SIR: You say your ship is aground. It will be your duty to defend your ship up to the last moment, and not to fire her, except it be to prevent her from falling into the hands of the enemy.
He paused in his writing, looked at the note. He knew the words he wished to use in the second paragraph, but he could not write them. It was not fitting for an officer and a gentleman to write the sort of thing he was thinking. Instead, he continued in a more even tone.
I do not think the enemy will be down tonight, but in case they do, fight them to the last.
You have boats enough to save all your men. I do not approve of your leaving your ship until every effort to defend her from falling into their hands is made.
Respectfully, your obedient servant,
John Pope
He folded the note, handed it to the midshipman, said, “That is for Captain Handy.”
The midshipman saluted, hurried away. Pope stepped across the deck, looked out over the dark water at the glowing lanterns on Vincennes’s deck.
…Crippled ship and worn-out men…Shall I burn her when I leave her? Good God…
“The damned Rebels have the grit and the will to come down and attack us in paddle wheelers and towboats armored in cotton,” Pope said out loud, certain that no one was near, “and that idiot Handy wants to abandon and burn a ship more powerful than the whole Rebel fleet because he is tired and stuck in the mud!”
Pope shook his head. Dear God…here is why this damned war will not be over anytime soon.
29
After twenty rounds from the Fort the ammunition became exhausted and the entire garrison, under the command of Capt. Barron, late of the United States Navy, surrendered, and were made prisoners by Butler and his vandals…
– Richmond Whig, August 31, 1861
Samuel Bowater stared at the face in the mirror over the washbasin in the master’s cabin of the CSS Cape Fear. Thinner, more tired, lines more prominent. His facial hair shot through with considerably more gray. But overall, not too bad.
Da, da-da, da-da-da-da-daaa…
He smoothed his mustache and goatee and hummed the strains of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Quintet in C Major. In two hours’ time, he would be sitting in the cramped, drafty, not excessively clean theater, a block from the waterfront in Elizabeth City, a theater generally relegated to minstrel and burlesque shows, and enjoying an uncertain performance of the work as interpreted by the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet.
Da, da-da, da-da-da-da-daaa…
Samuel did not expect great things from the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet. If they could come at all close to the sound he heard in his head, he would be content.
Those reservations aside, he was eager for the performance. It had been a long, long time since he had enjoyed real music. He was so starved for the genuine article that he would catch himself turning his ear to his cabin window, actively listening to Hieronymus Taylor’s violin, Moses Jones’s singing. He found himself tapping his foot to the tune of “ Maryland, My Maryland,” waving an imaginary baton to coax out the strains of “The Leaving of Liverpool.”
They were very good, Taylor and Jones, Bowater had to admit. Such a waste of talent. What a fine Don Giovanni Moses could make. With some work, Taylor could be a first violin. First violin for the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Quintet, certainly.
A blast of wind hit the Cape Fear , whistled around her superstructure, made her dock fasts groan. It was mid-November, cold and bleak. Hard on one’s optimism, with the gales coming in off the Atlantic, churning Albemarle Sound into steep chop, gray water capped with marching rows of white horses, cold, driving rain.
They were dockside at Elizabeth City, just in from a week’s patrol of the sound, running supplies down from Norfolk to the 3rd Georgia, dug in on Roanoke Island, taking long shots at the Yankees in Pamlico Sound. Uninspiring, miserable business, but Samuel was glad to be back at it. There had been moments enough during the past two months when he thought he might never step foot on shipboard again.
It was more than two months before, on August 29th, that Fort Hatteras was surrendered to the Yankees. The ten-inch shell from Wabash that had destroyed the fort’s Number 8 gun carriage, killed one of the gun crew, shattered Lieutenant Murdaugh’s arm, and knocked Flag Lieutenant Sharp galley west had nearly done for Samuel Bowater as well. He was tossed into a sea of hurt. He lost a lot of blood.
He had, besides the wounds to thigh and shoulder and arm, three broken ribs, a fractured humerus, and a mild concussion. He could not remember most of what had happened that morning at Fort Hatteras, even less of the trip back to Norfolk. He recalled some sort of shouting match between Hieronymus Taylor and the lockkeeper at the Great Dismal Swamp Canal locks, but little else.
