Glory in the Name

1

…At twenty-five minutes past four o’clock A.M., the circle of batteries with which the grim fortress of Fort Sumter is beleaguered opened fire.

— Report of the Charleston Press

Oil on canvas, in his signature fine brushstroke, Samuel Bowater painted the opening shot of the War for Southern Independence.

He stood on a small, grassy rise at White Point Gardens at the very tip of Charleston, where the Cooper and Ashley rivers met. From there he looked out over the dark water of Charleston Harbor, six miles to the open ocean and the weak gray band of light in the east.

It was a cool morning, early April, and the damp found its way through his frock coat and the white linen shirt he wore under it. Civilian clothing, not nearly as warm as the uniform he was used to. A cloak coat was draped over his shoulders. He pulled it snug, rubbed his arms together, hunched his shoulders as he waited for the light to come up. The air smelled heavily of salt marsh and the smoke from early-morning fires wafting from chimneys. What sounds there were were muted and distant—birds and crickets, the lap of waves, the creaking of ships at the wharves.

Charleston was holding its breath. It had been for some time, since Anderson left Fort Moultrie for Sumter, and it could not continue to do so much longer.

In front of him, still lost in the predawn dark, the twenty-by-twenty-four-inch canvas on which he had been working for the past five mornings.

Samuel stared out past the black humps of land which were just becoming visible in the morning light, out toward the sea, where the growing dawn was beginning to bleach out the stars and the night sky.

He wanted to be ready for that moment when night yielded to dawn, when the daylight asserted itself and the tenor of everything changed. It was a moment he had witnessed a thousand times at sea, and now he wanted to re-create it on the canvas.

And then, right in front of him and four miles off, a sharp muzzle flash of red and orange, and lifting up from that flash, a long, hair-thin arc of light where the burning fuse of the shell tracked against the dark sky. Samuel Bowater swallowed, closed his eyes as the familiar flat pow of the distant artillery caught up with him.

It was followed immediately by another, and then the twin explosion of the shells.

So it shall be war…

It was a resolution, at least. For months Bowater had been knocked about by the crosscurrent of speculation and rumor; the likelihood of peace, then the near certainty of war, then back again. Now, with the single jerk of a cannon’s lanyard, the question was decided.

Morris Island, he thought. The shot had come from Morris Island. Stevens’s Iron Battery.

Samuel Bowater, thirty-three years of age, lieutenant, United States Navy, on extended leave, had been kicking around his hometown of Charleston for months with little to do. He had come to know the harbor defenses well.

It would be days before he learned that the honor of firing that first shot had been offered to Congressman Roger Pryor of Virginia. That Pryor, understanding as Bowater did the enormity of the act, could not bring himself to pull the lanyard.

It would be a long four years before he read that the man who did finally discharge that shot, Edmund Ruffin, put a gun to his head rather than suffer the unbearable burden of a lost cause.

But that was in the future.

Samuel opened his eyes.

From all around Charleston Harbor, from Fort Moultrie and Stevens’s Iron Battery, the Floating Battery, and the Dahlgren Battery, the Enfilade Battery and Major Trapier’s Battery and Fort Johnson, the guns opened up on the sixty-eight Union troops huddled in Fort Sumter. The dark harbor was ringed with flashes of light, the bombardment so insistent that in some places it looked as if the shore had taken fire, and the bright trails crisscrossed the sky.

It was an awesome sight, beautiful and terrible at the same time. But in his mind Samuel Bowater saw only that first flash, that first arch of light.

The sky was growing rapidly brighter, and Samuel picked up his thinnest brush. He angled his paint kit toward the east, found the tube of cadmium yellow, squeezed a pea-sized drop on his palette. He stood back, but it was not yet light enough for him to see the canvas. He picked up the easel, turned it so the gray dawn light fell on the painting.

He took one last look at the harbor, the flames from the guns’ muzzles, the streaks through the air like a hundred falling stars, and now the bright flash and deep rumble of shells that found Fort Sumter and exploded against its twelve-foot-thick walls.

Samuel turned back to the canvas. He dabbed the brush in the yellow paint, sighed, touched the sharp pointed bristles to the canvas right at Morris Island, and made a little slash of light, up and off to the left.

He squeezed yellow ocher onto the palette, augmented the yellow on the canvas, and then added red, blending the colors until he had the subtle multihues of a muzzle flash, as he himself had seen it that morning and so many times before.

He stood back, dabbed the cadmium yellow again, took a deep breath. One stroke to paint the trail of the shell’s fuse, but it had to be perfect. He moved his hand over the canvas, the brush less than an inch from the surface, practicing the trajectory.

The dull sounds of the ceaseless bombardment surrounded him like a soft gray blanket of noise. And below that sound he heard another cheering, shouting from the rooftops and along the harbor walls and from the ships tied up to their docks—but like the gunfire he was hardly aware of it. He was no longer in that scene, he was completely in his canvas. The painting was his world and he was aware of no other.

Slash, slash, and then the tip of the brush came down on the canvas and a long, arching yellow streak cut across the oil sky, reaching its apex and dropping toward the small hump that was Fort Sumter.

Samuel Bowater stepped back, let out his breath, took in the canvas as a whole.

Perfect. It was just as he had seen it. Now, regardless of what happened next, of what he saw in the years to come, of how his memory of that morning was polluted by the dubious influences to which memory is susceptible, regardless, that moment was captured forever in oil.

He pulled his eyes at last from his canvas. A dozen people had joined him on his grassy rise, pointing toward the batteries and whooping and shouting and carrying on without the least shred of dignity, and more were hurrying toward them.

They had come to gawk, while Bowater had come to paint. He frowned at the intrusion, disapproved of the sentiment that made those civilians come running as if this act of war was a burlesque. Under his own strict code, he would not consider indulging his curiosity in so crass a way.

Samuel turned back to the action in the harbor.

The sun was up, dull yellow behind the veil of thin clouds, and the muzzle flashes and the streaks from the flying shells were not nearly so bright. But the sound was a continuous rumble now, and the gray clouds of smoke hung like morning mist over the batteries.

The smell of gun smoke reached the city at last. Samuel took a deep breath, and with that smell a thousand memories came back. Until he had taken leave of the navy five months before, there was rarely a day that passed that he did not smell it.

He shook his head as he watched the barrage that was being released on Fort Sumter. Those walls might well have collapsed by now, he thought, if they had been built by anyone other than the government of the United States. Bowater had not seen anything like it, not for fourteen years, not since the Mexican War, when, as an ensign fresh out of the Naval School at Annapolis, he had participated in the shelling of Veracruz.

For some long time he watched in silence and tried to fathom what this meant for him, but it was so very complicated and the gunfire was so murderous and the shouts of the people on the rise so distracting that he could not think.

Sumter has not fired back. He wondered if they had surrendered. The rumor was that they were nearly out of provisions, that bombardment or no they could not remain long on that little island.

Samuel picked up his haversack and stuck his hand inside, felt the cool brass of his telescope. He pulled it out, let the haversack fall. He snapped it out full length, brought it up to his eye, fixed Fort Sumter in the lens.

There it was, undulating in the light offshore breeze. The Stars and Stripes.

Oh, say can you see… Samuel thought of the words to that popular song. A circumstance just like this, when it was written, but then at least the flag stood against a foreign enemy, all of the United States battling their common foe.

He took the glass from his eye, snapped it shut. Always hated that song, mawkish, overwrought sentimentality…

The bombardment had settled into a steady monotony. Samuel stared at his canvas, crossed his arms, rested his chin in one hand, stroked his perfectly groomed mustache and goatee, and considered what he had done.

Over the past five days he had worked on the sky and the distant land, filling the canvas with rich purples and greens and oranges, creating a lush early-morning scene.

Talk about mawkish, overwrought sentimentality…

He had been trying to eschew the silly romanticism of the Hudson River School, of Washington Allston—revered in South Carolina—of Thomas Cole and that lot. He had failed.

Samuel scowled at the canvas, squeezed a bit of blue and black on his palette, swirled it together. Get rid of some of this purple… he thought.

With delicate strokes, like fingers on a lover’s cheek, he applied the paint to the top of the canvas, recreating the dark fringes of the western morning sky. He lost himself in the work, and the morning hours and the drama before him faded away as he got inside the painting, becoming part of its reality and dabbing away in an effort to make it reflect the reality he saw and felt.

After some time he heard footsteps behind him, on the soft grass. He felt his stiletto-sharp concentration waver, and he cursed under his breath. He waited for the stranger to come up, look over his shoulder, make some comment. Every passing philistine felt welcome, almost obliged, to look and comment.

Sometimes they would make a noncommittal grunt, sometimes say a word or two. Sometimes they would praise his work, which was the worst. Bowater could not tolerate praise coming from someone unqualified to give it, which was just about everybody.

The footsteps stopped. Samuel could feel the presence of someone behind. He braced. A woman’s hand reached past his arm, pointed to the American flag, a tiny spot of red, white, and blue he had painted over Sumter.

“May as well paint that right out,” his sister said.

“Are you a secessionist, now, Elizabeth?”

“I always have been, brother. Sitting on a fence is unladylike. But more to the point, has this gunfire knocked you off? And if so, on which side have you fallen?”

Samuel had joined the navy, entered as midshipman at the Naval School—now the Academy—at seventeen, driven by his father’s urging and a love for the sea with which he was born, as much as he was born with arms and legs and brown eyes.

With the one exception of the Mexican War at the very beginning of his career, Samuel Bowater’s time in the navy had been largely uneventful. For the past decade everyone’s career in the somnambulant United States Navy had been largely uneventful. But that was over. And service in the United States Navy was over for him.

“In any event, Colonel Chesnut says not a thimbleful of blood will be shed in this war,” Elizabeth said.

“Indeed.”

The garrison at Fort Sumter was firing back now, stabs of flame just visible as they shot out from the gray walls of the fort. Heroic, futile defiance. Not the sort of action that would lead to a bloodless revolution.

Samuel Bowater had not thought much about any of the questions that were tearing the nation apart, questions of sovereignty and the permanence of Union, questions of slavery. He was of the navy, half of the past fourteen years he had spent in foreign service, where his only connection to his home was his fellow officers, most of whom were Yankees, and the Stars and Stripes flying at the gaff.

Samuel Bowater was a man of the sea and he did not give a damn what happened in Kansas or Nebraska or Missouri. It was all very abstract to him, very theoretical, like a discussion of the latest elections in England or the uprisings in Germany. The United States Navy was what he knew and loved. And now he would have to reject it, and fight against it.

Samuel had joined the navy, but he had been born to South Carolina, and in the end he knew where his loyalty lay. He knew that he did not care for the Yankees deciding any question that related to his beloved state. But he could not hate the Yankees as so many of his fellow Southerners did. He had messed with too many of them.

The gunfire continued without letup. It was nearing noon and the barrage had not slackened in the least since that first shot at four-thirty. Bowater was terribly hungry.

“I think perhaps it is time to go home,” Samuel said. He cleaned his brushes and carefully packed his paint kit. He treated it with such care that it looked exactly as it had the day he bought it. Other painters wore special smocks to protect their clothes, which always seemed foolish to Samuel. If you were careful, you did not need a smock. There was no excuse for splattering paint on your clothes.

He took the canvas off the easel and leaned it against his haversack and folded the easel up.

He looked up, and his eye caught a cluster of dark shapes on the horizon. Ships, though a less experienced eye might not have recognized them as such, or might not have seen them at all.

Samuel fished his telescope out again, trained it on the distant vessels. Men-of-war, Union ships. They were just outside the harbor entrance, a good five miles off, but he thought that he recognized the profile of the twin-screw steamer USS Pawnee. She was less than a year old, but he had seen her often enough for her profile to be familiar.

In company with her he recognized the Harriet Lane and a steamer that he did not know. An expeditionary force, no doubt sent for the relief of Fort Sumter. He shook his head. “Too damned late,” he said. “The war has started without you.”

2

The streets of Charleston present some such aspect as those of Paris in the last revolution. Crowds of armed men singing and promenading through the streets, the battle blood running through their veins…

— William Russell, London Times

Samuel and Elizabeth Bowater left White Point Gardens and walked through a Charleston that Samuel had never seen, a jubilant, ecstatic, self-congratulatory Charleston. There was a universal joy and goodwill; it was Christmas and Easter and the Fourth of July, and many times more than that.

Sumter was fired upon. The waiting was over, the war had commenced. South Carolina, leader in secession, was the leader in the fight. Now that powder was burning, those states of the upper South—sister North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri—had to secede and then join in with the Confederacy. Now there was only to lick the Yankees and the South would be free.

Samuel was not immune to this mood, not entirely, though he found the crowd’s enthusiasm cheap and facile. Still, there was a new liveliness to his step, and he returned enthusiastic waves of greeting with a smile and a broad gesture, whereas just the day before he would have frowned and given a halfhearted shake of his hand.

“I don’t recall ever seeing you so enthusiastic, brother,” Elizabeth said.

“I am not made of stone, my dear,” Samuel said. He thought of their father. There was a man made of stone. He was not like that. “At least I am not treating the event like a circus come to town.”

“No? I could swear I caught you down at the Gardens, gawking like one of the mob.”

“I was painting, I was most certainly not gawking,” Samuel replied, but his sister’s implication rattled him. She was good at rattling him, always had been.

They walked on, and Samuel’s thoughts returned to the firing on Sumter, and with that thought his good mood returned. The waiting was over, the torment of indecision. He was not happy about war, had not wanted it. The United States Navy was his life. He had sworn an oath. No event short of his beloved South Carolina’s taking up arms against the United States could have moved him to break that oath. So he had waited, and suffered the suspicions of both sides.

They walked down King Street, shouldering through the crowds. All of Charleston was in the streets, and Samuel caught snatches of conversation as he passed, men bragging on what they would do in the upcoming fight, women adding to their bravado, or speaking in fearful tones, or gushing about the strength of Southern arms. He heard the word “honor” punctuating conversations like an exclamation point, and “Yankee” and “Black Republican”; it all swirled together in a patriotic gumbo.

They came at last to the Bowater house, three stories of brick walls and white-painted window frames and green ivy, standing shoulder to shoulder with the other fine homes on Tradd Street. A sign over a side door proclaimed, “William Bowater, Esq., Attorney at Law.”

It was the only home that Samuel had ever known, the only place he had ever lived besides the dormitories of the Naval School and the wardrooms of various ships. It was the place where Samuel had grown to manhood under his father’s seemingly omniscient eye, his unwavering rule.

It was where Samuel had learned to be a gentleman, and, more to the point, a Southern gentleman. Courteous to the last. Studied, urbane. Personally disciplined—a gentleman, he was taught, did not show womanly weakness of any sort. Passionately loyal to his country and his state. Unwilling to suffer even the hint of insult. Tolerant of the lower classes, appreciative, even, of their labor, but always aware of their place, and his. Kind to slaves. These were the things that made the Southern man, and the instruction was so thorough that those traits became a part of Samuel Bowater as much as his height and the color of his eyes.

They climbed the stairs, brother and sister, and crossed the porch, and Samuel pushed open the big front door. It opened onto an expansive foyer, at the far end of which was the wide staircase to the second floor. The floor was tiled, white-and-black checkerboard. A deep brown, ornately carved Venezuelan ironwood table sat to the right of the door. Samuel had brought it back from Caracas following a cruise in South America.

Samuel had not yet closed the door when Isaac appeared, his dark face—nearly the color of the ironwood table—showing no hint of interest in the commotion going on in the streets.

“Here, Isaac.” Samuel handed the black man his haversack and easel and paint kit.

“How da paintin’ go today, Misser Samuel?” Isaac asked. Samuel held up the canvas for the servant to inspect.

“Ain’t dat somethin’?” Isaac said. It was what he always said. Samuel considered it one of the more insightful comments he received.

“Samuel?” His mother’s voice came from the sitting room off to the right, a lovely, strong voice with just a hint of her native Ireland. There was a rustle of crinoline and silk, the tap of shoes on the marble floor, and the heavier footfalls of his father.

