The rest of the crew, including Smith and Dewey, escaped with only the clothes on their backs.
Proudly, Batcheller held up the coat. “At least I’ll have something to wear for the ladies in New Orleans.”
His cabin mate Ensign Shepard leaned over and eyed the coat. Then he looked up and grinned. “Thanks very much, Batcheller, but that’s my coat.”
And so it was.
Dewey was greeted by a close friend from his Naval Academy days at Annapolis, Winfield Scott Schley, who was destined to command the fleet that would destroy the Spanish fleet off Santiago, Cuba, at almost the same time Dewey was making his mark in the Philippines.
Back at the battered Mississippi, the river flowed in through the engine water-delivery pipes that had been cut by the engine-room crew before they abandoned ship. Because the hull was grounded on an angle with the bow slightly raised, the incoming water flowed toward the stern. The added weight lifted the bow, and she slid free off the shoal. The current turned her around so that now she was moving with her bow pointed downstream. The port guns that had been loaded but not fired now faced the Confederates. As the flames reached their primers, they began firing a ragged broadside in a final act of defiance. Dewey solemnly described the sight as “a ship manned by dead men still firing at the enemy.”
Engulfed by a sheet of fire that raged through the pummeled ship, Mississippi was carried downriver by a four-knot current. The shriek of steam escaping from the ship’s safety valve cut through the pandemonium of gunfire. Flames burst from her rigging and erupted into the night sky, casting a flickering orange blaze of light that illuminated both shorelines as bright as day. Looking like a floating, flaming pyramid, Mississippi was a funeral pyre for the dead aboard. It was a sight never forgotten by both the Federals and rebels who watched her fiery passage in the night. Her death would later be described as a grand spectacle.
Several reports from both sides in the battle put the frigate sliding off the shoals at 3 A.M. and drifting down around Profit Island, her flaming hull reflecting in the sky until 5:30, when the fire reached the twenty tons of gunpowder in her magazine and she blew up in a tremendous explosion. The ensuing concussion shook the country for miles around and rocked the Union ships from stem to stern. Such was the end of the brave old paddle steamer.
It was somehow fitting that the river she was named for became her burial shroud.
Perhaps Dewey himself paid Mississippi her greatest tribute when he stood on the deck of Richmond, stony-faced and deeply saddened as he watched her die. He said, “She goes out magnificently.”
II
Nothing Stays the Same 1989
THIS IS ESPECIALLY TRUE OF RIVERS AND THEIR SHORELINES. Unless it’s the Colorado flowing through the Grand Canyon on the same course for thousands of years, most rivers, particularly the Mississippi, change their course on a daily basis. The riverboat Sultana, chronicled in the first Sea Hunters book, burned and sank a few miles above Memphis in 1865 with a loss of two thousand lives. Our mag search put the remains two miles from the present course of the river, eighteen feet deep in a farmer’s soybean field in Arkansas.
The final resting place of the gallant old frigate Mississippi, where she has lain ignored and forgotten since that horrendous night in 1863, is not under the present river channel, either. In the approximate area where Mississippi was last seen, the river has moved almost a mile to the west and has become an immense bog.
Because I did not feel it was fitting or proper that “lost in obscurity” be Mississippi’s epitaph, I cleared my desk after finishing another Dirk Pitt adventure book and began the research in preparation for the hunt for Mississippi.
Relying on researcher Bob Fleming in Washington, who combed the archives, we amassed a mountain of material that we eventually sifted to a ten-inch pile. Then began the investigation to estimate a ballpark for Mississippi’s location. One of the first things we had to consider was the possibility that she had been salvaged. Fortunately, a probe through the naval archives revealed no such attempt. Part of the reason was a report that she had exploded in the middle of the channel and sunk in deep water, which would have been between eighty and a hundred feet, a depth that would have made it impractical to undertake a salvage operation 140 years ago.
Since none of the contemporary reports gave a clue to the exact location where she had blasted herself to bits and gone down, and no distances were given to still-existing landmarks, I had to base the search on the time element. With the river running at a known four knots, it didn’t take a great strain of my pitifully inadequate talent for mathematics to figure that Mississippi drifted a distance of ten to eleven miles before she sank.
There were one or two Confederate reports that put the site of her explosion close to the wrecks of the ironclad Arkansas, destroyed by her crew a few months earlier. But we had discovered the ironclad eight years before under a levee sixteen miles below Port Hudson at the bend of the reach before it dropped toward Baton Rouge.
The ten-mile distance was consistent with contemporary references. Spears’s biography of Farragut states that “she reached the foot of Profit Island when the fire reached her magazine and she blew up.”
A. J. C. Kerr, a Confederate veteran from Corsicana, Texas, stated later in his memoirs that “the Mississippi blew up ten miles below Port Hudson.”
The log of the Richmond also stated that “the Mississippi drifted down the river and blew up ten miles astern of us.”
George S. Waterman recounted that “the Mississippi floated down the river a short distance below the fleet when the fire reached her magazine.”
And finally, there is a sketch of the river and gun emplacements at Port Hudso
n with a notation by William Waud, a war artist who was on board Richmond. “Air very thick with smoke. The Mississippi drifting down in flames, exploding near the land pier.”
The last was a good reference point, except there were at least six piers along that stretch of river in 1863. Then, to muddy the water, Waud never indicated what he meant by “land pier.” Upper Springfield Landing was the closest to the projected site. Also, two contemporary wrecks were marked on the old chart, one on top of the other, on the west bank below the bend in the river. Over the passing of a century or more, the encroaching swamp had covered them and left their remains a good half mile from the present river flow Since they were unnamed and appeared to have run aground, we eliminated them as Mississippi. Also, it seemed likely that if one had been the Union frigate, the chart maker would have labeled her as such.
Next came the important process of overlaying a new chart showing the present course of the river as compared with an 1868 chart. It quickly became apparent that the approximate spot where we computed Mississippi to lie was now nearly a quarter mile west in a huge bog called Solitude Point.
Springfield Bend, as the area that traveled around the point was called, had filled in toward the east. It was encouraging, but we still felt we stood a slim chance.
Having taken it as far as we could go, we decided it was time to gather up the equipment and head for Louisiana to begin our search.
In May of 1989, Craig Dirgo and I arrived in Baton Rouge and arranged with the West Baton Rouge parish sheriff’s department to once again borrow their great little aluminum boat for a river survey. Accompanied by a deputy and his son-in-law, we launched the boat on a hot, humid day under a clear sky. Relying on NUMA’s EG&G sidescan sonar and the Schonstedt gradiometer to find a promising target, we set out hoping for the best, expecting the worse, and willing to settle for anything in between.
Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo Page 13