The first sensation that he felt, once the doctor had backed off the laudanum a bit, was anxiety.
The Cape Fear, he was told, had been sent back to Albemarle Sound to join with the little fleet defending Roanoke Island. Roanoke sat square in the middle of the single passage between Pamlico and Albemarle Sound. It was the key to Albemarle Sound and so the key to control of the rivers that wound their way into North Carolina-the Roanoke, the Chowan, and the Pasquotank, as well as the inland passage between Elizabeth City and Norfolk.
It was inconceivable that the Yankees would not push up Pamlico Sound, fast and in force, and capitalize on their victory at Hatteras Inlet. Indeed, it was no more than half a victory if they did not.
While Samuel had no doubts about Lieutenant Harwell’s enthusiasm, he was deeply concerned about the luff’s ability to command the ship in his absence. Every day Bowater asked for the news from North Carolina. And every day the news was the same. The Yankees were in possession of the inlet, the Confederates held Roanoke Island, and they all seemed content to stay where they were.
Finally he stopped asking, and contented himself with the newspapers.
Jacob, whom he had kept to aid him during his convalescence, was dispatched daily for the Richmond Examiner or the Whig, in which Bowater read, “Whose fault it may be, that the little garrison at Hatteras was so poorly provided with ammunition, we leave the proper authorities to enquire. We take it for granted that the marauders will not be permitted to stay long where they are.”
Bowater smiled. If you had stood in that rain of shells, sir, you might not take that so much for granted.
When he could find it, Jacob also picked up the New York Post or Tribune. Samuel read the gloating headlines:
THE WAR ON THE COAST
GOOD NEWS FROM BUTLER’S FLEET
FORT HATTERAS BOMBARDED
SURRENDER OF THE REBELS
CAPTAIN BARRON AND 300 MEN TAKEN
THE TRAITORS OUT OF POWDER
He read about the panic and dismay that had seized the South in the wake of Hatteras, the first successful Union invasion of the Confederacy. From the highs of Manassas to this new low.
In Washington and points north, just the opposite reaction. Elation, renewed hope. Samuel wondered if anyone on either side still had any sense of proportion. To compare the successful shelling of an undermanned and poorly built fort by a vastly superior enemy to what the Confederate Army had done at Manassas was simply absurd. If the people of the South-or the North-allowed themselves to play at such emotional tug-of-war, they were all in for a sorry time.
Back in early September, Samuel had been confined to bed, weak, arm hurting like hell, drifting in and out of sleep. He was tossing in feverish dreams when he heard a soft voice call. “Captain Bowater?” The voice incorporated itself into his dream, a woman calling from far off, and he was running to her, but he could not seem to move, for all his flailing legs.
“Captain Bowater?” His eyes fluttered open. He looked Wendy Atkins straight in the face and could not place her.
“Captain…? It’s Wendy Atkins…”
“Wendy Atkins…” Samuel said the name as the memory came back with the sound of her voice. It had been two months at least since he ha
d seen her. He tried to picture her by the riverfront park, in paint-spattered clothing. She had annoyed him to no end, he recalled, but with all he had been through he could not recall why.
“What are you doing here?” It was all Bowater could think to say.
“I am volunteering as a nurse,” she said. “Oh, I know, the height of scandal, a female nurse.” She sat on the edge of his bed, leaned down, and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “They think we women will become too aroused, working among the men. I tell you, after all the blood and wounds and pus and worse I have seen, I am in danger of never being aroused again!”
Bowater smiled, smiled at what he understood he would have considered shockingly forward half a year before. But not now. He felt bits of his old propriety flaking off, like paint from an unprimed canvas.
“And how do you happen to be here, Captain?”
Bowater told her, in the barest terms, of Hatteras and the awful shelling, and she listened and she nodded and she did not say any of the stupid things-“Oh my…how dreadful…surely you were afraid”-that most people who had not been under fire said. Instead she just listened, which was just what Samuel Bowater wanted, though not even he himself knew it.