“Samuel!” His mother, Rachel, raced out into the foyer, his father right behind. “Oh, Samuel, have you been down to the harbor?”

His mother, at fifty-four, was still a beauty, with her once black hair now showing signs of gray, her strong features emboldened with tiny lines around her eyes and mouth. She came up to him, put her hands on his arms. “You are all right?”

“It was a near thing, Mother. I almost stabbed myself in the eye with my paintbrush. But my dear sister was there to see I came to no grief.”

“Our Michelangelo was well out of the way of the flying metal, Mother.”

Over his mother’s shoulder Samuel met his father’s eyes. He wore a vest and bow tie, as he did every day of his life, as far as Samuel could recall, and his white hair and beard were as perfectly groomed as Samuel’s dark brown hair and goatee. “What news, son?”

“Stevens’s Iron Battery at Morris Island opened up just at dawn, and the rest right after that. The firing has been continuous since. There was a relief squadron in the offing. Pawnee and Harriet Lane, looked like, but they’ll never dare come in now.”

“Sumter still stands?”

“For the time being. Not for much longer.”

William Bowater nodded.

“You are the only people in all Charleston not in the streets, I reckon,” Samuel observed. He knew that his father, like himself, thought the gawking crowd unseemly.

“Let us retire from here,” William suggested, and the party moved en masse from the foyer to the big, open drawing room. Through the tall windows they could see throngs in the streets. The jubilation seemed to reach through the glass, to sweep the elegant room and its occupants along with it. The excitement was like the odor of spent gunpowder that drifted over the city, ubiquitous, invading every space, wrapping itself around every person.

“Isaac, coffee,” William called as he sat in the big wing chair, the patriarch chair, and turned to Samuel. “I would say this is war, son. What will you do now?”

Samuel let out a breath. He had no notion of what his father, a staunch secessionist, thought of his long resistance to joining the Confederate forces. His father was a lawyer—his feelings were not easily read—and he was a gentleman, so he did not impose those feelings on others. He and Samuel talked at length about politics. They did not talk about emotions.

“I had hoped it would not come to this, I won’t pretend differently,” Samuel said. “I swore an oath to the United States, once. But it is war, as you say, and now my duty is clear.”

Isaac came in with the silver tray. He poured the coffee, added sugar and cream to each individual preference, and handed out the bone china cups.

William Bowater balanced his cup and saucer on his knee. “You are resolved, then, to fight for the Confederacy?”

“It is my duty. Honor demands it. But it was not an easy thing, Father, not at all.”

It was not an easy thing.

Samuel Bowater viewed South Carolina as the hub of all that was civilized and proper in America. When he thought of the Yankees coming, of the low, dirty mechanics and foreign-born plug-uglies, the dried-up abolitionists in their black clothing, the fast-talking, haughty New Yorkers running unchecked through his beloved Charleston, lording over his fellow Southrons, it made him angry in a way that surprised him.

They were the unwashed, battering down the gate to his shining city, the Persians coming to topple his perfect Athens. It was silly, of course. He knew plenty of Yankees, had been shipmates with them, and they were fine men. But somehow those men with whom he had sailed were not the same as the infidels who were coming to destroy his cherished South Carolina.

“No,” William Bowater said, “I should think it is not an easy thing at all. For thoughtful men it cannot be an easy decision,” and for the first time Samuel believed he heard a note of approval in his father’s voice. “Will you apply to the navy?”

“The navy is all I know. But there are plenty of naval officers who have not been sitting on the fence, and I fear the available berths have gone to them. There can’t be but a dozen or so ships in the whole Confederate Navy.”

Samuel was being generous, and he knew it, referring to the ragtag collection of tugs and paddle wheelers and sundry craft as “ships.” If there was no navy, he did not know what he would do. Join the army, perhaps, but what good could he be to an army?

“Perhaps it is too late, perhaps not,” William Bowater said. “I think your action in the Mexican War has not been forgotten.”

Samuel tried to wave the comment away. A stupid, rash move, a burst of youthful enthusiasm, more than a dozen years ago. By some miracle he managed to rescue a few dozen sailors when by all rights they should have been dead, along with himself and his crew. It had been a foolish act, but since he lived it was viewed as heroism.

“What is more,” William added, “Stephen Mallory and I are acquaintances, I might venture to say friends.”

“I had no idea,” said Samuel. Stephen Mallory was a former senator from Florida, former chairman of the United States Senate’s Committee on Naval Affairs, and, as of February, Secretary of the Navy of the Confederate States.

“We had occasion to work together on a matter concerning a merchantman belonging to a client of mine wrecked on Key West,” William said. “We only met twice, but have kept up our correspondence, even to this day. If you like I will write you a letter of introduction.”

“Yes, if you think it proper.”

“I will do no more than attest to your character. The rest is between you and Mallory.”

“I would expect no more.” Samuel felt his mood buoyed by the promise of action. Not combat—he was a long way from that—but something, anything beyond the purgatory of indecision to which he had condemned himself.

After more than a decade in the United States Navy, where action and promotion were equally unlikely, where discipline and protocol were maintained out of habit and not out of any pressing need, the idea of an upstart navy was refreshing. Better to play at David, with blood pumping in his veins, than be a sleepwalking Goliath. He was eager to be at it.

“I will leave tomorrow for Montgomery,” Samuel announced, even as he reached the decision himself. “Isaac, fetch Jacob.”

Jacob stepped into the room. He was the son of Isaac and Isabella, the Bowaters’ cook, had been Samuel’s servant for the past seventeen years, since Samuel had turned sixteen. Aboard the Pensacola he had acted as Samuel’s cabin steward, and had handled rammer and swab on the starboard midships thirty-two-pounder while at quarters.

“Jacob, I’ll be off to Montgomery in the morning. Pray pack my bag. I imagine I shall be away a week or so.”

“Yes, Misser Samuel. I’s goin’ with you?”

“No, I think not.”

“Yessuh,” he said and was gone.

“Dear Lord, but I am famished!” Samuel announced. “Is dinner not yet served?” He had not felt so sharp an appetite for months.

3

I shall never forget that beautiful day, and how elated I was, marching down the street while the band played “The Bonnie Blue Flag” and “Dixie.” Thousands were on the sidewalks, cheering and waving handkerchiefs. Some were crying, and of course it never occurred to me that many of us would never see those dear friends and neighbors again.

— Private George Gibbs, 18th Mississippi Infantry

The late-afternoon light was muted and soft and the breeze had died away and the warm ground gave off its smell of early spring. The Yazoo River moved slowly down to its rendezvous with the Mississippi, where together they would flow to the sea. But all of the earth’s somnambulant pace could not smother the excitement that rang through the halls and fields of Paine Plantation.

Robley Paine, owner of the plantation, patriarch of the family, stood on the wide porch, under the roof painted light blue on the underside to mimic the summer sky. One hand on the brilliant white porch rail, he stared out at the vast green lawn which rolled down to the Yazoo River, the grass as smooth and flat as the water, with only the one old oak to break the straight run from porch to river.

Paine Plantation, all nine hundred acres of it, was just south of Drumgould’s Bluff, on one of the rare straight stretches of the twisty Yazoo. From northeast to southwest the river ran like a great corridor though the green, fertile country of western Mississippi, past countless fields of cotton, cotton, cotton, the currency of the South.

Cotton was to the Southern man what the buffalo was to the Plains Indian, and Robley figured that if cotton could migrate, then the Southerners would pick up and follow after it.

A shout from inside the house, and Robley was pulled from his thoughts by the commanding voice of his oldest boy, Robley Paine, Jr., ordering, “You give me back that gun, now!”

Robley Junior was a venerable twenty-two and took his leadership and manhood seriously.

“Yassa, General, suh!” the higher-pitched voice of Jonathan Paine, third and youngest son, eighteen years old. Paine smiled and shook his head. How ever would those three boys manage under the real discipline of army life? They had lived their wild, rambunctious, and carefree youths there on that plantation, on the banks of that river. They had grown to manhood under Robley’s eye, Robley’s none-to-firm hand.

He would not crush the joy from them, as his father had done to him, just for the sake of making them strong. Robley was strong, and he reckoned he would have been strong even without the sermons, the beatings. Stronger, most likely. He probably would not have the brittle feeling inside him, as if his soul was a skim of ice on a water trough in early winter.

Robley Paine had let his boys run their heedless way, let them suck the joy out of every moment of their youth. Despite the disapproval of his fellow planters, all the head-shaking and tongue-clicking over the subject of his easy parenting, he gave them little by way of discipline. Just his quiet instruction and his love, and that he gave unstintingly.

And for all the predictions of worthlessness and profligacy, his boys, Robley, Nathaniel, and Jonathan, had grown to fine and honorable young men.

Robley Paine, Jr., was talking again, in his officer’s voice. “Git your goddamn gear on, and be quick about it!”

He was now, informally, Lieutenant Robley Paine, Mississippi Infantry. The young men of Mississippi were responding to their state’s call to arms. From Ocean Springs and Amite and Covington and Pike, from Marshall County and Carrol County and Clark County and from Yazoo, from every town and county in the state, young men were becoming young soldiers.

In Yazoo they were signing on under the captaincy of Clarence F. Hamer, who, until just weeks before, had been a lawyer in Yazoo City. Though there was nothing yet official, Robley had been appointed to the rank of lieutenant. That rank was the result not of family influence or money, but rather of the acclamation of his fellow soldiers.

Unfortunately for him, his younger brothers did not appreciate, as he did, his importance and position.

“Y’all wanna miss the whole damned war?”

Robley Senior frowned and shook his head. Such language. The boy thought it made him sound more like a soldier and a man.

Under the oak tree the two dozen other young men assembled there looked up at the sound of Robley Junior’s voice. Like the three Paine boys, they were the sons of the planters that lived pressed against the Yazoo River. Like all the sons of the wealthy plantation owners, who had grown up to understand that they must serve honor as faithfully as they would serve God, they had flocked to join the new-formed Confederate Army of Mississippi.

Like his boys, Robley reckoned, they all had fathers both proud and sick with fear.

The boys had been gathering all day under the big oak at the Paine plantation. Now they were all there, twenty-four young men, and soon Lieutenant Paine would lead them up to Yazoo City, where they would join the rest of their regiment. From Yazoo City they would travel by steamer to Vicksburg, then by train to Jackson, where they would begin to learn the art of soldiering.

Robley smiled. To listen to them and their pontificating you might think they were already veterans of years of bloody fighting. They discussed war the way they discussed the young ladies: high talk and great bravado based on an absolute dearth of practical experience.

He heard shoes in the hallway and turned, and the door opened and his boys joined him on the porch. His heart lifted to see them; tall and strong, handsome, smiling boys. Jonathan and Nathaniel wore identical gray shell jackets, Robley Junior a gray frock coat with a single second lieutenant’s stripe on the collar. They wore gray trousers and kepis tilted back at a jaunty angle—save for Lieutenant Paine, who wore his perfectly horizontal.

Each jacket sported a single row of brass buttons with a star in the middle and the word “Mississippi” surrounding it. The buttons ran down the front of their jackets and held them snug against their strong, lean forms. They had slung over their shoulders cartridge boxes and canteens and haversacks, and they carried knapsacks on their backs. They clutched their shiny new 58-caliber Mississippi rifles. They smiled as if setting off for a great camping trip.

Robley Paine ran his eyes over each grinning boy and he smiled as well. They looked like window displays for a shop selling soldiering gear. “I’m proud of you boys,” he said.

“Thank you, Father, thank you,” they mumbled, embarrassed, trying to be weighty and sincere. They were too young to understand the depths of a father’s love, so he let it go at that.

Robley Paine, Sr., was a passionate secessionist, what the papers liked to call a fire-eater. As a senator in Jackson he had been calling for Southern independence since long before it became the fashion to do so.

Paine loved his nation, his new nation, the Confederate States of America. There was nothing, save for his boys, that he loved more. And now the one love was demanding the sacrifice of the other. It was Abraham and Isaac, to the third power.

“Y’all write your mother, you hear?”

“Yes, Father…” The boys were glancing over at their comrades, who were standing and adjusting themselves for the march. The Paine boys were eager to be at it. They were afraid their father would do something embarrassing, such as hug them. Robley understood that, and desperate as he was to embrace each of his boys, to never let go of them, instead he thrust out his hand and gave each a manly shake.

“Very well, then. Off with you,” he said and managed something of a smile.

Robley Junior, Nathaniel, and Jonathan clumped down the stairs to the lawn and over to where their fellows were clustered in the shade under the big oak. It was a massive tree, hundreds of years old and easily seven feet wide at the base. Twelve feet up the trunk, two huge limbs thrust out at right angles. From the river, looking back at the house, the tree seemed to be welcoming with arms spread, ready to embrace anyone tramping up the lawn toward the Paine home. Robley loved the tree and its insinuation of hospitality.

“All right, y’all, form up, now,” Lieutenant Paine was saying, and Robley was happy to see that the boys were obeying, after a fashion. His son had a lot to learn about command, but Paine did not want to see the boy’s authority questioned now, at the very outset of his military career.

The door opened again and Katherine Paine, his wife, the boys’ mother, joined him, and he put his arm around her. Her eyes were red and her eyelids swollen. He had thought she would not join him, did not think she could stand to see her boys, her only children, marching off to war.

The young soldiers formed up, and with Lieutenant Paine in the lead began to walk off toward Yazoo City. They made a lovely sight in the warm sunlight of the late afternoon. Jonathan turned and in a very unsoldierlike manner grinned and waved, and Robley and Katherine waved back and a little sob came up from Katherine’s throat.

All these young men… Robley thought. The finest of all of us are marched off to die.

The boys’ feet raised little clouds of dust as they moved off the lawn and onto the dirt path that would meet with the road that ran from Vicksburg to Yazoo City and on which the Paine plantation was situated.

We don’t send our best horses to become food for dogs, we don’t feed the best of our crops to the pigs…why do we send the best of our future off to fight ?

It was not an original thought, Paine understood that, but that did not make it any less true. We should send broken old men like me to the fight, and leave the young and the strong to rebuild when we are done. It all seemed very backward to him. But Robley Paine, Sr., had taken a bullet in the leg during the Mexican War, and that made marching even to Yazoo City out of the question, and so he could do no more than outfit his progeny and send them off.

The gray-clad, well-equipped troops marched out of sight. Katherine buried her face against his arm, and he could feel her body shake as she tried to subdue her sorrow. It was the duty of a Southern woman to send her boys off to defend their nation, but she was a mother first, a Southern woman second.

Robley squeezed her tight. It was hardest for the mothers, he knew. Fathers understood in their guts why their sons could not remain safe at home while others fought. Young men took up arms and young ladies were flush with romantic talk of soldiers, and full of scorn for those not in uniform.

But for the mothers, there was nothing, save anxiety and grief.

He pressed his cheek into Katherine’s hair and looked out past the massive oak, down to the Yazoo River. He had always thought of that river as a moat, as a watery defensive line that kept his home and his beloved family safe from whatever was out there. He loved that river.

And now as he stared at it he allowed himself to wish that it really was a moat, some impassable barrier which the filthy Yankee hordes could not cross. They would stand on the other side and howl and wave their arms and throw stones, but Robley and his family and his new nation would be safe on this side, and they could go about their business unmolested until the Yankees tired of their fruitless effort and went home.

But the Yazoo was too far south to protect all of his nation, and it was not a moat in any event. And now his boys, his Robley, his Nathaniel, his Jonathan, were marching away, leaving the safety of the river, the welcoming arms of the big oak.

This war will not last, Robley thought, not for the first time. Be over before those boys reach the lines. Going to war is not the same as being sentenced to death. Odds are they’ll come back without a scratch. That thought had brought him comfort once, but it did little for him now.

His boys were going where he could not protect them anymore. It made him sad and filled him with dread, and he felt the tears coming too.

