The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks

I Civil War Turtle 1861–1862

“Curse this boat,” Lieutenant Alexander Warley said loudly. “I feel like a horse wearing blinders.”

His command, the Confederate ironclad Manassas, was less than fifty yards downriver of Fort Jackson, some seventy-five miles south of New Orleans. Warley peered through the single bow port into the misty night. The clattering of the machinery, combined with the hissing of the steam boilers, was magnifying the tension Warley already felt. The Confederate ironclad was untested and only weeks from completion. And although the night of October 11, 1861, was unseasonably cool, Warley was sweating.

Fourteen feet of Manassas was underwater, with only the top six feet of the convex hull and the twin smokestacks rising into the air. Because of an Indian summer, the temperature of the Mississippi River had remained warm longer than usual. With the shroud of warm water around her hull, combined with the heat from the boilers, Manassas was being warmed from without and within. Slipping downstream with the current, Warley wondered how he and his crew had found themselves here.

Farther south, at the Head of the Passes, the area of the Mississippi River Delta where the river forked into three separate channels, Commander Henry French, aboard the ten-gun Union sloop Preble, finished writing in his log and prepared to turn in for the night. After waiting for the ink to dry, he closed the logbook, capped his inkwell; and set his quill pen in the holder. Stretching in his chair, he rose to extinguish his whale-oil lamp, then changed his mind. Leaving the lamp burning, he walked through the passageway and up the ladder onto the deck. Saluting the deck sentry, he pulled a leather pouch from his jacket pocket and began to stuff tobacco into the bowl of his newest pipe.

Striking a wooden match, he waited until the strong sulfur smell was carried away by the wind, then touched the match to the bowl and puffed the pipe to life. Then he stared across the water. The night was black, with no moon, and a mist hung low over the water. The scant illumination came from lanterns on the deck of the twenty-two-gun flagship Richmond, and the few on the deck of the Union sloop Joseph H. Toone that was tied alongside. The sloop was off-loading coal for Richmond’s boilers, and French wished the loading operation was finished.

No captain enjoys having the maneuverability of his vessel compromised, and French’s feelings were heightened by the fact that he was at the mouth of an inland waterway and not far out to sea, as he preferred. Rivers were for flatboats and barges, not warships, French thought to himself. He drew in a mouthful of smoke.

“Sights or sounds?” he said to the sentry, after he exhaled.

“No sights, sir,” the seaman noted. “With the bunkers being reloaded, it’s hard to hear anything from upriver. Nothing indicates it won’t be a quiet night, though, sir.”

French puffed on his pipe while he smoothed his beard with his hand. “Where are you from, sailor?”

“Maine, sir,” the young man answered. “Rockport.”

“I imagine you’ve spent some time on the water, then,” French noted.

“Yep,” the seaman answered, “family of fishermen and lobstermen.”

French finished and tapped the dottle over the side into the water.

“I’m going belowdecks. You keep a sharp eye,” he said.

“Aye, sir,” the sailor answered.

Just then a small series of waves from far out in the gulf rocked Richmond and pressed her and Toone together. The sound of the hulls slapping washed across the water like distant thunder.

French climbed back down the ladder and entered his cabin on the Preble. Licking his fingertips, he pressed them against the wick of the lamp and climbed into his berth. Making himself comfortable, he settled in to sleep.

Lieutenant Warley coughed, then rubbed his watering eyes. The pair of smokestacks were failing to vent the smoke from the boilers. This was just one more problem to add to the many Warley had noticed with Manassas, the first armored warship in North America that would see battle. To begin with, the vessel was proving underpowered, and that was no wonder. The Confederate navy was underbudgeted, and the ironclad’s twin engines — one high-pressure, the other low-pressure — were worn out when they were installed. This was a common problem. The Confederates lacked the funds and the foundries to produce new engines themselves. Nor did the Confederates possess the large and modem shipyards of the Union.

The hull of Manassas came from a New England icebreaker formerly named Enoch Train that had last seen life as a river towboat. A group of enterprising Louisiana businessmen bought Enoch Train, then paid to have her razed at a crude shipyard across the river from New Orleans in Algiers. The ship’s masts and superstructure were cut off, the hull was lengthened and widened, and her bow was extended and rebuilt with solid wood. Then the worn engines and hardware were installed. Next, a convex iron shield backed by wood was built as the upper deck. In the bow, a rounded shuttered port that flipped up was cut and the hole for the smokestack punched through the top. Last but not least, the shipwrights bolted a cast-iron ram to the bow just below the waterline.

They named her Manassas after the site of a recent Confederate army victory.

Then the businessmen applied for a letter of marque and reprisal, a document from the Confederate government giving them the right to sink Union vessels and take their cargoes as prizes.

Their dreams of grandeur above patriotism did not last. Commander George Hollins was in charge of building a fleet of warships to fight the expected fleet of Admiral David Farragut. Needing every vessel he could arm, Hollins sent Warley with a crew from the C.S.S. McRae to seize Manassas for the Confederacy.

The longshoremen aboard the ironclad defied the navy and shouted that they would kill the first man who attempted to board her. Warley, wielding a revolver, called their bluff. Cowed, the longshoremen abandoned the boat, along with one of the owners, who had tears in his eyes when escorted ashore. It was later reported that the Confederate government paid the businessmen $100,000 as compensation for the ship.