By midmonth, Samuel’s strength was coming back, and he made a point of walking up and down the whitewashed, airy halls of the naval hospital, to the limits of his endurance. On these jaunts Wendy accompanied him, lent an arm when necessary, and sometimes they talked and sometimes they did not and it was fine either way.
The broken arm still hurt, but he could move it now, and rather than remain in bed he often sat by the big windows that looked down over the water, or strolled around the hospital grounds. Then one afternoon Wendy appeared, carrying canvas and easel and paints, all quite new.
“Are you going to paint?” Bowater asked. “I would love to watch you, if you would not mind.”
“No, these are for you,” Wendy said, and there was hesitancy, uncertainty, in her voice.
Insouciance…that is it… Bowater thought. He had tried to pin it down, the thing he had so disliked about Wendy Atkins. Insouciance. That was the word. An arrogant boldness.
But the insouciance was gone now, and in its place a kind of calm understanding, a maturity he would not have thought could be gained in a few months. Something had happened, and now he could hardly recall the Wendy who had so annoyed him. Nor could he entirely recall the Samuel Bowater who had been so annoyed.
“Very well, then.” Bowater sighed, set the canvas up. He looked at the paints and the brushes. Something frightened him, and he did not know if it was an inability to get what was in his heart on canvas, or fear that it would all pour out, that he would make it all appear before him, and have to look on it again.
September turned to October and the cheerless days of autumn, with the cold wind tearing brown leaves from the trees, swirling them down the cobbled streets of Norfolk. Bowater, for all the pleasure he was now taking in Wendy’s company-they walked together, set up their easels, painted side by side, working away for hours in companionable silence-was desperate now to get back to the Cape Fear. He extended his walks beyond the confines of the hospital, strolling along the waterfront, looking longingly out over the river, assessing the shipping that plowed the gray water under gray skies.
Wendy urged him not to overtax his strength, and he did not, mostly, but he pushed himself to the brink.
In mid-October he sent word that he would be rejoining the Cape Fear, that he would take passage to Elizabeth City and meet her there. On that very day he read with some amusement how a band of ad hoc Confederate gunboats had chased the mighty Richmond and two other men-of-war from the Head of the Passes below New Orleans. Employed an ironclad ram, first such vessel built on the American continent. The CSN stealing a march on the Yankees.
Rams… That ancient weapon of Athens and Rome, made obsolete with the ascendancy of sail over the oar. Now with the rise of steam, the oldest of naval weapons was voguish once more.
He read of the first of the Yankee ironclad gunboats, the Carondelet, sliding down the ways. He hoped she was as unreliable as this Manassas appeared to be.
At last the doctors pronounced him fit to leave. With great enthusiasm he packed his few belongings, dressed in the new uniform he had ordered, his third, the second of cursed gray cloth. Tailored to the same measurements as the last, but he found it hung loose on him, was ill-fitting. He ignored that, ignored the aches he still suffered, the short-windedness. He would have ignored a missing limb to get out of the hospital and back to his command.
He said goodbye to Wendy, and it was an awkward thing, with a part of him wanting to embrace her, even kiss her, the other part quite unsure of how it was with them. In the end he gave her a hug, she gave him a sisterly peck on the cheek.
“We are in Elizabeth City quite often,” he said to her, a veiled suggestion.
“I could take the train down…” she said.
Bowater took passage aboard the Raleigh, which was transporting supplies from Norfolk to Roanoke Island. He could see the Cape Fear, tied to the dock, a half mile away, as they steamed down the Pasquotank River, leaving the Great Dismal Swamp Canal astern.
Samuel Bowater felt a charge he had not expected, a delight at seeing his little command, as he looked her over through a pair of field glasses. She looked good. Trim, tidy, her paint freshened, the brass howitzers on the afterdeck glowing dull under the overcast skies.
“She look good, Massa Samuel,” Jacob said.
“Here, have a closer look.” He handed Jacob the field glasses. “Are you eager to get back to her?”
“Oh, yassuh. Hospital ain’t no place for no navy men like us, suh.”