4

BOMBARDMENT OF FORT SUMTER!

Splendid Pyrotechnic Exhibition

Fort Moultrie Impregnable

The Floating Battery And Stevens’ Battery a Success,

“Nobody Hurt” on Our Side. Etc., etc., etc.

We stated yesterday, that on Thursday, at three o’clock p.m., General Beauregard had made a demand upon Major Anderson for the evacuation of Fort Sumter through his aides, Colonel Chesnut, Captain Lee and Colonel Chisholm…

— The Charleston Mercury

Bowater read the newspaper account, but he did not witness the final act.

Even as General Pierre G.T. Beauregard was issuing the conditions for the surrender of Fort Sumter, Samuel stood on the platform above the tracks at the central depot of the Charleston railroad. He stood with carpet bag in one hand, the folded Charleston Mercury in the other, trying to read as the swarming crowd jostled him, knocked into him, excused itself as it brushed past.

All of Charleston was in a hurry. For no rational reason that Samuel could divine, the tempo of the whole city had changed. It was like the sensation of a ship building momentum, the massive vessel gaining speed, becoming more unstoppable, after one has called down to the engine room for more steam. Did the firing on Sumter mean for all these people what it meant for him? He could not imagine.

…and that Major Anderson had regretfully declined, under the circumstances of his position, Samuel read, and then a handsome gentleman in the gray coat of a Confederate officer, stripes and swirls of gold on his cuffs, slammed into him so hard that he dropped the paper.

“My apologies, sir,” the officer said, stooped, retrieved the paper, handed it to Samuel, and disappeared into the crowd.

Samuel sighed, muttered under his breath. He looked down at the paper. The right-hand side of the front page consisted of three columns of advertisements for Haviland’s Compound Fluid Extract of Buchu, Compound Fluid Extract of Sarsaparilla, Hembold’s Genuine Preparation for the Bladder, Moffat’s Life Pills. Here, the most momentous event in half a century, and the quackery and charlatanism went on and on. It shared the headlines with the first shots of civil war, as many thought they might prove to be.

Samuel shook his head, smoothed his black frock coat, resettled the tall silk hat.

He had considered wearing his uniform, wondered at the appropriateness, even the common sense, of appearing in public in the uniform of a lieutenant of the United States Navy. Probably not a very good idea, but still he was torn. It did not seem right to go on this official business in civilian dress.

He had laid the blue uniform coat out on his bed and spent some long time looking at it; running his eyes over the gold stripes and star on the cuff, the double row of brass buttons with their eagle design. For all the moral certainty he felt about joining with the Confederacy, he could not deny the sadness as he hung the blue broadcloth up in his wardrobe and removed the black frock coat he wore now.

There was something clean and precise about the navy, stolid and predictable. Going aboard a strange vessel, you knew beforehand exactly what your greeting would be, because the protocol was written in hundreds of years of naval tradition and spelled out plain in the Articles of War. You knew that the ship would be in perfect order, clean and tidy, the men respectful. There was an orderliness to the navy that any other life could not hope to achieve, and Samuel Bowater liked it.

He called to Jacob to have the frock coat pressed, then sat down and addressed a letter of resignation to Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy.

The distant chugging of the steam locomotive grew louder, and the platform beneath his feet began to vibrate and the train appeared down the track. Four hundred miles to Montgomery over the rough and unreliable rails of the South, and Samuel Bowater was not looking forward to the trip.

The train came to a huffing stop at the platform. The cars were nearly empty. Charleston was the point of origin for the westbound train, which would call in at Atlanta, where Samuel would change to another bound for the Confederate capital. He doubted he would enjoy the luxury of near-empty cars for long. They would be half filled by the people on that platform alone.

He pushed his way through the crowd, bag in hand, made his way, step by step, aboard the nearest car. He stowed the bag and pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and deftly wiped the seat before sitting.

There was little he hated more than idle talk foisted on him by some cretinous stranger, so he tried to make himself look as inhospitable as he could, to discourage anyone from sitting beside him. He was successful, and twenty minutes later the train lurched away from the station with Samuel Bowater happily alone on the nearly straight-backed benchlike seat.

The miles passed by. Samuel rattled and shook and stared out the window as the train rolled through the western country of South Carolina. They rumbled through the tidewater region, wheezed and hissed up into the Piedmont, screeched and lurched across the state line into Georgia. With each stop the car grew more crowded as the train picked up more and more people, like a snowball rolling toward Atlanta.

It was a mixed crowd; workingmen and men in frock coats and silk hats, women in sensible traveling attire, people whose wealth was obvious, and people who tried to make their wealth obvious, rough-looking men in fine clothing, who had made their fortunes in the slave trade or supplying the western regions.

There were pious-looking men and men who drank and cursed and spit tobacco and played cards at the small tables scattered around the car. There were women who looked to their men to protect their virtue and women who looked to offer their virtue for sale.

And there were soldiers. Most of the military men still wore the uniform of their local militia, and since there had never been any sort of standard, the car looked like a convention of armed forces from the world over. The air was thick with opinions.

Samuel listened in silence and stared out the window and later tried to lose himself in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, until he decided that the man was insufferable in the way that only the French can be. He tossed the book back into his carpet bag.

It was late evening when he arrived at Atlanta and carried his bag across the depot to the train bound for Montgomery.

He was not greeted by a near-empty car this time. Montgomery was the seat of Southern government, and every office-seeker and aspirant to military command and every other Southron who felt he had something of importance to add to the Southern cause was descending on that formerly inauspicious town. Their name was legion and they were, by Samuel’s estimate, all jammed onto the train that he was trying to board.

He managed at last to push his way onto the penultimate car. He was bumped hard as he pulled his handkerchief but still managed to wipe a seat and settle himself, and soon the train was underway. The smell of close-packed men, all in low conversation, the sound of chewing and spitting tobacco, the rhythmic motion of the car, the smell of coal smoke drifting in through the windows—it was all like being back aboard a man-of-war, though considerably less pleasant.

Samuel slept and woke and stood and stretched and sat and fumed all through the rocking, jerking, loud, uncomfortable night. It was well past dawn when the train came to a ragged halt at the main depot in Montgomery and Bowater secured a black porter with ragged trousers and an old wide-awake on his head to carry his bag in a barrow.

They walked down the wide, sandy main street. Samuel had been to Montgomery only once before, a decade ago, and it was more built-up and crowded than he recalled. Trees and buildings of various height and description lined the street, and in the distance the Alabama River moved slowly between its brown banks. The huge capitol building loomed over all, like a magnificent Greek temple on a hill, Alabama’s own Parthenon.

Bowater arrived at last at the Exchange Hotel, where he intended to stay, on his father’s recommendation, and with the use of his father’s name he was able to secure a room, despite the mass of people crowding the place, and, indeed, crowding all of Montgomery.

Once in his room, Samuel unpacked, then washed up in the basin standing in a corner. The water was tepid but it felt utterly refreshing, splashed on his face and run through his hair. He was exhausted from the trip, but far too excited to sleep. He stepped out into the hot, dusty late morning, made his way to the capitol building.

It was an enormous edifice, three stories tall and fronted with six grand columns that rose forty feet to support a heavy portico over the grand entrance, and a clock, itself fifteen feet high, on top of that. Rising up behind the clock, a magnificent dome capped the building proper.

Beside the clock, standing straight and bold, as if being purposely defiant, a flagpole, and hanging listlessly from the pole the flag of the Confederate States of America: a blue field in the canton with a circle of white stars, reminiscent of the flag of the Revolutionary forefathers, a wide red stripe, a white stripe, and a red stripe.

It was not as original as Samuel might have wished, and he wondered how well it would be distinguished from the United States flag at a distance.

Bowater made his way into the grand foyer and found the offices of the Navy Department, shunted away in a far corner of the building. It was Sunday, but the building was still crowded with men. Things were happening too fast, and there was too much to do, for officials of the Confederate government to enjoy the luxury of keeping the Sabbath holy.

He left his name, determined the hours that Secretary Mallory would be seeing people on the morrow, then returned to the hotel, where he dined on an excellent wild duck and rice and then retired to his room.

Samuel pulled a chair over to the window, sat with stocking feet up on the sill, sketched the scene laid out before him with pencil and charcoal; Montgomery, Alabama, capital of a new nation.

He thought of all the hard lessons learned by the founding fathers—three different capitals, the faltering start with the Articles of Confederation, the long uncertainty regarding strength and place of the military. The Confederacy had already benefited from those lessons, taken the best, discarded the mistakes, set up fresh and decades ahead of where the United States had been at its birth.

He sketched and pondered and soon he could hear snoring coming through the wall from his neighbor’s room and he was reminded of how tired he was. He packed the sketch pad and pencil and charcoal away and crawled wearily into bed.

Samuel Bowater woke the next morning and dressed with care. He was surprised by the nervous agitation in his stomach, the slight tremor of his fingers as he anticipated the morning’s interview. I have been too damned comfortable for too damned long, he thought as he looked himself in the mirror and brushed his hair and mustache and goatee. He relished the fear. It meant he was not dead.

He arrived at the capitol building well before the naval office opened. When at last the clerk opened the door, Bowater found a seat, addressed it with his handkerchief, and waited for his appointment to be called in the order it was made.

He sat, undisturbed, for six hours.

His eyelids were growing heavy with the stuffy heat of the office when the clerk called, “Samuel Bowater?”

Samuel stood, smoothed out his frock coat, took up his bundle of papers, and stepped through the door.

The first he saw of Stephen Mallory was the top of the Secretary’s head and his unruly mop of hair. Mallory was seated, his elbows planted on his desktop, his head, which he was slowly shaking, sunk in his hands.

Bowater stood for a moment at something near parade rest, waiting for Mallory to recover.

At last the Secretary gave a loud sigh. He straightened, leaned back in his chair, eyed Samuel with an expression that seemed to say, Now what? Apparently he was not having a good day.

Samuel Bowater had a preconceived idea of what a navy man should look like, and Stephen Mallory was not it. His hair, which looked unruly from the top, looked worse from the front. It seemed as if no amount of brushing or cutting would contain it.

Mallory’s face was round and fleshy. He wore a beard that skirted the perimeter of his face like a chin strap and made him look like a Quaker or Amish or some member of one of those severe Northern sects. But his eyes were dark and penetrating and he did not look like a low-level, lick-spittle pencil-pusher.

“I am here to request a commission in the Confederate States Navy, sir.”

“Indeed?” Mallory’s enthusiasm was not excessive. “What is your naval experience?”

“I am a graduate of the Naval School in ’47. Saw some action in the Mexican War. I have been commissioned lieutenant in the United States Navy since. I last sailed as second officer aboard USS Pensacola.”

At that Mallory smiled and shook his head, and Bowater bristled. “The Pensacola was a good and fine ship, sir. Just because I find myself in opposition now to the United States does not change that fact.”

“No, no, Lieutenant. It’s not that. I am well aware of how fine a ship the Pensacola is. She was one of mine.”

“Sir?”

“I was the one who shepherded her construction, back when I was chairman of the Committee of Naval Affairs in the United States Senate. A fine ship, and now my handiwork comes back to bite me in the ass. Do you see the irony of that, Lieutenant?”

Samuel nodded. “I do, sir.”

“So tell me, you are just resigned from the United States Navy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have had officers coming south for half a year now. You are a bit tardy, sir, in deciding where your loyalties lie.”

Bowater stiffened. Mallory’s remarks were coming very close to insinuation, and he would not stand for it.

“Mr. Secretary,” he began, and his voice carried an enforced calm, “I swore an oath to the government of the United States, and I take my oaths seriously. A man of honor could do no less, nor would I expect you to look for less in your own officers. Now that I have seen where my duty lies, you can expect me to display the same loyalty to the Confederate States.”

Samuel waited for a reply, wondered if his words sounded as pompous to Mallory as they did to himself. Still, he would stand for only so much where his honor was concerned. It was a hanging offense to challenge a superior officer to a duel. What about a cabinet member? Of course, Samuel realized, he was not an officer in the Confederate Navy. He was still a civilian. And after that exchange likely to remain one.

“From what state do you hail, Mr. Bowater?”

“South Carolina. Charleston.”

Mallory’s eyebrows went up. “Indeed? Such reticence from a Charleston man. I had thought you were all a bunch of fire-eaters. Well, no matter. I think men of sense do not rush into these things. I myself have been accused of being too lukewarm to the cause, even treasonous, if you can believe it. My own state of Florida did not support my nomination to this post, did you know that?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“‘Bowater’…are you by any chance related to William Bowater, the attorney?”

“Yes, sir. He is my father.”

“Ah!” Mallory’s expression brightened.

“If I may, sir, my father has given me a letter of introduction.” Samuel flipped through the papers neatly arranged in his folder and handed his father’s letter to the Secretary.

Mallory took it, ran his eyes over it, smiled. “I see he speaks highly of your character but no more. He does not go so far as to ask I favor you with a commission. That is the William Bowater I know.”

Mallory set the letter aside, looked up at Samuel. “You are holding out on me, sir. Now I recall. You were responsible for some great feat during the Mexican War. I recall reading some small account of it in the papers. And your father wrote about it in great detail to me. He was very proud.”

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 hurried 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 Merrimack is 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.

“Danby, you had best see the fires banked,” Isherwood said, then turned to Alden. “As you can see, Commander, the engineers and firemen are aboard. Men enough to get you to Newport News or Fortress Monroe. Out of danger in any event. The engines are operational. As far as the engineer department is concerned, the vessel is ready to go. My orders are fulfilled.”

“Ah, yes, Mr. Isherwood. The machinery seems in fine shape…”

Isherwood sighed. “See here, Alden,” he began again, in a softer tone. “I tell you this by way of letting you know there is nothing keeping Merrimack here. Nothing but McCauley, and what he will do I do not know. The time may come, soon, when you must simply act. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Good.” Isherwood looked around the engine room, at his beloved pumps and boilers and piping and valves and gauges. “The barbarians are at the gate, Mr. Alden. They will be breaking it down soon, I do believe.”

6

Then the navy men came under discussion. There is an awful pull in their divided hearts. Faith in the U.S. Navy was their creed and their religion. And now they must fight it—and worse than all, wish it ill luck.

— Mary Boykin Chesnut

The Confederate States Ship Cape Fear.

She was somewhere around eighty feet long, perhaps twenty on the beam. One hundred tons or thereabouts. A nearly plumb bow and a bit of counter at the stern. Her hull was black, the dull, flat black of coal-tar paint, a workboat finish. One strake, painted white and running the length of the vessel about four feet below the rail, was her only bit of trim.

Most of her deck fore and aft was occupied by a big deckhouse, painted a brilliant white and interrupted at various intervals by doors and windows. At the forward end of the deckhouse and on top of it sat the wheelhouse, which rose another level above the rest of the superstructure.

Abaft the wheelhouse, supported by wires fore and aft, the stack rose straight up, twice again as high as the deckhouse.

Wonder how the fireboxes would draw with that shot away… Flying metal had not been a consideration in the tug’s original design.

There was no smoke coming out of the stack, not the smallest tendril. Her fires were dead.

At the very stern, on the ensign staff, the flag of the Confederate States, its blue canton and three stripes just visible whenever the soft breeze disturbed it.

She had formerly been the screw tug Atlas, but now she would officially be known as the screw steamer CSS Cape Fear. That was all that Samuel Bowater knew about his ship, and most of it was only what he could observe, standing anonymously at the top of the low hill that ran down to the riverfront of Wilmington, North Carolina.

It had been a wild ride so far, with the events in the life of the new nation moving as fast and unpredictably as Samuel Bowater’s own.

On the day that Samuel, in Montgomery, Alabama, was commissioned an officer of the Confederate States Navy, Abraham Lincoln in Washington had ordered 75,000 troops called up to suppress the insurrection. It was not a declaration of war, but near enough for most. North Carolina and Kentucky refused to send men. The fire-eaters were howling.