At this instant, Warley was ruing the day he had been assigned her command. To add insult to injury, he was having a great deal of trouble controlling Manassas’s direction. To have steering control, Warley needed to exceed the speed of the current by at least a few miles per hour. Right now Warley was barely creeping downriver.

“Get the engineer,” Warley shouted to a deckhand standing nearby.

The man scampered down a hatch into the engine room. Warley was well known as a stern disciplinarian, and by the sound of his voice he was none too happy. Crouching down to avoid hitting his head, the deckhand crab-walked to the stern, where William Hardy, the ship’s engineer, was applying grease to the shaft leading to the propeller.

“Cap’n wants to see you,” the deckhand shouted over the din.

“Be right up,” Hardy said, wiping his hands on an already greasy piece of burlap.

Straightening his uniform, Hardy ran a wooden comb through his hair, then climbed up the ladder through the port. Walking forward, he saluted Warley.

“You wanted to see me, sir?” Hardy said.

“Yes,” Warley said. “How many inches of steam are we making?”

“About nine, sir,” Hardy noted.

Manassas could make nearly thirty before her boilers would blow.

“Why so little?” Warley asked. “I’m having problems with control.”

“It’s the fuel we loaded,” Hardy noted. “We have some seasoned wood and a half-load of coal — but if I burn that, we won’t have them when we go into battle.”

“So we burn green wood?” Warley said, wiping his nose, which was dripping from the smoke.

“Unless you order me otherwise,” Hardy said easily.

Warley nodded. Hardy was a good man and as fine an officer as he had aboard Manassas. “You made the right choice, William,” he said. “Let’s just hope next time we go out, it will be with a full load of prime fuel.”

“Yes, sir,” Hardy said, “that would be a blessing. For now, however, you have about fifteen more minutes of green wood.”

“Then that’s the way it is,” Warley said, dismissing Hardy with a crisp salute.

Turning the helm over to First Officer Charles Austin, Warley made his way to the bow, where the Manassas’s single nine-inch gun sat pointed downriver. He stared out at the blackness as he drew in breaths of clean air.

The Yankees were out there, and, seasoned wood or not, it was time for the rebels to visit.

The fog was growing thicker around the anchored Union fleet as Manassas steamed downriver. The flotilla was well armed. Richmond was armed with a total of twenty-six guns. The sailing sloop Preble carried seven 32-pound cannon, two 8-inch rifled guns, and a single 12-pounder. Less heavily armed was the steamer Water Witch, which mounted only four small guns. More heavily armed was the sloop Vincennes, which carried a complement of fourteen 32-pounders, twin 9-inch Dahlgren smoothbores, and four 8-inch rifled guns. Because of the late hour, the decks of the Union fleet were quiet.

Engineer Hardy popped his head through the hatch into the pilothouse. “We’re into the good wood. You should feel an improvement.”

Charles Austin at the helm shouted. “I felt the speed pick up a few minutes ago.”

“Good,” Hardy said. “Fear not — when we attack, I have a little trick up my sleeve.”

“I’ll let you know,” Austin shouted after the retreating Hardy.

Manassas was the lead ship of a small Confederate force.

Just behind and off her port side trailed the small Confederate tug Ivy, which had come downriver a few days before. Ivy mounted a new British-made Whitworth rifled gun. The Whitworth was a rare and expensive extravagance for the Confederate navy, effective and well built. The last few days, Ivy had stayed upriver, harassing the Union blockaders by shelling the Union fleet from a distance of nearly four miles.

Calhoun, Jackson, and Tuscarora also left Fort Jackson to travel downriver for the attack. Calhoun was an aging vessel equipped with walking beam engines. Her orders called for her to stay away from action and fire her guns from a distance. Jackson was a newer high-pressure paddle wheeler, but the Confederates were concerned that the noise from her engines and paddle wheels would alert the Union forces, and she was coming downriver last. Tuscarora was a small tug tasked with towing a fire raft the Confederates hoped to use to set the Union fleet ablaze.

Manassas was close to the Union ships. Austin strained to see through the fog.

Frolic, a southern schooner the Union had captured when she tried to run through the blockade with a load of cotton bound for London, was manned by a skeleton crew. She was due to travel north for conversion to a Union vessel in a few more weeks, and only a few men tasked with maintenance were aboard.

The master of Frolic, a laconic New Yorker named Sean Riley, was having trouble sleeping. The monotony was wearing on Riley, and after tossing and turning in his berth, he finally decided to try the main deck to see if the fresh air would bring sleep. Carrying a thin wool blanket, he headed for the stem to make himself comfortable.

A sound of tapping reached his ears. Maybe it was a woodpecker, Riley thought. No, not a woodpecker — the tapping had a distinctly metallic tone. Must be from Richmond, which was anchored nearby. Riley climbed into the riggings to investigate.

“I saw a dim outline ahead,” Warley said to Austin, after returning from the gun port. “I have no idea if it’s a Federal vessel, but she’s slightly to port.”

Austin adjusted the wheel, then peered from the tiny port into the gloom.

“What in God’s name,” Riley blurted aloud.

A blackened leviathan from the depths was quickly approaching. If not for the round smokestack and noise, the unknown object might have been a whale that had lost its bearings and traveled from the Gulf of Mexico upriver. Like a hunter stalking prey, the black object was advancing on Richmond.