The Raleigh’s skipper brought his boat neatly alongside the Cape Fear. Bowater stepped aboard his own vessel to the kind of formal greeting he would have expected Lieutenant Harwell to organize. There were bosun’s calls and a sergeant’s guard with rifles and lines of men at attention. It was all very stirring, but Bowater did not really notice.
It was the smell that struck him at first. The smell of the Cape Fear. Before, he would not have said there was such a thing, a distinct odor to his ship. But now, coming back aboard after a month and a half absence, he realized there was. Paint and coal smoke and tar and the unique smell of Johnny St. Laurent’s galley-oh, how he had missed St. Laurent’s cooking! They all melded together to give the boat a unique and distinct ambiance. Bowater breathed deep, happy to have that in his lungs again.
He stepped down the lines of men, drawn up to greet him. There was a genuine warmth in their welcome. Bowater was touched, and not a little surprised.
“Tanner.” He stopped in front of the seaman, dressed out in his best uniform. Tanner, and some others, Bowater noticed, had embroidered “Cape Fear” on the silk bands around their caps. “I don’t recall much of what happened that morning at Fort Hatteras, but I do have some memory of your tending to me. Thank you.”
Tanner shrugged, hemmed, looked genuinely uncomfortable. “Whatever I could do, sir…” he managed to get out before Bowater released him from his discomfort, offered him a hand to shake, moved on down the line.
Hieronymus Taylor and his small engineering department were drawn up at the end of the line. Burgess, Moses Jones, Joshua Beauchamps, Nat St. Clair, and two new faces Samuel did not recognize, black men, one a big, burly fellow, the other more slight, around Bowater’s height.
“Welcome back, Cap’n,” Taylor said, hand outstretched. Samuel took the offered hand and shook. Taylor’s clothing, his frock coat and shirt and pants, were perfectly clean, with a crispness that far exceeded even Lieutenant Harwell’s. Bowater looked down the line. It was true of all of the black gang; their clothes were as clean as if they sent them out. How do they do that?
“Cap’n,” Taylor was saying, “these here are two new members of the engineering division, hired on by permission of Lieutenant Harwell. This big fellow is Lafayette Jefferson-how’s that for a patriotic name
-and the little fellow is Tommy. Jest Tommy, he says. I took ’em on as coal passers.”
And not just their clothes. There was a generally scrubbed appearance about their persons-none of the coal smudges and sweat stains and matted hair Bowater associated with the engine room, as if they had access to a bathtub, or a shower bath. How do they do that?
“Ahh,” Bowater continued, “is that not an excessive number of coal passers, for one boiler?”
“Well, suh, I’m bringing ol’ Moses along as fireman, see? I think he’s ready for a step up in the world.”
“Very well.” Samuel’s head was swimming. He wanted desperately to sit.
“You will forgive me, Chief…” he said, and making his goodbyes he headed off to the privacy of his cabin, with Jacob close behind.
Da, da-da, da-da-da-da-daaa… He’d been back two and a half months. His strength had returned. With the rolling deck underfoot, the ladders to negotiate two dozen times a day, and Johnny St. Laurent’s cooking, he was soon nearly back to his former self.
The first week in November brought no relief to the monotony of patrolling Albemarle Sound, the Cape Fear now one of the mosquito fleet under the command of Flag Officer William Lynch.
From the south, reports arrived of the Union capture of Port Royal, South Carolina. Big Federal men-of-war pounding the little Confederate forts to dirt-it was a virtual reenactment of Hatteras Inlet on a somewhat larger scale. But on Albemarle Sound, there was little happening. Except a concert by the Norfolk and Elizabeth City Symphony Orchestra, and it was taking on an importance all out of proportion with its promise.
Bowater finished dressing, let Jacob help him on with his coat, pulled his cap over his eyes, and stepped out into the cold. There was the distinct smell of winter in the air, carried on the lashing wind. The Cape Fear thumped against her fenders, rocked hard in the short waves piling up around her hull, a lot of motion for a vessel tied to the dock. Bowater stepped down the ladder and ducked behind the deckhouse, catching a lee from the wind.
Glory In The Name sb-1 Page 31