Lincoln called for a three-month enlistment, reckoned, apparently, that that was all it would take. An insult, heaped on top of great injury.

As Samuel was boarding the train to take him back to Charleston, outrage over the firing on and capturing of Sumter was sweeping the North. A nation that had seemed half inclined to let the Southern states go their way and be damned with them was now fervent about stopping secession immediately and for good.

On the day that Samuel Bowater arrived back at his home in Charleston and directed Jacob to pack his trunks for sea service, and Jacob’s own things as well, the state of Virginia, in secret session, voted to secede from the Union rather than bear arms against her fellow Southrons. All of Lincoln’s attempts to coddle the state were for naught. She would not fight for the Union.

It was the following day, Thursday, the 18th of April, 1861, that Samuel returned to the train station in Charleston, accompanied by his father and mother and his sister. He dispatched a telegraph to the ship, giving warning of his coming. He said his goodbyes to his family and boarded the train to Wilmington, North Carolina, while Jacob stowed his bags away and found a seat in whatever part of the train that Negroes rode.

On that same day, Colonel Robert E. Lee declined President Lincoln’s offer of command of all Union forces.

Around the time that Samuel Bowater stepped off the train in Wilmington, Major Robert Anderson and the garrison that had defended Fort Sumter were stepping ashore in New York, the great heroes of the Union.

All of that history was swirling around him, but Samuel Bowater disengaged himself from it, there at the top of the road that ran down to the river, a quiet place where he could look down on his first command. Jacob waited patiently behind, their bags and trunks piled on a wheelbarrow.

What would greet him when he stepped aboard? He had long envisioned this moment—assuming command of his own ship. But it had been different before. Before he had behind him nearly one hundred years of United States Navy tradition, and that based on hundreds more years of Royal Navy tradition. There was never any question then as to how he would be received by officers, warrants, men.

But this was something new, a renegade service. He would not be part of a grand tradition, stepping aboard his ship, but rather he would be setting the protocol in place.

Perhaps in one hundred years’ time, a young captain would come aboard a ship of the Confederate States Navy, confident of his part because it was a part that had been set for a century, stretching back in a great unbroken line to the year 1861. But not for Samuel Bowater. He did not have that foundation; for him it was shifting sand.

Bowater’s eyes moved beyond the former tug and took in the Cape Fear River, which ran like a rippling highway past the town. The banks were low and green and brown, and without thinking on it Samuel began to mix paint in his head, green on the palette with a touch of black, a hint of yellow to bring out the early-spring colors.

He shook his head. The most important moment of his first command was upon him, and he was thinking about painting. That would not do. He had to think about first impressions, about establishing in the minds of all aboard his absolute authority over them. He was setting precedent, for his own first command, and for all the first commands of the Confederate Navy to come after. He headed down the hill, and behind him he heard the squeak of the wheelbarrow, the slap of Jacob’s bare feet.

Sailors are sailors, he thought. Even if the history of the Confederate States Navy could be measured in months, there was still the custom and usage of the sea. There were always traditions to which they could look for guidance. Samuel Bowater had no doubt that the dignity and command presence that was part of being a Southern gentleman would see him through any awkwardness.

Still, it had annoyed him to find no one at the station to meet him. He had expected a few bluejackets at the very least, to carry his gear. A decent first officer should have seen to that.

Samuel and Jacob walked past the brick stores and the white clapboard houses of the lovely town of Wilmington, and a part of Samuel’s mind took it in, but his eyes were still on the CSS Cape Fear, his world now. There were people on her afterdeck, he could see, just smudges of gray cloth and white skin and, back a ways, nearer the deckhouse, black skin as well.

Closer, and Samuel Bowater could hear music, just the faintest strains, and he was curious, and as he grew closer still he could see that the fellow sitting on the after rail was playing a violin.

He paused again to listen. Bowater had no talent for music, but that did not quash his passion for it. He went regularly to the Charleston Symphony Orchestra and had sought out performances in every port where he had found himself for any length of time.

The strains of the violin came to him now, and he listened. The tune was familiar. Not classical, something else, but not displeasing. As a rule he despised folksy, crude ditties, such aberrations as “Dixie” and “Turkey in the Straw” and “Roll the Chariot Along.” But this was something different. The tune moved through him, clear and melodic.

And then he realized it was “Shenandoah,” the capstan chanty he had heard so often. It was one of those songs enjoyed by the lower deck, but he had a grudging affection for it as well.

And then a deep bass voice, clear and full, twined itself around the notes of the violin.

Oh, Shenandoah, she’s a lovely river…

And then, soft but all together, the rest of them,

Aaaway, you rolling river!

Then the single bass voice again.

And I shall ne’er forget you, never…

Then together,

Away, I’m bound away, ’cross the wide Missouri…

Samuel turned and smiled at Jacob, and Jacob smiled back. “Sweet as sugar, ain’t it, Massa Samuel?”

“Lovely.” The crew was gathered there on the Cape Fear’s afterdeck, singing as one, and Samuel Bowater was standing alone, watching. But he was captain, and that was how it would always be. He continued on, moved faster, anxious now to be aboard.

Hieronymus M. Taylor closed his eyes and let the bow move over the violin’s strings, let the fingers of his left hand fall easily on the fingerboard of the instrument, let the graceful melody of “Shenandoah” flow from the hollow place inside the instrument. He had a notion that every beautiful tune in the world was stowed down inside there, that his finger placement and strokes of the bow were not so much creating the sound as releasing it.

The violin smelled of coal dust and oil and smoke and soot, but there was nothing for it. It had been with Taylor for years, through his time as fireman and oiler, third assistant engineer, second assistant, and now on his third berth with the rating of first assistant engineer. Everything he had smelled that way, his clothes, his books, his bedding. Hieronymus Taylor himself smelled of those things, and even the most conscientious scrubbing could not rid him of the smell entirely.

He moved through the first refrain, and then the merest pause, and then as the violin sounded again, so Moses Jones’s voice rose with it, soft at first and then building in strength like the note that Hieronymus was coaxing from the instrument. It was as if the voice and the note were coming from the same place, as if they had been born joined in that way.

Oh, Shenandoah, she’s a lovely river …

Then the rest joined in, soft, and there were enough of them that the cumulative effect was good.

Aaaway, you rolling river…

And I shall ne’er forget you, never… Moses came in on the last dying note of the chorus, bold and strong, and Hieronymus felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

Damn me, but that darkie can sing, he thought.

Three weeks the ship had been there, tied to the dock, waiting on a captain, any captain. Hieronymus, at sundown, his third day aboard, came aft and sat on the stern rail, sawed away on his fiddle, as was his habit and had been since he first put to sea. Moses had drifted over after a while, started singing soft to the tunes that the chief played, and just for fun Hieronymus stuck to song melodies, tested the breadth of Moses’s repertoire, which turned out to be extensive.

And Moses, fireman, unofficial chief of the coal heavers, caught on to the game, sang more boldly each day. He was a freeman, unlike most of the coal heavers, who were slaves and hired on to the navy by a master somewhere—somewhere safe, Taylor imagined. Moses had, for some reason, volunteered for the navy. Like any Southern black man, he knew how to move through the white man’s world without giving offense.

And so, each afternoon, the crew of the CSS Cape Fear began to drift aft, and soon they were all coming around and sitting on the deck and listening to the music and Moses’s lovely bass voice and joining in on the chorus.

The “luff,” the first lieutenant, was a moon-faced young man of twenty-eight perhaps, an unassuming officer with what Hieronymus Taylor considered the command presence of a greased pig at a county fair. But he was agreeable, and Taylor liked him well enough. His name was Thadeous Harwell and he had graduated from the Naval Academy eight years before, but Taylor still liked him.

It had been a busy three weeks. Harwell had been issued orders to get the tug in shape for combat, and for the arrival of the new captain. And Harwell, an Academy graduate and an eager young officer indoctrinated into the ancient traditions of the navy, had very definite ideas of what a man-of-war was, and the Atlas was not it.

The deckhouse, for one, had been laid out and maintained to the standards of the tugboat’s small and none too demanding crew. The cabins were filthy and stuffed to the overhead with all manner of junk: old coils of rope, fenders, rusting machinery, lumber of all sizes, stacks of newspapers. It did not appear to have ever been cleaned.

Harwell turned to the work with a will, and did an admirable job of driving the others. They cleared out each of the cabins, scraped the decks, painted the bulkheads. They tore out the berthing for four crew in the forecastle and installed berthing for ten, plus additional berthing for the Negroes aft and storage amidships. They gutted the master’s cabin and turned it into a place fit for a naval officer, and the same with the luff’s and the chief’s cabins.

They scraped, scrubbed, and painted the galley until it no longer made a man nauseous to look at the walls or the deck.

Hieronymus had his own problems. Despite the title of first assistant engineer he was in fact the officer in charge of the Cape Fear’s machinery, the former tug being too small to warrant an officer with the rank of chief engineer. With the fires drawn and no coal to heave, he set the black gang to scraping and painting the engine room, draining and cleaning out boilers, taking on and shifting stores of coal.

He and his firemen first class, the Scot Burgess and the Irishman O’Malley, had their own work to do. They had mapped and scraped the bearings, balanced out the high—and low—pressure cylinders, rebuilt the boiler stops, reconditioned the air pumps, replaced fire tubes. The engine had not been in bad shape to begin with, and by the end of three weeks’ constant work it was as perfect as it was going to get.

The Cape Fears spent their days toiling to turn their little floating world into something that could be a part of the coming fight, while the newspapers told them of all of the extraordinary events spooling out across the nation, history of which they longed to be a part. And then in the evenings, their sing-along.

Burgess was sitting on the deck, leaning against the bulwark, smoking his pipe in silence. O’Malley was leaning on the ladder that led from the afterdeck to the roof of the deckhouse. He began every evening by ostentatiously refusing to sing, because he would not sing with Negroes, and certainly not if Moses Jones was left to sing the lead parts. That generally lasted about twenty minutes, and then he was adding his clear tenor to the mix—an Irishman could not remain silent at a sing-along forever.

The luff was sitting on an overturned bucket now, singing the chorus of “Shenandoah” in his alto voice, having finally abandoned any hope of putting a stop to the music. It was clear that Lieutenant Harwell thought perhaps he should not allow the crew to congregate as they did, officers, men, slaves, all together. He spent a week of afternoons floating about and fidgeting and looking as if he wanted to say something. But Taylor just chewed on the stub of his cigar, looked the luff hard in the eyes, and any objections died a quick death and the men had their little time.

Hieronymus Taylor came to the part of “Shenandoah” where he improvised on the reprise. He had been working on it, changing it around in subtle ways, for the past week, and he was coming to love what he had. He felt the music lift out of the violin, and then, just as he was coming to the high point, the part that near moved him to tears, just as his bow drew out that quivering note, a voice shouted from the dock, saying, “Ahoy, da boat!”

Taylor clamped his teeth down on the unlit stub of his cigar, drew the note out, but the mood was shattered.

“Ahoy da boat!” There was always some idiot coming by. It was the disadvantage of being dockside and not at an anchor.

This darkie son of a whore better have a damned good reason…

“Who goes there?” Lieutenant Harwell called out, and a voice, someone who was definitely not a darkie, and probably not a son of a whore, answered, “Cape Fear.”

Cape Fear? Ah, shit… Their captain, come at last. Just when Hieronymus Taylor had Harwell trained up right, now there would be another damned officer for him to teach. He lowered his bow and violin, opened his eyes to a scene of confusion. Half the peckerwoods on board clearly did not know that only the captain referred to himself by the name of the ship, and they were staring wide-eyed at the others, who were scrambling to get up and stand at some kind of military readiness.

“Fall in there, men, fall in, fall in. Dress it up,” Harwell was saying in a stage whisper as he inched backward toward the brow.

Taylor smiled, set his violin and bow down. He considered pulling on his frock coat, which was draped over the rail, and decided against it. “Moses, get them darkies in some kinda order. Captain’s comin aboard.”

Moses began to maneuver the coal heavers into line, and then Lieutenant Harwell was back, practically genuflecting to the man who followed behind.

“If we had had any idea, sir, that you were arriving today…” the luff stammered.

“You did not get my telegram?”

“Telegram? No, sir…telegram?” Harwell looked around as if hoping for more intelligence regarding a telegram, but none was forthcoming.

Taylor grinned around his cigar. No telegram. This meeting would not have been half as much fun if he had given the lieutenant the telegram announcing the old man’s arrival.

The chief ran his eyes over the new captain. Thirties, nice uniform frock coat. Mustache and goatee trimmed and groomed to an absurd perfection. The accent was Charleston, and it wasn’t peckerwood. Charleston elite. Naval Academy. Regal bearing.

This one got a ramrod right up his ass, he thought. Taylor stepped across the deck, brushed past Lieutenant Harwell, thrust out his hand. “Captain…?”

“Samuel Bowater.” He took Taylor’s hand, matched the strength of his grip, looked him in the eyes with no hint of expression. If he was angry or afraid or disgusted or pleased, Hieronymus Taylor could not tell. “And you are?”

“First Assistant Engineer Hieronymus M. Taylor, sir. This here’s my engineering division. Them there’s the black gang. Coal heavers is black as coal, as you can see.”

“Hmm, indeed.” Captain Bowater released his grip. His eyes flicked up and down Taylor’s clothing. His patrician expression did not change any more than that of a statue would change, but still Taylor felt the disdain radiate from the man. It was a particular trick that these gentlemen had.

“What is the state of the engine, Chief?”

“Ready for fire. Coal boxes are full. Soft coal, not so bad. Shit, we been sittin here for three weeks with our thumbs up our collective asses. Managed to get some damned things done.”

Bowater just nodded and his eyes did not leave Taylor’s, and the chief thought, Damn, he got some fire in his belly. This Captain Samuel Bowater would not be so easily cowed. Hieronymus Taylor wondered if they might get deep into the monkey show after all. Maybe do some real fighting, put a shell through a Yankee or two. He felt a spark of hope, even through the immediate and thorough dislike he was harboring.

“When can you have steam up?” Bowater asked.

“Don’t you want to have a look ’round the ship first, Cap’n?”

“I am looking at the ship now, Chief. I want to know when you can have steam up.”

This ain’t goin so good. “Five hours.”

“Good. Make it so.” Bowater turned away, done with Hieronymus Taylor. The chief felt like an overseer being dismissed, sent back to the cotton fields.

“Lieutenant,” Bowater said to Harwell, “please have some hands help my servant with my things. You may show me the master’s cabin, if you will, then muster the hands aft for inspection. Then I will inspect the ship.”

“Aye, aye, sir. McKeown, Williams, bear a hand with the captain’s things! Please, this way, sir.” With that, Harwell and Bowater walked off down the side deck and disappeared around the corner of the deckhouse.

“Well, damn me,” Taylor said. He pulled his soggy cigar stub from his mouth, spit out the flecks of tobacco on his tongue. He scratched at his chin and the usual three days’ growth of beard there. He was never certain if he was growing a beard or not, it was a day-by-day decision. Finally he returned his violin to his case and snapped it shut. “Moses, get them darkies down t’the engine room and start buildin’ the fires. Y’all heard what Captain Samuel Bowater said.”

7

I reached Norfolk on the morning of the 19th instant and found the city in a state of great excitement…

— Major General William B. Taliaferro, Virginia Provisional Army, to John Letcher, Governor of Virginia

There was panic in the air. Commander James Alden thought he could smell it, like a whiff of smoke from a far-off fire. Far off, but closing.

The Gosport naval yard seemed wrapped in an intangible strangeness, as if all the people there—and there were not so many anymore—were mesmerized. They seemed to wander about, unsure what to do, not knowing who was in charge.

Alden paused at the Merrimack’s brow, looked around, unsure himself. The yard seemed bathed in a weird light. The colors were different. Brighter. Everything seemed more intense.

He shook his head, cursed himself silently. He would not be caught up in this nonsense.