The time was 3:40 A.M.

Sliding down a line, Riley began ringing Frolic’s bell. Then he shouted across the water. “Ahoy, Richmond, there’s a boat coming down the river.”

Over the sound of the bunkers being loaded, no one on Richmond heard his pleas.

Riley ran into the pilothouse to find an aerial flare.

“Enemy dead ahead,” Austin shouted down the hatch to Hardy.

“Now’s the time, boys,” Hardy yelled to his engine-room crew.

Opening the door to the firebox, the black gang took turns tossing kegs of tar, turpentine, tallow, and sulfur into the flames. Almost immediately, the steam gauge began creeping higher. At the helm, Austin felt Manassas surge forward.

On Preble, a midshipman saw Manassas advancing. He ran to warn Commander French. A few moments later, French appeared on deck in his long underwear. The Confederate ram was only twenty yards from Richmond—there was no time to give warning.

The explosive fuel tossed into Manassas’s firebox gave the vessel speed but also raised the temperature inside the vessel. The crew of the ram was covered in sweat, and their heads were swimming from the heat. One crewman began to sing “Dixie.” The rest of the sailors quickly followed suit.

Inside Manassas, it became chaos. The sailors were singing at the top of their lungs, the Union ships were sounding their warnings, and the vibration of the propeller shaft through the deck was making Austin’s feet numb. He peered through the tiny port at the vessel looming above.

They were ten yards from Richmond when Riley’s flare streaked skyward.

“Fire the gun,” Warley shouted to the gun captain.

The shot from the cannon struck the side of Joseph H. Toone and exited from the other side. Then Richmond’s bell began to ring the call to arms. In the confusion, Austin never hesitated in his advance and never deviated from his course. Hands firmly on the wheel, he steered Manassas directly into the side of Toone. The cast-iron ram performed as designed. It parted the planks of the frigate like a knife through the belly of a fish. The ram wedged between a pair of thick ribs two feet below the waterline. Water poured into the hull through a six-inch gash.

Fortunately, it was not a fatal blow.

On board Manassas, Austin touched the tip of his fingers to his forehead. When he brought them away and into the light, he could see red. At impact his head had slammed into a bulkhead and opened a cut. He dabbed at the wound with his handkerchief. Later he could tend to the wound — right now it was time to make another run at the Union ship.

“Full astern,” he shouted down the hatch to Hardy.

In Manassas’s engine room, one of the condensers had sprung a leak, and the hold was filled with a thick cloud of steam. A crewman had been badly burned and lay off to one side, moaning. Hardy diverted the steam through one of the side ports on Manassas—a device designed to repel boarders by blasting them with a stream of scalding water and steam. Tying a rag over the split condenser pipe, he slammed the controls into full astern.

But Manassas did not move.

As soon as the Union officers organized their crews to begin firing, Manassas would be taking direct broadsides. Austin wasn’t confident that the armor plating could withstand such an attack. He spun the wheel hard to starboard in an attempt to free his command.

Manassas shuddered as the propellers began to find purchase.

“Get us out of here,” Warley yelled to Austin.

Austin still had no idea the ram was wedged in Toone’s hull. On Toone, a seaman aimed at Manassas with a black-powder revolver. He was just about to squeeze off a round when a thin stream of scalding water struck him in the face. Screaming in pain, he flipped over the side into the river. At that instant, Manassas’s propeller shaft slowed, then reversed direction. The four-bladed bronze prop began to bite at the muddy water.

Deep inside Toone, the iron bolts holding the ram to the solid wood bow began to squeal like a pig stuck by a saber. Something had to give, and it would not be the interwoven layers of hardwood forming the bow. Manassas crabbed its way sideways.

And then, like a string of firecrackers being ignited, the nuts began to pop off.

The nuts, with portions of the bolts still attached, shot across the cargo hold of Toone and embedded themselves in the far wall. All at once, the ram was pulled from the bow of Manassas. With the wheel turned to the locks, the Confederate ram had little choice but to respond to the helm. Once free, the vessel slammed full abeam into Toone. Richmond and Toone had been anchored perpendicular to the current, with their anchors upstream. This allowed the Union vessels a margin of safety in case of attack — the cannon were pointing upriver toward the enemy.

Manassas slipped under one of the hawsers holding the anchor.

The thick line slapped against the rounded wooden deck and pulled tight. Deep below the Mississippi River, Toone’s anchor was wedged against the hulk of a sunken French schooner. The wreck had lain in the mud for nearly a century and was stuck as fast as if encased in cement.

“Get us out of here,” Warley yelled to Austin.

Austin still had no idea the ram was wedged in Toone’s hull.

“I’m backing out,” he shouted. “We’ll come at her again.”

Manassas lurched in reverse. The inside of the ship quickly filled with smoke.

“I’ve got no draft for the fires” Hardy yelled topside, “and one of the condensers is blown. We’re now down to a single engine.”

Austin backed away to assess the damage.

As soon as Manassas engaged Richmond, the rest of the Confederate flotilla sprang into action. The tugs Watson and Tuscarora raced past. Attached to their sterns were a total of five burning fire rafts, and the two ships were looking for a target. Just then, the guns of Richmond opened up. The Union gunners were firing blind — shells began raining out from every direction.

Manassas backed away a short distance in the fog, and Warley assumed control. Almost at once, he noticed that the ship was responding sluggishly.