That is not my affair… Alden clambered down the brow, stepped quickly across the yard, making once again for the commodore’s office.

The rumors had been filtering in: militia and Confederate Army troops massing in the city, thousands arriving by train, batteries going up on Craney Island and all the points that commanded the shipyard and the anchorage.

Those stories had been circulating since before he and Isherwood had arrived, but now they had a new momentum, and every hour brought fresh and more alarming news. Rumor built upon rumor until the people found themselves glancing up at the brick wall that surrounded the yard and half expecting to see Rebels pouring over it.

Head down, Alden paced off the steps across the cobbled shipyard. I’ll wear a path in these stones before I am free of this place…

The shipyard was McCauley’s concern. The Merrimack was his. His only thought was to get the frigate under the guns of Fortress Monroe at Old Point Comfort.

He stepped into the building that housed the commodore’s office. It was Thursday, the 18th of April, but it might as well have been a Sunday evening for all the activity there. Gone were the officers and warrants hustling in and out of the various offices, pleading for this or that, gone were the civilian engineers and shop stewards and correspondence secretaries and enlisted men. Gone was almost everyone, and more leaving by the hour.

Of those who were left, Alden was not sure whom he could trust. He hoped to soon be one of the gone himself.

McCauley’s office was open, and Alden entered without knocking. The old man had his frock coat on and was wearing sword and pistol. He was not alone.

Commodore Pendergrast, commander of the Home Squadron, was there. The Home Squadron had found itself at Norfolk when the trouble first began to simmer and had been ordered by Gideon Welles to remain and lend its weight of iron to the defense of the shipyard. Along with Pendergrast was Captain Marston, captain of the 1,708-ton sloop-of-war Cumberland, flagship of the squadron.

“Commander Alden, good you are here…should be part of this…” McCauley said, and his voice sounded even less promising than it had that morning. “Just discussing the strategic situation here…last report I heard, must be two thousand of these damned Rebels massing…”

“It would seem so, sir. Commodore, Merrimack has her head up steam. I’ve men enough to get her to Fortress Monroe, at least. I beg of you, sir, give me leave to go.”

McCauley threw a hopeful look at the other officers. “Pendergrast, what do you think?”

“Welles says to move the ship. It ain’t going to get any easier. Best do it now.”

Alden wanted to cross the room and hug the man. How clear and straightforward was his perception of the situation!

“Well…” McCauley sputtered. “You have men enough for this, Alden?”

“There are men enough in the engine room. If I can beg of Captain Marston thirty men from Cumberland —I’ll send them right back, soon as we’re under Monroe’s guns—then I have enough.”

Marston frowned, and the expression brought out a hundred more lines in an already craggy face, but he nodded his big head. “I can spare you thirty men, Commander, if you sent ’em right back.”

All eyes turned back to McCauley. The commodore breathed deep. Alden tensed. This is a lot of work just to get the old bastard to let me do what the Secretary of the Navy ordered me to, he thought, and then McCauley nodded as well.

“Very good, Commander. Take Merrimack out of here before these Rebels can get their damned hands on her.”

Alden straightened, and he felt inches taller. “Aye, aye, sir,” he said.

Marston stood up from the desk on which he had been leaning. “I’ll arrange for those men, Alden, march ’em over to Merrimack, ” and with no more ceremony he left McCauley’s office.

“Thank you, sir. Oh, and sir?” Alden turned back to McCauley. He felt he was pushing his luck, as if inching farther out on ice of dubious thickness. “Sir, the ordnance is all out of the ship. If I could have a couple of field pieces, something we could bring right up the brow, that should serve as battery enough for now.”

“Yes, yes, very well,” said McCauley. Now that the decision was made, he seemed to not want to hear more about it. “Go see Tucker about it.”

“Aye, aye, sir. And sir…you have done the right thing, if I may be so bold…”

“Yes, yes, yes, dismissed, Commander.” McCauley waved him away, did not meet his eye.

Alden fairly ran out of the commodore’s office, raced back to Merrimack and up the brow. Lieutenant Murray, first officer of the Cumberland, who had volunteered to help with Merrimack, was on deck. He was in discussion with Chief Isherwood.

“Mr. Isherwood, Murray, praise God, we have orders to get the ship out of here!”

“Most high miracle,” Isherwood said dryly. “God alone could have moved that man to make a decision.”

“God and Commodore Pendergrast, reminding him of his duties. Where is Lieutenant Poindexter?” Poindexter was the Merrimack’s first officer. Alden would have expected to find him on deck as well.

“I haven’t seen him,” said Murray.

“No matter, I’ll find him. Mr. Isherwood, if I might impose upon you to see the engines ready to get us underway?”

Isherwood nodded.

“And Mr. Murray, we need a pilot. Do you know of a pilot who will take us out of here?”

“Ahh,” Murray equivocated in a way that Alden did not like to hear. “That won’t be easy. Since Virginia went secesh, none of the pilots’ll work a government ship. They’re all afraid of being hanged, apparently, by the damned Rebels.”

“Well, find one. Offer a thousand dollars to the man who will get Merrimack to Fortress Monroe. Wait…offer twice that if he can get the Germantown there, too. We’ll tow her out. And offer a place for life in the navy, as well.”

Murray smiled. “He’ll need that. Damned sure won’t be going back home anytime soon.”

“Good. Go.”

“Aye, aye!” Murray hurried off, and Alden was glad he did not ask if he, Commander Alden, had the authority to make such offers. To hell with it. We’ll sort it out when the ships are safe.

“I must see to getting us a few guns, Mr. Isherwood,” Alden said next.

“I will see the fires stoked up, Mr. Alden,” Isherwood said. He looked pleased. That was a change from the seemingly permanent dour look that the frustrations of the past week had stamped on his face.

Alden raced back down the brow and back across the yard to the ordnance shed. It was a grand warehouse of artillery, and where it met the water’s edge, a great set of shears rose up overhead, used for lifting the heavy guns and setting them down on ships warped alongside. He would have liked to put those to use, to have Merrimack’s twenty-four nine-inch guns back in place, but there was no time. If he could get a couple of three-inch ordnance rifles he would be happy.

He stepped out of the sunshine and into the gloom of the cavernous ordnance building. On the far side of the big shed door was the office of Commander J. R. Tucker, ordnance officer for the naval yard. One of the few officers who had not resigned.

Alden crossed over to Tucker’s office, knocked, and entered. Tucker was at his desk, his frock coat unbuttoned, his feet up, heels resting on the edge of the desktop. He made no move to assume a more businesslike position.

“Commander Alden! What can I do for you, this fine spring day?”

Alden stiffened. Tucker’s informality would have been objectionable in the normal course of affairs. In the current crisis it was near insufferable. “I need guns, Mr. Tucker. For…”

“No, no, no. That ain’t gonna happen, Mr. Alden. I don’t have men to work the shears, or…”

“Damn the shears. I need two field pieces, that’s all. Howitzers, three-inch rifles, whatever you have, just something I can defend the Merrimack with.”

Tucker smiled, shook his head. “It’s all these damned disloyal workers, all gone over to the Rebs, now Virginia is out.”

“Never mind the workers. Marston’s giving me thirty men out of Cumberland. Give me a pair of guns on field carriages and we’ll get them up the brow.”

Once more Tucker shook his head. “It ain’t just men I’m wanting for, Alden. I haven’t got the requisition forms I need to issue guns, don’t know where in hell I would get them.”

Alden made to speak again, but Tucker talked right over his protest. “And even if I had them, who would approve them? The damned office is deserted, old McCauley’s too drunk, I’ll bet. I’m sorry, Mr. Alden, I sure as hell would like to help you, but there is just nothing I can do.” He shrugged, smiled, and then Alden realized what was what.

The commander straightened, looked down on Tucker, hoped that the disgust he felt was evident. He could see what Tucker was, now. Traitor, secesh. It was like discovering that a friend and shipmate is in fact an escaped criminal. He tried to think of something to say, something proportionately scathing, but nothing would come.

“Good day,” he said, and turned and stamped out. Through the open door he could hear Tucker call, “And good day to you, Commander! Good luck with them guns!” The humor in his voice was like a knife to Alden.

He crossed back, making once again for the commodore’s office. Having ordered Merrimack away, perhaps McCauley would have the guts now to stand up to Tucker. He saw Lieutenant Poindexter across the yard.

“Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” Alden shouted, and Poindexter stopped and waved. Alden hurried over to him. “Lieutenant, we’ve received orders to go. Isherwood is stoking the boilers up. I need you to single up the fasts and have the ship winded. We’ve no time to lose.”

“Single up the fasts…?”

“Yes, Lieutenant. It is customary when leaving a dock. What in hell is the matter with you?”

“It’s just…well, sir, I reckon you need to get permission from Commander Robb.”

“Robb?” Commander Robert Robb was the executive officer of the shipyard. “I have orders from Commodore McCauley!”

“Well, pardon, sir, it’s just, I think we need Commander Robb’s permission to do that…”

Alden looked at Poindexter, and where before he had seen a handsome young lieutenant of the United States Navy, he now saw a loathsome, ugly thing. Like Tucker. A man whose loyalties were not where Alden had thought.

Involuntarily he glanced to his right and left. It was like a dream, as if he suddenly realized that he was not in the place he thought he was, that the people he took to be friends and comrades were really people he did not know.

Without a word he abandoned Poindexter to his halfhearted protestations and headed back to McCauley’s office, his pace just short of a run.

“Whoa, there, Commander!”

Alden looked up. Standing in his way was Commander Robb. Had Robb not spoken, Alden would have run him down like a ship in a fog.

“See here, Robb…what’s the meaning of Poindexter telling me we need your permission to get Merrimack underway? I’ve orders from McCauley, and I don’t reckon I need any others…”

“Hold up, there, Mr. Alden!” Robb held up his hands in mock defense. “No one is saying that Commodore McCauley isn’t in charge here. But I am the executive officer, as you well know, and these things must come from me.”

Alden drew a breath. “Very well, then, may I have permission to single fasts and wind the ship?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I’m sorry, Commander. You may not have the ship.”

Alden just shook his head. He had no words.

“Commodore McCauley has changed his mind. We need to keep the Merrimack here. If we try to move her now it will only infuriate the thousands of troops mustered in town.”

Alden glared at Robb through narrowed eyes. Robb’s soft voice, the accent of northern Virginia, sounded to Alden like the strident shriek of a traitor, howling out his perfidy. “Damn you…”

“Yes, yes. Now please go and draw your fires.”

“To hell with you, sir. I will not take orders from a traitor.” Alden pushed past Robb, made a point of physically pushing him out of the way, and stamped into McCauley’s office.

“Sir!” Alden shouted. McCauley looked up, his eyes bleary and rimmed with red, his face gray and sagging. He looked much worse than he had even that morning, and Alden, who had intended to shout at him, softened his approach.

“Sir, I have just spoken with Commander Robb, whose loyalties I frankly question. He could not have told me the truth.”

“I’ve spoken with Robb. We both agree Merrimack should remain. You may draw the fires and stand down to an engine watch.”

“Sir…”

McCauley slammed the flat of his hand down on the desk, a more energetic move than Alden would have thought him capable of, and Alden started. “Goddamn it!” McCauley shouted. “Do you think I have not examined this from all angles? Goddamn it! Fifty-two years I have been in this navy, was a captain while you were still at your mother’s tit, sir, and I will not have you in here questioning my every order!”

Alden straightened, came to attention. McCauley was no traitor, but traitors had his ear and they had swayed him and he would not be swayed back. He had made the last decision that he had the energy to make, Alden could see that, and that decision would stand.

“Aye, aye, sir. I will go and see the fires are drawn.” He turned and left the office, and he knew he would not return.

A cable length from the Merrimack he stopped and ran his eyes over her. She was a grand and solid thing, with her high black sides and the single white band running from gunport to gunport. She had none of the elegant sweep of the ships of an earlier era—her sheer was perfectly straight—but what that lost her in grace it added in giving her a formidable, martial look. If she was the descendant of the great high-pooped, gilded men-of-war of centuries past, then she had evolved into something leaner, more efficient, more deadly, the naval equivalent of Mr. Darwin’s theory.

She did not look so magnificent now, with her masts and yards all gone, down to the lower masts, and not a bit of standing rigging to support those. Smoke was rolling out of her funnel, midway between the fore and main masts, a thick black smoke, and Alden knew that down in the belly of the ship Isherwood was pushing the men to get the fires up and the boilers churning and the steam pumping through the pipes.

Isherwood. Alden did not think he had the strength to tell him.

The Merrimack had been in commission less than six years. She had cost the United States nearly $700,000 to build. She had had her problems, sure, and she was not much to look at now, dockside and stripped of her rig. But she was in her heart a magnificent ship.

I should just damn well take her anyway, Alden thought. Just cast off, let her drift out into the stream…Murray at the helm, one of the firemen at forward lookout… He felt a tremor of excitement as the idea built in his head. Just take the Merrimack anyway, and damn McCauley and his orders.

But he could not and he knew it, and the fantasy faded away. He was a naval officer, had been for all of his adult life, and the habit of obeying orders was far too deeply ingrained for him to ignore it now. Like a peddler’s horse that has tramped the same route every day of its life, and knows no other, so Commander James Alden could not alter the route along which his sense of duty and respect for rank led him.

He felt sick, down deep in his stomach, as he stepped up the brow. He crossed the deck to the scuttle and climbed slowly down to the engine room, where he would tell Benjamin Isherwood to draw the fires and let the beast die.

8

Under the orders of Flag Officer Paulding, was inaugurated and in part consummated one of the most cowardly and disgraceful acts which has ever disgraced the Government of a civilized people.

— Major General William B. Taliaferro, Virginia Provisional Army, to John Letcher, Governor of Virginia

It took the Confederate States Ship Cape Fear a little over fifty hours’ steaming, Cape Fear to Cape Henry.

From Wilmington, it was three miles downriver, feeling their way in the moonlight, to the point where the Cape Fear River opened wide and Bowater could feel the tension ease as the muddy banks and their hidden snags receded from view. They passed Orton’s Point and finally, with Smith’s Island looming, turned southeast, leaving Zeek’s Island to starboard. Fifteen miles from the dock at Wilmington they steamed through New Inlet and met the long rollers of the Atlantic Ocean.

Then it was northeast and forty miles off the low, treacherous shore of North Carolina, the Outer Banks. Once Samuel had determined that tricky Diamond Shoals were well astern, dead reckoning with the chart spread on the table in his cabin, it was a near-ninety-degree course change to northwest and the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay.

That was pretty much how Captain Samuel Bowater had figured it. Fifty hours, Wilmington to Cape Henry, and that had them steaming into the bay in full darkness, and running past Fortress Monroe and the naval installations at Newport News and Norfolk in the dead hours, the least watchful hours. They could anchor once they were well up the James River, once they were safely in the bosom of Virginia.

Three hours and ten minutes after he had stepped aboard, they had slipped the fasts and worked their way out into the stream. The chief engineer, Hieronymus M. Taylor—Bowater smiled as he recalled the name—had said five hours to get head up steam, but that was the sort of thing engineers always said. Made them look particularly efficient when they had steam up in half that time.

Engineers …

In the days of sail, an officer learned it all. He could navigate, sure, and work his ship in a harbor or in a storm. But he could also knot and splice, he could lay aloft to stow sail, he could stand a trick at the helm, and had done so. He could set up standing rigging and send spars down to the deck and act as gun captain or sailing master or mast captain. There was no part of any job on board that the captain had not, at some point, done himself.

But with the advent of the steam engine, that all changed. Now there was someone aboard his ship who knew more about its most vital part than he. It was a relationship that Samuel Bowater was still struggling to define.

Goddamned engineers…

He had begun defining it for his present circumstance the second he stepped aboard. It had not been his intention to get underway immediately—first light in the morning would have been sufficient—but one look at Hieronymus Taylor and Bowater knew that the first conversation he had with that man had better end with an order, and an unequivocal one. The relationship of superior to inferior had to be established immediately and forcefully. Bowater knew men like Taylor—rough, uneducated, surly—and knew they had to be handled in the same way one handled a bad-tempered servant.