“Something is wrong,” he shouted to Austin.

Just then Hardy popped his head through the hatch from the engine room. Hardy’s face was covered with soot, and his eyes were as red as a Washington apple. In one hand, he held an ax.

“I can see up through the deck,” he shouted. “The stack is attached and dragging.”

With Austin supporting him on the slick deck, the two men hacked off the smokestack. It floated a short distance, then sank from sight. Climbing back down into the pilothouse, Hardy addressed Warley.

“Sir, we’re damaged,” Hardy said. “The ram is gone, and we’re down to one engine. Other than our single gun, we’re completely defenseless.”

Warley nodded and turned his crippled vessel upstream.

“There will be time to fight another day,” he said slowly.

When it was all said and done, the battle at the Head of the Passes decided little. The Union navy suffered damage that they repaired, and the blockade was not broken. Even so, the actions of the Confederate fleet gave the citizens of New Orleans a much-needed shot of confidence. The crew of Manassas was hailed as heroes, and the vessel was towed to the shipyard for repairs. The vessel, which had entered its first battle as a privateer, officially entered into the roles of the Confederate navy. Engineer Hardy was promoted, and Charles Austin was made her official master.

The repairs necessary on Manassas stretched on for months. Her appearance was now changed. Instead of two thin stacks, she now sported a single thick one.

For Union planners, the Mississippi River was a linchpin to winning the war. The river was the artery for shipping and commerce, and it tied together the western Confederate frontier. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln summed it up succinctly: “The Mississippi is the backbone of the Rebellion. It is the key to the whole situation.”

The most important city was New Orleans — a hotbed of rebellion and unrest as well as a growing center of shipbuilding and weapons manufacture. By 1861, a total of five shipyards and twelve docks were operating, and the city was second only to Norfolk, Virginia, as a Confederate shipbuilding center. New Orleans had inventors and risk-takers. The first Confederate submarines were tested in Lake Pontchartrain, and newly developed torpedoes (sea mines) were designed there. Equally important, a large number of the cotton traders funding the rebellion lived in the city, and the blockade runners shipping the cotton to London loaded their cargo at the wharves.

Primary defense for the city was provided by Fort St. Philip on the east side of the river and Fort Jackson on the west. The pair of forts were located some seventy-five miles downstream, near the Head of the Passes. Fort St. Philip was considered to be the stronger of the two. Built of brick and rock and covered with sod, it had originally been constructed by the Spanish. St. Philip had a total of fifty-two guns pointed at the river. To the west, across the expanse of muddy water, Fort Jackson had been built by the Union before the war and bristled with seventy-five guns.

In addition to the pair of forts, a second barrier to the Union navy had been laid in place. Stretched across the river between the two forts was a heavy chain that was supported by the sunken hulks of six sacrificed schooners designed to snag any Union vessels venturing upstream.

At first glance, the Confederacy fielded what appeared to be a formidable defense.

“Ship Island,” David Farragut said quietly.

Folding his brass spyglass, Farragut slid it into the pocket of his uniform jacket. Farragut was one of the Union navy’s few flag officers, and his uniform proudly displayed this fact. His epaulets featured the stars denoting his rank. Unlike most of his officers and men, Farragut’s uniform had been carefully tailored and fit him perfectly. Farragut was not a tall man, but his erect posture and squared shoulders made him appear larger. A sense of his own importance infused his being and radiated outward to envelop those around him. Farragut was a man comfortable with leading, comfortable with decisions, and comfortable with fate. The fleet he commanded had left Hampton Roads, Virginia, on February 2. Nine days later, they stopped in Key West, and nine more found him here in the Gulf of Mexico off the Mississippi River.

“Anchor and assemble the flotilla,” Farragut said to his second in command.

It was no secret that Farragut’s fleet was preparing to attempt a run up the Mississippi River. On April 1, rebel spies reported that all but two of the vessels had crossed the bar and were now in the river. In New Orleans, work proceeded around the clock to finish the Confederate ironclads Louisiana and Mississippi.

Louisiana was a large vessel, 264 feet in length with a 62-foot beam. Her armament was to consist of a pair of 7-inch rifled guns, a trio of 9-inch shell guns, a quadrant of 8-inch shell guns, and seven 32-pounders. Mississippi was no less a vessel. Some 260 feet in length with a beam of 53 feet 8 inches, she was due to carry a battery of twenty guns of various sizes.

The problem was that the two ships were far from final commissioning.

Atop the ramparts of Fort Jackson, Delbert Antoine stared west at the red sunset. The sight was unsettling to the native Louisianian, and he shared his feelings with his partner, Preston Kimble. The date was the eighteenth of April.

“The red of the sky,” Antoine said, “looks like blood.”

Kimble leaned over to spit off the brick walkway atop the parapet into the moat below. “If our guns don’t sink the Yankees,” Kimble said, “that gator in the moat will eat them.”

Both Kimble and Antoine were early conscripts to the cause. They were dressed in early Confederate gray wool uniforms, now showing wear. Antoine’s eyes scanned the fort. It was pentagon-shaped and stood twenty-five feet above the water. The walls were constructed of red brick and were twenty feet thick.

In the area of the sixteen heavy guns that pointed toward the water, the brick had been reinforced with thick granite slabs. Inside the center of the fort was a diagonal-shaped defensive barracks where five hundred men could take shelter during bombardments. The sight of the substantial construction gave Antoine little comfort.

“They’re coming for us,” Antoine said. “I can feel it.”

“We’ll blow them out of the water,” Kimble said, “like shooting ducks in a pond.”

Antoine nodded. But he knew his friend’s words were just bluster. If Kimble wasn’t afraid, he was just plain stupid — or crazy.

A few miles down the river from Fort Jackson, around a bend and tied to the shore, Franklin Dodd checked the lines holding his barge to the trees. It was dark, and a stiff wind was blowing. Even so, thousands of frogs were croaking, and the sound was making Dodd angry.

“Damn frogs,” he said to powder monkey Mark Hallet.

“They’ll hush up when we start firing,” Hallet noted.

An assignment to one of the numerous mortar boats was not a job relished by a Union sailor. Their job was to soften up the forts before Farragut and his ships made their run upriver. The crews’ job was simple. They would load their gun, then stand with mouth agape to avoid having their eardrums blown out. The gun would fire, then they would reload and fire again. Hundreds upon hundreds of times, the exercise would be repeated. By the end of the war, most of the crews would find themselves deaf.

Early on the morning of April 19, the mortar boats opened fire.

The first round slammed into the base of Fort Jackson. For five days the barrage would keep up around the clock. By noon of the first, half the Confederates were trembling.

Hallet poured a powder charge into the mortar. For the last few days, he had felt a pressure in his head he could not shake. He would yawn and that would relieve the pressure some, but still it always returned. He felt a hand on his arm and stared at Dodd. His friend’s mouth was moving, but Hallet could not make out the words. Wiping some powder from his blackened face with a rag, he put his ear next to Dodd’s mouth. He could smell Dodd’s breath, and it was not pleasant.

“The word is Farragut’s making his run tonight,” Dodd shouted.

Hallet smiled at the words, but he was worried. He had been unable to stop his body from shaking for the last two days. The only thing that brought him relief was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. So he rocked until the gun fired. Then he ran over and set another powder charge.

On Manassas, Lieutenant Warley knew the Union was coming. He reasoned that the first order of business for the Federals would be to send a couple of boats upriver to try to breach the chain obstruction stretching across the river. The problem was that Manassas was still upriver.

The last few months had reinforced Warley’s opinion of Manassas. The vessel was underpowered, lightly armored, and poor-handling. Even so, if Warley sighted an enemy ship, he was ready to ram her. For the coming battle, Warley could count on little help. Louisiana and Mississippi were still not fully operational. Both had been towed down from New Orleans and were now anchored by the forts to be used as floating gun batteries.

The Union gunboats Pinola and Itasca had been tasked with blowing the Confederate chain obstruction. Sneaking upriver, a crew from Itasca rowed a small boat to the obstruction and attached an explosive charge. The charge failed to explode. Luckily, one of the gunboats fouled itself in the chain and, attempting to free itself, pulled the chain apart, creating an opening large enough for the Union fleet to breach.

The Mississippi was open, but the Union navy faced a gauntlet of murderous fire.

On April 23, Manassas and her tender, Phoenix, arrived off the forts. Shells were still raining down from the mortar boats as Warley maneuvered into place. So far, Fort Jackson had been the hardest hit. Through the smoke, Warley could see that parts of her outer wall were pocked from the rain of shells. Continuing to scan the fort with his spyglass, he could see the Confederate flag still flying atop the pole.

Just then, one of the Fort Jackson guns returned fire.

April 23 melded into April 24. Admiral Farragut rolled his charts and stared at the men around the table in his stateroom aboard his flagship Hartford “Are there any more questions?” Farragut asked.

The men shook their heads in the negative.

“Then we go at my signal,” he said quietly.

The men filtered off to return to their commands and a strange quiet.

Just past 2 A.M., two red lanterns were hoisted atop the mizzen peak of Hartford.

From this point forward, there was no turning back.

Manassas was tied to the bank just off Fort St. Philip; because of earlier problems, she now sported but a single smokestack, but that had failed to solve all her problems. Earlier, the ship’s engineer had reported a balky condenser. Warley ordered it changed before the battle. The pilot was testing the steam power as Warley paced the decks.

“Is the gun crew ready?” he shouted to Lieutenant Reed.

“Yes, sir,” Reed said. “I checked with them a half hour ago, as you instructed.”

“Fireman and black gang?”

“All in place. The condenser is repaired — they’re making steam,” Reed noted.

“Are the steam and water ports operational?” Warley asked.

“If we need to repel boarders,” Reed said, “they’ll be in for a shock.”

Just then, the pilot interrupted.

“Sir, we have steam in the boiler and power to the propeller,” he said.

“Then cast us off,” Warley said.

The barrage from the mortar boats increased. Delbert Antoine peered through the gloom for signs of the Union navy. The air was thick with the smell of spent powder and brick dust. The temperature was cool, like the inside of a tomb.

“I think I see something,” Preston Kimble shouted.

Kimble was fifty feet from Antoine and closer to the water.

Like an evil mourner shrouded in black, the dim outline of Hartford slowly materialized on the river. Kimble reached for the pistol lying on the wall of the rampart and fired a minié ball at the approaching wraith. The effect was like trying to use a flyswatter to kill a bird, but Kimble didn’t care.