So he ordered steam up, turned his back on the engineer, ordered the luff to show him the master’s cabin.

Harwell turned to the tasks with a will, overseeing every aspect of carrying the trunks and bags aboard and maneuvering them down the port side deck that ran the length of the deckhouse, fifty feet, to a ladder that ran from the front of the deckhouse to the wheelhouse above.

Harwell gestured for Bowater to go first. “The captain’s cabin, sir, is in the wheelhouse, just behind the wheelhouse. I hope you will find that convenient.”

Bowater stepped through the wheelhouse with its big varnished wheel and bell lanyard for communicating with the engine room, and through the open door into the cabin beyond. The walls of the cabin were also painted white, gleaming and spotless, and the deck was covered in the traditional black-and-white-checkered canvas. The overhead was white as well, with varnished deck beams at regular intervals. There were windows with curtains on three sides, and even in the evening sun the cabin was wonderfully lit.

On one wall was a built-in bunk, against another a washstand. A generous table was lashed down against the forward bulkhead. In all it was a very agreeable space, light and airy as a deckhouse.

The disadvantage, of course, was that this cabin and everything in it would likely be reduced to kindling when the iron started to fly.

“Very good, Lieutenant. Jacob, stow my gear away. Mr. Harwell, let us see if the men are assembled.”

Bowater led the way aft. They came around the corner of the deckhouse and found the ship’s company, all twenty of them, standing at attention by division and department. After years aboard USS Pensacola, with her crew of more than five hundred, it was not an inspiring sight.

The Cape Fears’ uniforms were generally clean and in good repair. Most of the men wore the pullover bibbed wool shirt, loose-tied neckerchief, and flat cloth cap that were the standard dress of sailors the world over. They wore trousers that were tight at the waist and flared out at the feet to pool on the deck in a wide bunch of cloth, the descendants of the slop trousers worn by sailors of the last age. Half of the men had shoes.

The loose-fitting clothing gave the seamen a rangy, casual look, a look that was both military and subtly insubordinate, all at the same time. The clothes seemed to imply a relaxed discipline and at the same time something much more important: professionalism, dedication to the mariners’ arts. The clothes were the unconscious reflection of the sailors’ mind; they said the men who wore them would take their sailoring, their ship, and their fellow seamen seriously, and all and anyone else could go to the devil. It was a look and an attitude that Samuel had come to respect.

If their style of dress was similar, the colors were not. Some were outfitted in cadet gray, some in blue, uniforms they took with them from the old United States Navy when they went south. Some had black, some had combinations of all three.

Some—the landsmen—looked as if they had just left the farm.

“Mr. Harwell, please show me your master’s division,” Samuel said with military formality.

“Aye, aye, sir!” Harwell led the way, six feet to where the ten men of the master’s division were formed up. They were the seamen, the ones who worked the ship when underway. They were nominally under the charge of the master, though the tiny Cape Fear was without such a warrant.

“Captain, this is Eustis Babcock, boatswain.” Babcock stiffened, said, “Suh.” Faded blue uniform, with dark patches where Federal insignia once were sewn, salt-and-pepper beard, face tanned and lined, he looked every inch the old salt.

“Babcock,” Bowater said. “Are you old navy?”

“Oh, aye, sir. Twenty-six years. Boatswain aboard Merrimack for the last ten, when all this present goings-on begun, sir. Bid adieu to them Yankees and come south when dear Alabama left the Union.”

Bowater nodded. “I was second lieutenant aboard USS Pensacola. Reckon we’ve both taken a step down in our accommodations.”

“I reckon, sir. But I sure do admire having some damn thing worth fighting for.”

Samuel smiled. He was pleased to have men like Babcock under his command, men who formed the backbone of any real navy. “I agree, Boatswain. I look forward to serving with you.”

“Suh.”

They moved down the line, but Harwell did not bother introducing the other sailors and landsmen. There would be time later for names and assessment of each man’s ability.

They came at last to the single black man in the master’s division. He was wearing gray pants with a jaunty black stripe down each leg, a frock coat which, if old, was still in fine shape, a bow tie, and a derby.

“This here is Johnny St. Laurent. Cook,” Harwell said. The luff’s tone was odd, part exasperation, part resignation.

“Good day, mon capitaine,” St. Laurent said, and his accent was an odd mix of Southern black and Parisian French.

“Bonjour. Where are you from?”

“New Orleans, sir.”

“Were you a cook in New Orleans?”

“No, sir, I was a chef. A chef at the Chateau Dupre Hotel.”

“How did you get here?”

“I come with Monsieur Taylor, sir.”

Bowater glanced over at Hieronymus Taylor. The engineer was standing at something like attention, staring out over the water, his now-lit cigar waggling as he chewed on the end and puffed smoke like a steam engine. There was a story there, he imagined, but too much curiosity about the men was not a proper trait for a captain.

“I consider a clean galley to be of the highest priority, St. Laurent. I expect you to keep it thus. If you need help, speak to Mr. Harwell and he will see you get it.”

“Merci, sir. Chief Taylor, he allow me some of ze engine-room niggers, when I need help, sir.”

Bowater nodded. “Very good.”

That was the end of the master’s division, so Bowater took two steps down the deck until he was standing in front of First Assistant Engineer Taylor. “Very well, Mr. Taylor, you may report.”

“Well, suh, this here’s the engineering division. The firemen first class are Mr. Ian O’Malley from Belfast. He is of Hibernian descent,” Taylor added in a loud whisper. “Mr. James Burgess of Aberdeen, who ain’t been known to speak three words consecutive. The Negroes is the coal heavers. They have the singular advantage of not appearing dirty, though devil take me if I can find ’em when they’re hiding in the coal bunkers.”

Bowater held Taylor’s eyes, did not acknowledge his attempt at humor. He shifted his gaze, looked over the engineering division. They were the same men he had seen in every engine room aboard every ship he had sailed. “Very well. Carry on.”

Fifty hours…

Hieronymus Taylor slumped on his stool and leaned against the forward bulkhead of the engine room, disassembling a recalcitrant gauge with a small screwdriver. He pictured in his mind the chart, Cape Fear to Cape Charles. They had been steaming fifty hours now. That should put them into the Chesapeake Bay.

Now, from his place on the stool, Taylor could feel the motion of the ship change, the slow roll of the ocean swells give way to a shorter, faster pitch, and he guessed that they were finally inside the Capes.

“Missa Taylor?”

Hieronymus looked up. Moses was leaning on his coal shovel. “What?”

“We gots the fire going nice an hot. You wants us to clean up here, or sommin’?”

“Clean up what?”

Moses shrugged. “I dunno. Clean de deck plates, mop her up. Make her look good, fo’ de new cap’n an all.”

Taylor scowled, looked around. “Where the hell is O’Malley? Ain’t it his watch?”

“Reckon it too hot down here for dat Irishman. I thinks he’s havin a smoke, topside.”

Taylor pulled his shirt away from his chest. It was intolerably hot, by most normal standards. But with the sun set and the engine running at cruising speed, the engine room was not much above one hundred degrees, and for any veteran of an engineering division, that hardly constituted hot.

“Well?” Moses asked.

“‘Well, sir.’”

“Well, suh?”

“Well what?”

“You want us to mop de deck?”

“Why?”

“Case de cap’n come down here agin.”

“Devil take the captain.” Bowater had made his inspection of the ship soon after muster. He had looked around the engine room, found not one thing wrong, because Hieronymus M. Taylor made sure there was nothing wrong to be found. That perfection had earned only a nod, and a “Very good. Carry on, Chief” from the Academy stiff.

“You think I need to mop the deck to impress his lordship? Ain’t a goddamned thing wrong with the deck. Lookee here…” Taylor fished a chunk of bread from the pocket of his coat, hung beside him on a hook. “Lookee here.” He dropped the bread on the deck, got down on his hands and knees, and grabbed the bread in his teeth.

“See here?” he said through the chunk of bread. “I can eat off the damned deck!”

Nat St. Clair, coal heaver, began to bray like a hound dog, and the call was taken up by the other two coal heavers on watch. Moses grinned down at Taylor. “Now you got the boys all worked up!”

“Shut yer damned gobs, dumb coons.” Taylor got back to his feet. “I’ll make y’all eat yer damned dinners off’n the deck.”

Overhead the bell from the wheelhouse sounded, riing, riing. Three bells, full ahead. Taylor scowled at the polished brass irritant.

“Dat you massa calling!” Moses said.

“Shut up. Didn’t I tell you to wing that fire over?”

“No, suh.”

“Well, wing the rutting fire over.” Taylor glared at the bell. “St. Clair, go find O’Malley, tell him to tell them stiffs in the wheelhouse that’s all the steam we’re going to get out of this ain’t-for-shit coal.”

Just spoil ’em, if I give ’em everything they ring for. Next you know they’ll come to expect it… He picked up his gauge and gently turned the brass screw that held the backplate in place. Give ’em a little more steam in twenty minutes or so. That should do for them wheelhouse beats.

The Cape Fear steamed on, the thrum and hiss and bang of her engine so regular and perfect that Taylor did not even hear it, not on any conscious level. Any tiny change in the sound, he knew, would have sat him bolt upright, even if he had been asleep, every sense straining to determine the cause. But there was no change.

O’Malley stumbled back into the engine room, mumbled some excuse for his absence, spoke too low to be heard over the working of the engine, the roar of the boilers, the hiss of the air pumps. Taylor considered turning in.

A draft of cool air blew over him, and he looked up to see landsman Bayard Quayle come through the door and make his way warily down the ladder to the engine room. He stopped at the bottom, turned, and looked around with the wonder and uncertainty of one not used to the heat and the noise. Then he spotted Taylor and made his careful way over.

“Chief? Capt-” The tug took a harder pitch and Quayle grabbed frantically for a workbench, as if he was afraid of being sucked into the machinery. “Captain’s compliments, Chief, and…” He paused, trying to recall the exact wording. “…and things is getting a bit tight, and he would be obliged if you was to…ah…make the coal perform to satisfaction …is what he said.”

“That a fact?”

“Yes, suh… Oh, and he asks would you please report to the wheelhouse?”

“What for?”

“Dunno, suh. Don’t see nothing out of the ordinary. But the boatswain, he says it looks to him like all damned hell is breaking loose out there.”

9

The most abominable vandalism at the yard. The two lower ship houses burned, with the New York, line of battle ship, on the stocks. Also the rigging loft, sail loft, and gun-carriage depot, with all the pivot gun carriages and many others.

— George T. Sinclair to Stephen R. Mallory

Captain Bowater stood in the wheelhouse, just to the left of the helmsman. He stared out of the window at the shorelines, set off from the water by a sprinkling of lights, and at the traffic on the water, and he knew that something was wrong.

There was too much going on for so late an hour, too many vessels on the move, too many lights onshore. There was an energy in the air that should not have been there twenty minutes after midnight.

“Come left to a heading of east northeast,” he said, and Pauley McKeown, able-bodied seaman, eased the wheel to port and said, in the remnants of an Irish burr, “Coming left to east northeast…east northeast.”

At the far side of the wheelhouse, the luff’s pencil scratched the course change in the ship’s log.

Bowater frowned to prevent himself from smiling, because smiling for no apparent reason was the sure sign of a weak-minded idiot. Still, the smile wanted to come, despite his apprehensions about the night and the traffic on the water. He was overcome with the pure joy of the thing; the vibration of the engines coming through the deck, the motion of the vessel through the water. The quiet formality of the quarterdeck.

Not a quarterdeck, of course, not the wide, open quarterdeck of the Pensacola, but a wheelhouse. His wheelhouse. There was no one to whom he must report the course change, no one to whom he must try to explain the odd feeling he was having. No one to whom he need speak at all.

He looked down at the rounded bows of the Cape Fear as they butted their way through the small chop and he knew that they were his bows and he loved them.

But he allowed no inkling of this newfound passion to creep into his voice, or his demeanor. His attitude was perfect disinterest.

“Helmsman, steady as she goes,” he said and stepped behind the helmsman, behind Lieutenant Harwell, and peered out the side window on the starboard side. Just forward of the starboard beam he could make out Fortress Monroe. It was about two miles off—he had been giving it a wide berth—but even from that distance he could see that it was a busy place.

He frowned again, in earnest this time, and put his field glasses to his eyes. The magnification made the activity more obvious. He could see lights moving on the water, where small boats were pulling here and there, and more lights moving onshore. He could see lights along the top of the fort’s walls. Something was happening.

Bowater stepped back across the wheelhouse and out the side door, peering out into the night. It was cool. He was wearing his old U.S. Navy uniform, with the insignia removed, and the breeze made the tail of his blue frock coat flap and beat his legs. He grabbed the patent-leather visor of his cap and tugged it lower. Up in the wheelhouse, the roll and pitch of the little man-of-war was much more pronounced.

Samuel Bowater had not realized, during his long self-imposed exile in Charleston, how very much he missed this.

He felt the platform on which he stood shake and turned to see Hieronymus Taylor mounting the ladder. The chief reached the top, paused, gave something that could be construed as a salute, which Bowater returned.

Then, before the captain could speak, Taylor turned his back on him and stared out over the water, then peered through the wheelhouse windows north toward Fortress Monroe. He made Bowater wait for an audience, as if it had been Taylor who summoned the captain, and not the other way around.

When the chief was done looking around he fished a lucifer from the pocket of his frock coat, which was unbuttoned to reveal the sweat-stained cotton shirt beneath, scratched the match on the rail, and stoked his cigar to life. He coughed, spit over the side of the ship, and returned the cigar to his mouth.

All the while Samuel Bowater quietly regarded him, the unshaved face, the squinting eyes, the hands black with coal dust and oil. An occasional unfortunate turn of the breeze brought the smell of the engineer to Bowater’s nose. Samuel Bowater had never cared for engineering officers generally, as a class of men—dirty, artless mechanics—but so far Hieronymus M. Taylor was in the lead for most objectionable of the lot.

At last Taylor pulled the cigar from his mouth, looked out toward Sewall’s Point, just off the port bow. “They’s somethin happenin out there…” he said at last. “Somethin ain’t right…bad ju-ju…don’t know what it is, but I can feel it.” He turned, looked Bowater right in the eye for the first time. “You feel it?”

Bowater nodded and Taylor nodded, and for a moment they said nothing.

“Chief, we’ve been steaming for fifty hours now, so I imagine you have a good idea of the state of our engine and boilers. How are they?”

“Fine, fine. Ain’t a damned thing wrong with either.”

“And the coal? O’Malley seemed to think there was something wrong with it.”

Taylor grinned at the crude verbal trap. “We got that all straightened out, Captain.”

“So if we get into action tonight, I can rely on the engine?”

Taylor pulled the cigar from his mouth. “Action? What the hell we gonna do, throw biscuits at the Yankees?”

“Perhaps.”

Taylor replaced the cigar, nodded, and grinned. He had an eager, hungry look that Samuel did not find altogether disagreeable, not in the given circumstances. “Well, don’t you worry about the engine, Captain. Get you in and out of any damned thing you can dream up.”

“Good.”

The two men were quiet for a moment, looking out at the dark humps of land, the lights like fireflies on the water, wrapped in the weirdness of the night.

“Chief, if you do not mind a personal question…what does the ‘M’ in your name stand for?”

“Michael.”

“You were not, perchance, named for the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch?” The question sounded idiotic, even as it left his lips.

Taylor took his cigar from his mouth so he could grin wider. “I don’t reckon, Cap’n. I don’t reckon my pappy’d know a Flemish painter if one come up, kicked him in the balls. He spent his whole life humpin freight in New Orleans. Don’t know where he come up with ‘Hieronymus.’”

He put his cigar back in his mouth, turned his head into the breeze. “That’s the damned thing about a name, ain’t it? The very thing that God and man knows ya by, and you ain’t got a thing to say in choosin it.”