And just then the water batteries of Fort Jackson opened up with a roar.

The battle began at 3:40 A.M.

Lieutenant Warley opened the roof hatch on Manassas and stared at the sky. Mortar shells arced through the air with a flash of light from their burning fuses. He watched as the shells reached the apex of their trajectory and slowed. Then, looking like spinning Fourth of July sparklers, they accelerated and plunged into the Confederate forts. It was an eerie sight. The air was already clouded with smoke that hung low over the water and billowed and rolled like waves in the ocean.

In the engine room of Manassas, Chief Engineer Dearing, who had transferred over from Tuscarora, was stoking a hellish fire of his own creation. Dearing knew the Confederate ram would need all the steam he could make, and he took the boilers to the limit just as a Federal ship appeared through the gloom.

“Make for the Yank ship,” Warley shouted to the pilot.

The pilot began his course adjustment, but just then the Confederate ram Resolute, in full retreat, crossed abeam. Manassas struck her around the wheelhouse.

“Back off,” Warley shouted.

While still entangled with Resolute, the Union vessel slowed and poured shot into the side on Manassas before continuing upstream. Once they were free of Resolute, Warley ordered a course to midstream, where he had spotted a Union paddle wheeler.

The outline of the familiar ship appeared in the blackness.

“She’s the U.S.S. Mississippi,” Warley shouted.

In a war that pitted brother against brother, there was no time for sentiment. The U.S.S. Mississippi was the last ship Warley had served on before resigning his commission in the Union navy. Now Warley was bent on sinking her.

In the foretop of the U.S.S. Mississippi, artist William Waud spied the sinister-looking ship approaching. He would later draw her as a lead-colored wet whale, with the smokestack high in the air the only feature that might define it as a ship. At this second, there were pressing matters. Waud shouted to Lieutenant George W. Dewey, later to become famous for his destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay.

“Here is a queer-looking customer off our port bow,” Waud yelled.

Dewey corrected course in an attempt to run down the Confederate vessel, but his paddle wheeler was going upstream against the current and his pilot had little control.

He ordered his guns to fire, but the shots glanced off Manassas’s back.

“Take her at the wheelhouse,” Warley shouted to the pilot.

Manassas had the current on her side, but the pilot’s aim was poor in the blackness.

They came in on Mississippi’s quarter.

“Fire the gun,” Warley shouted, as they struck the Union ship.

The single cannon in the bow belched once as Manassas rammed into the Union ship. The shell entered through the broken hull planking and lodged in a cabin belowdecks. The U.S.S. Mississippi answered the attack with fire of its own. Dewey watched Manassas back away into the blackness.

Fear and anger ran through the Confederate fleet as the Union navy steamed upriver. With a few more weeks of preparation, they might have stood a fighting chance. As it was, the saber thrust of the Union navy was cutting through their defenses with indescribable ease. Most Confederate rams were grounded on the side of the river by their captains, and their crews escaped into the swamps. The mighty Louisiana, crippled by uncompleted construction and faulty propulsion, lay tied up alongside the shore. She was firing her guns, but the design of her gun ports was faulty, and she had only a limited range in which to fire.

A Union ship came abreast and poured shot into her hull.

Things were no better on Manassas. The Mississippi River had become a boiling inferno. Clouds of smoke rolled across the river, illuminated by bursts of light from muzzle flashes from the passing ships. Shells flew through the air in a rain of lead, and the flames of burning ships made for a macabre scene of destruction. A large orange-tinted moon had risen, but it was hidden behind the thick, choking smoke.

Over the noises of the engines, Warley could hear the shouts of the Union gunners, as they went through their firing drills. Still, Warley would not back down.

“To port,” he shouted to his pilot.

Aboard the Union ship Pensacola, Executive Officer F. A. Poe viewed Manassas advancing. Ordering a course correction to avoid the ramming, he waited until the last second, then ordered his guns fired into the Confederate ram. The shells exploded on Manassas’s back. Only a few inches to starboard and they would have entered the pilothouse through the port.

By now, the majority of the Union fleet had passed, and Warley ordered Manassas downstream. He was intent on attacking the mortar boats downstream to take fire off the Confederate forts. His decision would prove deadly. Once Manassas came into the range of Fort St. Philip, the batteries, mistaking the Confederate ram for a disabled Union ship, opened fire on their own countrymen.

“Get us out of here!” Warley shouted to the pilot, an order to steer upstream.

Manassas, underpowered to begin with, struggled hard to make headway against the current. And then Warley thought he’d found salvation. A Union vessel appeared in the gloom. Warley thought she was Farragut’s flagship Hartford, and he made his way toward her. But salvation would not be his. The vessel was not Hartford but Brooklyn, a worthy target but not what Warley had hoped for. Brooklyn was entangled with part of the remaining chain obstruction and was struggling to free herself. The Union vessel was stuck under the guns of Fort Jackson, and if she didn’t free herself soon, the guns now finding their range would turn her into tinder.

“Resin in the boiler,” Warley shouted down in the engine room.

The increase in power came seconds later. Warley ordered the pilot to ram Brooklyn. Had not the Union navy ordered chain armor mounted to their vessels before the battle, the blow from Manassas’s ram would have sunk the Union ship. As it was, the blow was deflected and caused minimal damage. Warley ordered the pilot to back off.

The battle had raged for hours. The sky to the east was beginning to lighten.

Warley noticed the Confederate vessel McRae involved in a one-sided fight with several Union ships. Manassas came to assist and chased the Union ships upriver. The crew was weary from the hours of battle. Manassas had taken numerous hits at close range. Many were injured. But Warley was still game. He ordered the pilot upriver around Quarantine Point, where most of Farragut’s fleet was waiting.

“We are losing steam,” Dearing shouted up to the pilothouse.

“We’re barely making headway,” the pilot shouted to Warley, as he stared out the tiny forward port at the approaching Union ships.

Warley stood silently for a moment. They had fought the good fight, but now his ship’s systems were failing. His ship was dying, and he was forced to face this fact. From the gun deck, Warley heard the low cries of a wounded sailor. To the front was an advancing enemy he was ill-equipped to fight.

“Run her aground on shore,” he said quietly.

The pilot steered for the bank.

“Prepare the men to make shore,” Warley shouted.

Manassas was run ashore, and the crew was evacuated. Climbing up the bank, Warley watched as Mississippi came abreast and pounded the abandoned ram with all the force of her guns. The rising sun had lightened the sky to a gray half-light. Warley watched as his command was pounded with shot.

Suddenly, a shell from Mississippi exploded against the stem just below the waterline, and the lower hold quickly began to flood. With the weight from the water, Manassas’s bow became light. She drifted away from shore with the current.

Now a ghost ship, Manassas floated a few dozen yards downstream of Warley and the crew. The gunners on Mississippi reloaded and fired. Screaming across the water, the shot parted the planks of Manassas’s hull.

As Manassas drifted downriver, Lieutenant Reed of McRae launched a last-ditch effort to save her. Rowing alongside in a small boat, he climbed aboard, only to find that Warley and his crew had cut through the steam pipes with axes. The ship had been rendered unusable. Reed had no choice but to abandon the ship and return to McRae.

Captain David Porter, later a distinguished admiral, in command of the mortar fleet, saw Manassas coming down the river, seemingly intent on destroying the mortar vessels, but he soon discovered that Manassas was never going to harm another ship.

“She was beginning to emit some smoke from her ports of holes,” he reported, “and was discovered to be on fire and sinking. Her pipes were all twisted and riddled with shot, and her hull was also well cut-up. She had evidently been used up by the squadron as they passed along. I tried to save her, as a curiosity, by getting a hawser around her and securing her to the bank, but just after doing so, she fairly exploded, her only gun went off, and, emitting flames through her bow port, like some huge animal, she gave a plunge and disappeared under the water.”

The career of Manassas had been short, but she led the way for armored ships. The first ironclad to do battle, she was soon followed by the Monitor and Merrimack/Virginia. Thanks to her, naval warfare would never be the same.

II They Don’t Come Cheaper Than This 1981, 1996

A few weeks after the unsuccessful conclusion of the 1981 Hunley expedition, I was sitting at my desk staring at the NUMA team’s graduation picture, a photo of everyone we always take before we head for home. I studied it carefully. The faces of so many dedicated and hardworking people brought back warm memories. Then, for some unknown reason, I counted those staring back at me. There were seventeen, excluding me. Seventeen! I began to wonder if all these bodies were critical to finding a shipwreck lying in no more than thirty feet of water. It seemed to me that three people could have achieved the same results.

The simple fact is — and this has been proven time and time again by our government — there comes a time when too many people get in one another’s way. Bureaucracy breeds bureaucracy. Feeding and housing a large search team requires support people. Once breakfast is consumed, a large crew needs at least four rental cars to ferry themselves and their equipment back and forth from the boat dock. And let us not forget the vital use of transportation for the younger members of the expedition team to make whoopee in town after dark.

More and more, it seemed that smaller might be better.

Warming to the idea, I planned the next expedition to the Mississippi River to search for ships sunk during Admiral David Farragut’s battle past the forts and his ultimate capture of New Orleans in 1861.

This time, there would be only two of us representing NUMA.

Walter Schob, an old faithful standby of NUMA, arranged to come with me on the expedition. All we brought was our Schonstedt gradiometer to detect ferrous metal and a golfer’s rangefinder. Walt met me at the Denver airport, where he had flown from his home in Palmdale, California, and was quite surprised when I rolled up to the gate in a little shuttle with my right ankle sticking out the side in a cast.

The day before I was to meet him, I was jogging behind my house on a path through the woods when I stumbled and twisted my ankle. There was little doubt a bone was broken, because I actually heard the snap. After limping up the path to the house, I found that my wife had gone grocery shopping. With no choice, I drove myself to the doctor, using my left foot for both brake and accelerator.

According to orthopedists who have looked at it twenty years later, the ankle bone didn’t mesh right and should have been screwed in place, or whatever it is they do in the twenty-first century to squeeze the parted bones together. As I aged, it developed arthritis. My advice is whatever you do, never get old.

The airline obliged me with a front-row seat facing the bulkhead so I could extend my foot. Incredibly, a fellow with another broken ankle sat across from me. Odd how misery loves company. His break was worse than mine, as his cast ran almost to his knee. Mine came only part way up my calf.

I always recall this flight because Walt had his carry-on bag sitting against the bulkhead at his feet. Now, you have to understand — Walt has a perverse sense of humor. When the flight attendant came along and asked him to move it under the seat or to an overhead bin, he said, “No, thank you, it’s fine right where it is.”