“I suppose that’s so. You were not in the old navy?” Bowater asked next.

“Navy? No, that ain’t for me, all that ‘yassa no suh’ horseshit.”

“Until now.”

“Well, suh, now’s different, ain’t it? Now we gots a chance to kill us some Yankees. Besides, if I didn’t join up with the navy, some dumb ass like to put me in the army, now ain’t they? Don’t reckon you’d care to suffer that fate anymore’n me.”

Samuel ignored the comment, which hewed pretty close to insubordination, and decided instead to wring more of Taylor’s past from him. He had no personal interest in the man’s history, but knowing the chief’s background would help Bowater size up his reliability. The fact that he was not a navy man had already lowered him considerably in Bowater’s estimation. “So you learned your trade in the merchant service?”

“Might say that. Bangin around riverboats and such. Thing of it is, Captain, I got me a natural inclination toward anything mechanical. Something a man’s born with, like music or painting or such. If it’s driven by steam, I know how to make it work. In my gut. Ain’t no other way to explain it.”

“I see.” Taylor apparently equated his proficiency with a wrench and screwdriver with Beethoven’s genius for music or Rembrandt’s mastery of the brush and palette. It was amusing, and charming, in a rough sort of way.

“Very well, Chief,” Bowater said, by way of dismissal. “Why don’t you lay below and conduct your orchestra of crankshafts and valves. And I promise I will let you know if we are going to get into any action tonight.”

Lieutenant Henry Wise of the United States Ship Pawnee sat in the stern sheets of the launch and held the boat’s tiller as the twenty bluejackets pulled slow and steady at the oars. Off the starboard side, across the river, some in shadows, some not, he could make out crowds of men, restless, ready for violence. He could feel their eyes on him. He could see the gleam of rifle barrels. Virginians, now secesh. They were waiting.

Thirty-five yards away to port, the granite seawall of the Norfolk naval shipyard made a sharp black line in the starlight. Beyond that, the yard receded into darkness, a darkness which swallowed up the brick wall on the perimeter and left what might be lurking beyond it to Wise’s imagination.

He pictured a growing army of militia, armed, drilled, waiting for the moment to attack. All night long they had been hearing trains pulling into the station in town, carrying, it was said, thousands of troops. Rumors were swirling around the yard, and they all pointed to an overwhelming attack, ready to break at any second. The lieutenant could practically smell the panic in the air.

Wise looked to his right again, over the dark stretch of the Elizabeth River to the lights of Norfolk. There were boats all over the water, lights moving onshore, a general noise of activity, like the growing buzz of a restless crowd waiting on some grand event.

It was all over for the naval yard; there was nothing more they could do. The Pawnee, under the command of Commodore Paulding, had steamed to Portsmouth to save what ships they could from the massing Rebels. They were too late. McCauley had ordered them all scuttled two hours before.

Wise had hit the dock, raced to Merrimack, his particular charge, and found the water already over the orlop deck. It was over.

Someone shouted, out in the night, something made a clattering noise, then the report of a rifle and the water spit up, ten feet astern of the boat.

“Son of a bitch!” Wise shouted. “Lean into it, you men,” he called, but the bluejackets needed no command, and like the experienced sailors they were they picked up the speed of their stroke without missing a beat.

Another rifle went off, and another, little shoots of water coming up around the boat. A ball thudded into the bows and then the boat moved into the shadow of the sloop-of-war Plymouth and was lost from sight of the mob.

The USS Plymouth, which had been perfectly serviceable that morning, was down by the stern and sinking slowly into the mud.

“Hold your oars,” Wise ordered, and the men stopped rowing, let the blades drag in the water, and the boat slowed until it was nearly stopped. From out of the night he could hear the clank of Pawnee’s anchor chain coming on board, the chugging of the steam tug Yankee, come to take the Cumberland in tow. She was all that they could save.

“Not long now, boys…” Wise said.

“Till what, sir? Till the secesh come over the wall?” one of the men asked, and got a chuckle from the others.

“No, till we blow this place to hell and the secesh with it,” Wise said. “Give way, all.”

Once again the sailors leaned into the oars and the boat gathered way. They glided down the long black side of the Plymouth and came out under her bows. He could see the mob again, in the shadows and the pools of light. They moved and swayed like a wheat field, and their shouts punctuated the night.

“Pick up the stroke,” Wise said, and the bluejackets leaned into it again and the boat shot forward just as the first rifle fired at them. Here and there muzzle flashes pricked the darkness and the balls whizzed around them, but they would be no more than a dark shadow on the water and it would be a lucky shot indeed that did any damage.

Now the once mighty Merrimack loomed up over them, and with one pull they were behind her protective wooden walls. She reeked of the turpentine with which Wise and his men had doused her decks hours before.

“Hold your oars.”

Over the noise of the Pawnee’s anchor chain he heard a voice, clear and loud, call, “Up and down!” Pawnee was nearly underway.

Wise shifted in his seat, turned to look in Pawnee’s direction, and as he did a rocket lifted off from her deck and streaked up into the sky. The yellow tail made a slash of light against the backdrop of the stars, and then the rocket exploded in a burst, its fragments trailing fire down to the water and hissing out.

“That’s the signal, boys. Toss oars. Bowman, ease us along to the powder train.”

The oars came up in two straight rows, and the man in the bow hooked onto the sagging Merrimack with his boat hook and pulled the boat along her black side. Ten feet above their heads the white band along her gundeck made a ghostly trail the full 275 feet of her massive hull. At regular intervals along the white band, the empty gunports gaped open, like mouths trying in vain to protest. One of the Wabash class, the most powerful, most valuable men-of-war in the United States Navy. She seemed too substantial to be destroyed.

“Here, sir.” The bowman had reached the gunport to which they had earlier run the train of combustible material—rope, ladders, grating, hawsers—which they had laid in the form of a big letter V forward of the mainmast and then doused with turpentine.

The bowman gave a final pull of the boat hook and then checked the motion as Wise came up level with the gunport. Cotton waste and frayed rope hung out of the square hole in an unsightly fashion. Wise sighed, looked around one last time, tried to put off doing that terrible thing, but there was no delaying it.

He pulled an oilskin pouch from his pocket, fished out a match, and struck the match on the gunnel of the boat. It sputtered and flared and caught, and Wise held it to the cotton waste. The flame jumped onto the spirit-soaked cotton, consumed it, moved inboard along the flammable trail.

“All right…shove off, give way, all.” The bowman pushed the boat off from Merrimack’s side and the oars came down and the boat pulled away. Wise pushed the tiller over and turned to look back at his own handiwork. His foot kicked a binnacle lantern lying in the bottom of the boat. He had saved it out of Merrimack earlier—why, he did not know. Because he had to save something, perhaps.

The oarsmen dipped their blades and pulled, dipped and pulled. They were twenty feet from the steam frigate when Wise turned back again to see if the flames had taken, and as he did the decks and gunports, the masts and rails seemed to explode in flame.

The shock of light and heat slammed into the boat, and Wise threw his arm up over his eyes.

He heard one of the men curse, and the confusion of an oar crabbing, oars banging on oars. Flames burst from each of the Merrimack’s gunports. Fire mounted up the lower masts, like the stakes in an old-time witch-burning. From over the high bulwarks they could see the flames run fore and aft along the deck, they could hear the low roar of the inferno, and now from the shoreline they could hear shouts of outrage, the sounds of the mob spurred to action, but it was too late for them.

“Well hell, sir,” the bowman called. “Reckon she’s afire now.”

“Reckon. Very well, let’s get a move on. We got more to do like her.” Wise turned his back on the burning Merrimack. He was blind now in the dark, after staring into those wicked flames. He pushed the tiller over and headed for where he knew the Germantown to be.

Paulding had ordered him to see about firing the Merrimack and he had done it, done it damned well, and now that honorable ship, the pride of the United States Navy, was engulfed in flames. In his stomach he felt physically sick. It was the most shameful duty he had ever been ordered to perform.

Together, as if they were puppets on one string, the heads of Samuel Bowater, Thadeous Harwell, and Hieronymus Taylor all moved right to left as they traced the line of the rocket streaking up, almost directly overhead.

“Well, now, that’s got to mean some damned thing…” Taylor observed.

Bowater pulled his eyes from the sky just as the rocket burst into flaming fragments. The three of them were standing on the roof of the deckhouse, where they could get an unobstructed view all around.

He looked to port and the town of Norfolk, and to starboard at the Gosport naval yard, two hundred yards away. If something was acting, Bowater had guessed it would be at the naval yard, and it seemed he had guessed right.

He could hear a ship winning her anchor, he could see boats moving, men on shore, their rifles gleaming. The occasional smattering of gunfire. There was a powder-keg atmosphere, ready to blow, and Bowater was not sure where to put his ship to keep her clear of the blast.

“Look here, sir,” said Harwell, and Bowater looked where he was pointing. A line of flame, a ship on fire, perhaps, it was hard to tell.

“Now, what in hell…” Taylor began and then suddenly the line of flame exploded into a great sheet of fire, illuminating the ship fore and aft, spilling out of the long line of gunports, climbing up the lower masts.

“Ho-ly…” Taylor muttered.

“That’s one of the Wabash-class frigates,” Bowater said. He could see her perfectly in the flames of her own destruction.

“I think she’s Merrimack, sir,” Harwell offered. “They’ve fired Merrimack.”

For a brief instant Bowater considered coming alongside her, wondered if the Cape Fear’s pumps were equal to the task of saving the burning ship. He opened his mouth to speak, and then the whole world seemed to explode into flames.

10

The flag of Virginia floats over the yard.

— George T. Sinclair to Stephen R. Mallory

Beyond the pyre that was the frigate Merrimack , first one, then another, then another of the massive A-framed ship houses burst into flame, the base of each building engulfed, the fire licking its way up the curved sides. At the other end of the yard, where Samuel knew the ropewalk and sail loft and rigging loft to be, now suddenly there was only fire. In a flash the dark night was turned into a brilliant inferno.

Across the river came shouts of rage, impotent gunfire.

“They’re firing the yard!” Samuel said, and even he could not keep from shouting that time.

“Who, sir?” asked Harwell.

“Got to be the damned Yankees,” Taylor said. “Got to be them damned Yankees running away and burnin the yard behind ’em.”

A bell rang and Bowater turned and out of the dark thrashed the steam frigate Pawnee, with her high sides and straight sheer and ugly, foreshortened masts. Samuel Bowater knew her well.

Black smoke poured from her funnel and the water creamed white around her bows as she gathered way. The burning ships and yard washed her in yellow light and weird dancing shadows. Samuel could see men lining her rails and imagined they were marines, ready for whatever else the night would bring.

From her after chocks, a hawser ran straight back, like a leash, and made off to the end was the USS Cumberland, which Pawnee had in tow. Unlike the squat Pawnee, Cumberland had the lofty spars, longer bowsprit, and jib boom and more elegant sheer of a pure sailing vessel. But without steam, she was helpless in the light air.

“Ahoy, the tug!” A voice came from Pawnee’s quarterdeck.

“Ahoy!” Bowater shouted back.

“Come up on Cumberland’s starboard side and make fast! Go on, get a move on!”

“Aye, aye!” he shouted, then turned to his officers. “We have to go ashore, see what we can do. Mr. Harwell, assemble a landing party. Tell off five steady hands.”

“Aye, aye, sir. And sir, may I lead the party?”

“No, Luff. I’ll go. I need you here.”

“Aye, sir,” Harwell said, and Bowater could see the genuine disappointment. But he could not send Harwell. He did not know himself what he would do once he was ashore.

“Mind if I tag along, Cap’n?” Taylor asked. He had his hands in his pockets and was leaning back some, as if loitering by the woodstove at the general store.

Bowater considered the request. He didn’t like Taylor, but the engineer’s perceptions that night had impressed him. Besides, Taylor had a wolflike, all but feral look in his eyes that his casual stance could not disguise. Bowater suspected the man would be good in a fight. “Very well. Arm yourself as you will.”

Bowater dashed back into the wheelhouse, grabbed the pull for the engine-room bell, rang up half ahead. “I’ll take this,” he said to the helmsman, pushing him aside and taking up the wheel. Tight maneuvering in a small vessel—it was easier for him to do it himself than to give helm commands.

He swung the Cape Fear’s bow off, headed her right for the granite breakwater. The shipyard was in flames from one end to the other, and some of it was lit as if it was noon and some was in shadow. The edge of the seawall made a sharp line where the yard met the river.

Samuel spun the wheel and the Cape Fear heeled into the turn and he rang for engine stop. It was a heady sensation to feel the tug move under his hands, feel the strong boat respond to his hand on the wheel, his hand on the engine-room bell.

The bow swung past the seawall, and Bowater rang engines astern and with a twist of the wheel brought the eighty-foot tug against the granite pier.

One jingle, all stop, and he felt the tug settle down as the screw ceased its thrashing. He leaned out the wheelhouse door. The fire had taken over the ship houses and engulfed them, the flames already reaching hundreds of feet in the air. There was a great roaring sound, the sound of rushing air, as the fires consumed everything: wood, stone, metal, the air itself.

Eustis Babcock was ashore with the forward fast, and he was directing the others to stern and spring lines.

Samuel Bowater took a deep breath, took in smoke and the swell of burning wood and paint and the coal smoke from his own boilers. He felt the excitement rush through him. He thought of how the fire had raced over and consumed Merrimack. That was it exactly. He felt strong, charged, with a head up steam, alive, as he had not felt in years. He was Rip Van Winkle. He was experiencing his own personal Great Awakening.

He turned, raced down the ladder to the side deck, nearly colliding with Thadeous Harwell.

“Sir, shore party is told off and assembled on the fantail, sir,” he said. Harwell could hardly contain his excitement, and it reminded Bowater to get control of his own.

“Well done, Lieutenant. Now see here, you are in command while I am gone. You are to concern yourself with the safety of the vessel above all else, even if it means casting off and leaving us, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bowater regarded the young man for a moment, saw himself with the guns of Veracruz firing in the distance. He felt sorry for him. “Your chance will come, Mr. Harwell.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Bowater gave him a slap on the shoulder, hurried down the side deck. There on the fantail was Hieronymus Taylor. He had shed his coat and now his braces made two dark lines across his stained white shirt. He held his cigar clamped in his teeth, and on one shoulder rested a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun.

The rest of the party was assembled, with cutlasses hanging from belts and rugged sea-service carbines in their hands. And there was Jacob, who had been though this drill many times, waiting with sword belt, sword, and pistol.

Eustis Babcock was back aboard. He had his back toward Samuel, staring out over the water, and then he turned and Bowater could see tears streaming down his deep-lined cheeks.

“Mr. Babcock?”

“It’s the Merrimack, sir. The dear old Merrimack. Look what them Yankee bastards done to her, sir, just look!”

Bowater nodded. Ten years as boatswain aboard that ship, Babcock would love her as much as he loved his home state. He might as well have been watching Mobile burn.

“Well, let us go and make them pay for this,” Bowater said, a silly, shallow platitude that disgusted him even as he said it. But Babcock nodded and wiped his cheeks with his sleeve. Looked more like a boy in a sailor suit than the grizzled veteran that he was. The words seemed to have bolstered him.

Sailors and their damned sentimental… Bowater thought, and turned his attention back to the rest of the shore party.

“Listen here, men…stick close by me when we’re ashore…” He raised his arms and let Jacob wrap the belt around his waist and buckle it. “We’ll…” He was not sure what else to say. He did not know what they were going to do. Instead he pulled his pistol from its holster, his own personal.36-caliber Navy Colt, a present from his father. It gleamed in the light of the fires onshore, and the engraved vines that twisted around the sides of the weapon stood out bold and the ivory handle glowed orange. He spun the cylinder, checked the caps, reholstered it.

“Let’s go.”

He turned and stepped up onto the tug’s rail and jumped the five feet to the cobbled yard below. The heat was overwhelming, even from that distance, like standing in front of an oven. One by one the men dropped to the ground beside him.

He turned and counted. The shore party was all there. He marched off toward the burning ship houses, because that seemed the focal point of the growing destruction. He wondered if the yard was still in Federal hands, or if the Confederates had come over the wall. He wondered if they might be shot by their own side.

“Don’t see how hell could be much diff’r’nt than this,” Taylor remarked, stepping up to Bowater’s side. “Reckon we’ll find out, soon enough.”

Hell, indeed, Bowater thought. The fire could be measured in square acres now, and the buildings were mere ghostly outlines in the center of the flames. Fire reached hundreds of feet in the air, arching over in the light breeze, dancing and swirling like yellow-and-red dragons. And under it all, a low and steady roar and the crash of structures collapsing as they burned through.

Fifty yards away, black against the flames, a knot of men moved toward them. Bowater’s hand reached under the wide flap of his holster, pulled his Colt, cocked the hammer back in a motion as familiar as pulling his watch.

“Hold up!” Bowater held up his hand, and the men behind him stopped.

The approaching men grew closer, and as they drew away from the flames Bowater could see the dark blue frock coats and the sky-blue trousers of United States Marines.

“Keep your mouths shut. Don’t do anything unless I tell you to.”

The marines came on at the double quick, rifles held against chests, and then they noticed the band from the Cape Fear. Bowater saw the lieutenant redirect his men.

Brass it out…have to brass it out with this type…

“Lieutenant!” Bowater called in his best quarterdeck voice. “What are you men still doing here? Report!”

The marine lieutenant stopped, and Bowater saw his eyes move up and down his uniform, but the frock coat he wore was the same one he had worn in the Union navy, the same worn by naval officers everywhere, and it did not give Bowater’s secret away.

“We were detailed to protect the men blowing the dry dock, sir.”

“Good. You are the detail I was looking for. Get down to the ordnance building, there, there,” Bowater pointed, “and cover the boat tied up at the seawall. We’ll see to the dry dock and get the men out.”

The lieutenant hesitated. He began to say something, a protest forming, but marines did not protest, it was not a part of them, so finally he said, “Yes, sir!” and led his detail away.

Bowater watched them go, watched the smoke swallow them up, then said, “Come on, men!” and led his people off at a jog.

Blowing the dry dock. That was what the man said.

Samuel knew Gosport, he had been to the naval yard often enough. The dry dock was the most valuable thing there. If the Yankees managed to burn every last inch of the yard, it would still be a godsend to the Confederate Navy if the dry dock was saved.

Blowing the dry dock. That could not be allowed to happen.

They raced along, closing with the ship houses, beside which Bowater knew the dry dock lay. Two hundred yards away, the heat seemed unbearable, but they ran on and Bowater wondered if the heat would discharge the rounds in his pistol. He shifted his holster so the barrel was pointing away from any part of himself.

The smoke from the burning building rolled over them, and they slowed their pace, coughing and staggering forward. Bowater felt as if his skin was on fire, as if it would start peeling and blistering, but they staggered on.

Thirty yards away, a gang of men hurried along, moving in the opposite direction, like specters, barely seen through the smoke, but they did not seem to notice the men from the Cape Fear, or if they did, they did not care who they were or what they were about.

Then, right ahead, Bowater could see gleaming in the light the long line of bollards and the small capstans that ran the length of the dry dock, and beyond them, the black pit of the empty dry dock itself.

“Taylor!” Bowater called, shouting over the roar of the flames, then paused for a fit of coughing. “Take…Babcock and go that way.” He pointed toward the river end of the dry dock. “See if you can see if the dock is mined. McNelly, come with me! The rest of you, station yourselves here, keep a weather eye out.”

Taylor hurried off and soon disappeared into the smoke, and Bowater and McNelly raced off in the opposite direction. They inched toward the edge of the dry dock and peered down. The bottom was in deep shadow; they could not see if there was anything there, powder kegs or such.

“Sir!” McNelly shouted, pounded him on the shoulder. Bowater looked up, looked in the direction that McNelly was pointing. Through the smoke, silhouetted by the burning ship houses, he could see two men, one standing, one kneeling, concentrating on some job at hand.

Bowater stepped forward, waved McNelly after him. He picked up his pace, reached under the flap of his holster, pulled the Colt free.

Then he was up with the two men in the smoke. He tightened his grip on the pistol, held it away from his body, stepped boldly forward.

One of the men, the one standing, noticed him at last. He turned until he was facing Samuel straight on, took a step forward, put a hand on his holster, paused.

Bowater stopped five feet from the man. He was framed against the wall of flame that was the ship building, and Samuel could barely look at him, could see little beyond a black shape against blinding red, yellow, and white.

The man crouching paused in what he was doing, looked up, and for a moment it was a stalemate, like the moment with the marines. And then the standing man took another step and said, “Lieutenant Bowater? Samuel Bowater?”

Bowater coughed, squinted at the man. His eyes were sore and running with tears from the smoke and he brushed them away. “John Rogers? Is that you?”

The man stepped forward, hand outstretched, and he materialized into Lieutenant John Rogers.

“Lieutenant…!” Bowater shook Rogers’s hand, glanced at his shoulder boards. “Forgive me, Commander!” Bowater had been fourth lieutenant and Rogers second aboard Wabash five years before.

“Good to see you, Samuel,” Rogers yelled. Bowater could see the sweat streaking through the grime on his face. “Hell, I thought you’d gone secesh!”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Sure! What are you doing here?”

“Came to see about the dry dock!” This reunion in the smoke only added to the dreamlike, unreal quality of the night.

“She’s set! See there?” Rogers pointed down at the ground. Through the smoke Bowater could see the sparking flames of a powder train, racing toward the edge of the dry dock. Lighting the powder train, that was what the kneeling fellow had been doing.

“Two thousand pounds of powder!” Rogers shouted. “Gonna blow this son of a bitch to Kingdom Come!”

“Then shouldn’t we get the hell out of here?”

“It’d be a good idea. Got five minutes till it blows, maybe less!”

Bowater felt the salty sweat running down his face and burning his eyes. He wiped a sleeve over his forehead. “I have men down there!” He pointed toward the river. “I have to go get them!”

“Be quick about it!” Rogers turned to the other man. “Captain Wright! Let’s go!”

“Which way?” the other shouted. Bowater looked at him for the first time. He wore the uniform of a captain of Army Engineers.

Rogers looked around, unsure. “Boat’s that way!” Rogers shouted, pointing past the burning ship houses. “Don’t know if we’re going to make it through!”

“Best try!” Bowater shouted. “Go on, I’ll follow behind!”

“All right! But get out of here, quick!”

John Rogers gave Samuel Bowater a fraternal slap on the shoulder, and Bowater saw the eyes follow the hand, saw the absence of shoulder boards register on Rogers’s face.

“Let’s go!” Bowater shouted to McNelly and turned away from Rogers, and Rogers let the question go. He and the other man stumbled off into the smoke and the shadows and the brilliant glare of the flames. Bowater watched them until their dark silhouettes disappeared.

“Let’s get the hell out of here, sir!” McNelly shouted, but Bowater shook his head.

“We’ve got to put out the powder train!” he shouted and started running. At the edge of the dry dock the cobbles gave way to smooth granite stones. Bowater approached the edge of the dry dock carefully, peering through the smoke, trying to see the powder train and avoid falling over the edge.

“Sir!” McNelly whined. “It’s gonna goddamned blow…”

“Shut up, sailor!” Bowater shouted, staring down through the smoke.

He saw it at last, a bright dancing light, crawling along near the bottom of the dry dock, moving toward the unseen barrels of powder. “Go find Chief Taylor, tell him I’ve gone down to put the powder train out!”

He turned to see if McNelly had heard him, but the sailor was nowhere to be seen, and Bowater could do no more than hope he had run off to obey the order.

Samuel Bowater raced along the length of the dry dock, his eyes moving between the burning train and the edge of the dock. The dry dock was constructed in a series of great granite steps or ledges angling down to the bottom, like a long, narrow coliseum. Bowater took the first, three feet high, and the next, climbing fast to the bottom of the dry dock, trying not to slip or tumble on the granite ledges.

It was black in the dry dock, and many degrees cooler, as he climbed down and down, and the flames of the shipyard were now no more than an orange glow overhead, and the omnipresent roar.

Down, it seemed a terribly long way, and then his foot came down in water and he stepped down another step and another and the water rose around him. It had not occurred to him that the dry dock could be partially flooded, but if the water was over his head he would have to swim for it, and he was none too sure of his ability to do so.

Another step down and his foot hit the slick, granite floor of the dry-dock. The water was up to his waist. He pushed forward, breasting the water, which dragged at him and slowed him down as he tried to race for the distant moving flame.

The powder train, he could see, had been laid along the far side of the dry dock. He would have to push his way through the water and reach it before it reached the powder. He forced his legs to work harder.

Goddamned…damned…nightmare… Bowater pushed on through the blackness and the water. It was just like one of those hellish dreams, in which he would run harder and harder from some nebulous evil and get nowhere.

The spark hissed and leaped and flared and raced toward the powder as Bowater raced toward it, and it seemed as if the entire world was compacted down to that space between himself and the flames. With his mind so focused he did not hear the grating, mechanical sounds at first, did not register the rush of cool water, he just forced himself on.

“Captain! Captain Bowater!” The voice came through his fog, but far away, barely audible above the roar of the flames and his own heaving breath.

“Captain Bowater!” It sounded like Taylor, Hieronymus Taylor.

Bowater stopped long enough to suck a lungful of air and shout, “Down here, in the dry dock!” He paused and realized that the mechanical sound he had heard was getting louder now. He staggered as an eddy of water caught him in the midriff.

“We’re opening the damned gates, Captain! Get the hell out of there!”

Opening the gates… Then Bowater understood that the mechanical, grating sound was the sound of the floodgates being cranked open, which also explained the sudden eddies of water rushing in. Taylor was flooding the dry dock.

Good, good… Bowater thought as a fresh surge of water knocked him off his feet. He flailed at the water, kicked with his feet, but his shoes could not find a foothold on the slick bottom.

The water rolled him over and he sucked in a mouthful and then managed to get his feet down and stand. He spit, gagged, thrashed his way toward the side of the dry dock from which he had come.

Son of a bitch…son of a bitch… He could see nothing in that black pit. He looked up and could see the edge of the dry dock, impossibly high overhead, framed against the orange, burning sky. The water swirled above his stomach, up his chest. It was cold, coming in from the Elizabeth River.

Another step and his foot was out from under him and the water tumbled him again, pushed him under and swirled him along. His arms grabbed out for something, but there was nothing but water. He kicked, reached out again, and this time his hand came up against cold granite, the side of the dry dock.

He steadied himself, tried to get his feet down, but there was no bottom anymore, the water was over his head. He tried to lie back, float, but the surge of fresh water coming in would not allow it. He slammed against the side of the dry dock, bumped and scraped down its length, completely at the mercy of the roiling river water.

And then his hand hit something, something jutting out from the wall of the dry dock, a ringbolt for tying off a fast. He grabbed it, held himself in place, climbed up one of the granite steps, then another, found another ringbolt to grab. The water swirled around and tugged at him, but he held fast to the bolt, pressed his face against the cold granite, and breathed.

“Captain? You down there?”

Bowater wanted to respond but he could not. He gave himself a moment, heaving for breath, and then when he had his wind called, “I’m here, Chief! Coming up!”

“I suggest you hurry, sir!”

The powder. With drowning imminent, he had forgotten all about the chance of being blown to hell. He swiveled around, stared across the black space toward the powder train. He could still see it, that hateful flame, creeping toward the unseen charge. Bowater gritted his teeth, hating the thing, waiting for the blast.

And then it winked and then it was gone.

The spark had drowned, and he, Samuel Bowater, had not.

He turned his face back toward the side of the dry dock, pressed his cheek against the granite, closed his eyes. The fire that had burned in him earlier was out, the head of steam that had propelled him with such fearless energy was gone. He could feel his hands trembling. His knees began to vibrate. He squeezed his eyes tighter shut, clenched his teeth.

Then he opened his eyes, looked up, said, “Oh, Lord!” then turned and vomited into the water swirling around him.

For a long moment he lay there puking, until nothing else would come. He spit out, again and again, lowered his face into the water to wash the vomit away. He could not let anyone see the shame of it.

“Captain?” Taylor’s voice again.

“Coming up!” Bowater shouted back, and took the steps one at a time, his confidence and his strength returning as he climbed up out of the pit.

At last he came up over the edge, not where he had first climbed down, but near the far end of the dry dock. The inrush of water had pushed him nearly the length of the thing.

He straightened and looked around. The blast-furnace heat from the ship houses felt good on his wet clothing. Shapes moved out of the smoke, and they materialized into Hieronymus Taylor and Eustis Babcock.

“Hell, Captain…” Taylor said. He shook his head. He was grinning.

“Hell, indeed. Where’s McNelly?”

“Ain’t he with you?”

“No. He must have run off.” Bowater forced McNelly out of his thoughts. “Good job, Chief, opening the gates.”

“Thankee, sir. Sorry ’bout near drowning you.”

Bowater shook his head. “It couldn’t be helped.” Now that his thoughts were settling back into place, he was feeling a bit sheepish about not having thought of the floodgates himself. “Let’s get back to the ship.”

Wearily they trudged off, making their way back in the direction they had come. With the bulk of the flames at their back they had an easier time of it, the shipyard before them brilliantly illuminated, the light making a million little bright spots and shadows over the rounded cobblestones. But the smoke was a dense fog, and their visibility was down to a hundred feet or so, and after a few moments Bowater found himself questioning his own sense of direction.

“Chief…” he began and then from behind him an explosion jarred the ground, tossed bright volcano flames high in the air. Bowater and Taylor and Babcock were flung forward, part from the shock and part from a desire to get down. For a long minute they lay there, unmoving, their hands clapped on their heads, as if that would save them from the falling granite of the dry dock.

Another explosion, and they felt the cobbles tremble under them.

Bowater rolled over, sat up, realized that lying on the ground would do them no good. He could see the fires at the ship houses had redoubled, and the wooden frame that had once been at the center of the inferno was gone.

“Reckon that was the dry dock?” Taylor asked.

“No,” Bowater said. “Probably some powder stores, or such. They put two thousand pounds of powder down in the dry dock. If that had gone off we’d be under half a ton of granite right now.”

He turned and looked at Taylor, who was on his belly and propped up on his elbows. Incredibly, his cigar was still in his mouth. The engineer nodded.

The three men hauled themselves to their feet, stumbled off again. The roar of the flames had dropped off a bit, as the fire consumed everything it could and began to starve.

They found the others, and together the lot of them made their way back to the Cape Fear. In the east, the sky was beginning to show signs of dawn, but Samuel Bowater could think of nothing but sleep.

We will anchor out…if it is safe…anchor out and let all hands sleep…

The tug was where they had left her, tied to the seawall, but lower with the ebbing tide. She looked like a ghost ship in the early-dawn light and the ubiquitous smoke. Samuel could see men moving about her deck.

Quite a lot of men, it seemed.

His weary mind toyed with this observation as he and his men shuffled the last hundred yards to the vessel. And then, twenty yards away, he became aware of more men, to his right and left, men closing in on them, and suddenly he was alert again, and his pistol was in his hand.

“Hold!” a voice called. Bowater turned. Men were coming at him from both sides, armed with rifles, some in uniform, most not. “Hold, sir!” the voice said again, and the man calling stepped forward, a sword in hand. He stood directly between Bowater and his tug, pointed with his sword to the pistol in his hand.

“Lay down your weapons, all of you!” he said in a commanding voice. “You are all prisoners of the Provisional Army of the State of Virginia!”

Bowater watched the officer’s expression of cool command turn to anger as he holstered, rather than dropped, his expensive presentation pistol. He did not know what to say. He wanted to laugh, but he was far too tired for that.