The flight attendant, with red hair and penetrating dark eyes, was rather attractive except for the fact that her hips brushed both seats as she walked down the aisle. She gave him a stem stare. “I’m sorry, FAA regulations. The bag has to be stowed.”

Walt stared back with an innocent expression. “There is no FAA regulation concerning a bag under my feet against the bulkhead needing to be stowed.”

“You stow it, sir, or the plane won’t take off,” she said in a voice filled with crushed ice.

“I’ll comply,” said Walt, “if you quote me the regulation, the section and paragraph.”

I might mention that Walt is an air accident investigator. If anyone knows FAA regulations, it’s him.

Now flustered, she said, “Then you leave me no choice but to get the pilot.”

This lady was not going to take no for an answer.

Walt smiled politely. “I’ll be more than happy to meet our pilot. I’d like to know his experience and flying time before we take off.”

Did I mention Walt is a retired air force colonel with several thousand hours’ piloting fighters?

She stormed off to the cockpit and returned with an exasperated pilot, who wanted to get the plane off the ground. In the meantime, Walt had stowed his bag and was reading a copy of an air accident investigative report.

“Do we have a problem here?” asked a grandfatherly-looking uniformed man with gray hair.

I looked up with my favorite dumb expression. “Problem?”

“The attendant says you won’t stow your bag.”

“I did.”

“Not you, him!” snapped the frustrated flight attendant, aiming a manicured finger at Walt.

Without looking up from his reading, Walt said calmly, “It’s stowed.”

As I said: perverse. But you have to like Walt. You can’t excite him. I’ve never seen him mad. With his ready smile and Andy Devine voice, he charms everyone — most of the time.

After landing at the New Orleans airport, we rented a big station wagon, a model now extinct, and made the seventy-five-mile drive down the river to Venice, Louisiana, the last town at the end of the road in the heart of delta country. From here it’s another twenty miles by boat to the Gulf of Mexico.

There’s not much to see in Venice: fishermen, boat dealers and part suppliers, a couple of miles of boat docks. We wondered why a huge parking lot was filled with acres of pickup trucks. Our answer came when a Bell Long Ranger helicopter approached, hovered, and settled to the ground. It was emblazoned with the company name, Petroleum Helicopter, Inc. A small army of offshore oil riggers poured to the ground. They had left their trucks parked when they were ferried out for their rig rotation.

We checked into a motel, the only motel at the time. The oil field workers must have had some rather exciting parties, judging from the damage to the place. I have always been amused recalling the Plexiglas sign screwed into the wall above the television. It said:

My shoestring expedition was off to a good start.

Our saving grace was a terrific little restaurant called Tom’s that was in the town of Buras. Tom’s specialty was Gulf oysters, and after shucking them, he’d pile them outside the restaurant. Back then the mound was nearly as high as the restaurant’s peaked roof. I still recall with fondness the chili-vinegar sauce his mama made. Nothing ever enhanced an oyster like that sauce. I was so impressed that when Dirk Pitt was chasing villains through the delta in the book Deep Six, I had him stop to eat at Tom’s.

We chartered a small fifteen-foot aluminum skiff from a local Cajun fisherman named John who lived in a mobile home near the river with his wife and tribe of kids. John treated Walt and me with great suspicion the first day and never said a word during the search. He was kind enough, though, to provide me with a lawn chair, so I could sit holding the gradiometer’s recorder in my lap with my ankle in a cast propped up on the gunwale, sticking over the bow like a battering ram.

The second day, John opened up a little. By the third day, he had opened the floodgates of his personality and begun to regale us with a string of Cajun jokes and stories. I wish I could remember them. Some were semi-jolly.

As we cruised up and down the Mississippi, trailing the gradiometer astern, I watched the needle on the recorder’s dial and listened to the sound recorder for any potential ferrous anomaly. With John in the stem of the skiff, steering, Walt sat in the middle, eyeing the shore with his rangefinder and keeping us in relatively straight lines until we neared the shore and he could guide John by eye.

The first day of the expedition, we concentrated on Manassas. The Civil War charts of the river were routinely matched to scale with modem charts and showed me that the east and west banks had not changed much over a hundred and twenty years. Only the bend on the east side in front of Fort St. Philip had filled in for a distance of fifty yards or more. I was quite sure Manassas had gone down near the west bank, because not only was it reported that the abandoned and burning ironclad had drifted past the mortar fleet, causing great concern, but Admiral Porter had tried to put a hawser on the vessel and save it as a curiosity. Unfortunately, at just that moment, there had been an internal explosion and Manassas had sunk into the river.

Walt, John, and I began our runs from the east bank and worked across the river to the west from Venice to the bend below Fort Jackson. I way overextended the search grid, because I wasn’t going to take any chances of missing Manassas. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve found that old contemporary reports are not necessarily the gospel truth.

The hours dragged by as we slowly approached the west bank, dodging big ocean cargo ships coming and going to New Orleans. This part of the river was devoid of any shipwrecks. I failed to receive more than the occasional one- or two-gamma reading, suggesting that we were passing over nothing larger than a steel drum or anchor. We were pretty discouraged as we made our final run, brushing the edge of the little rock jetty that ran along the west bank below the levee.

Abruptly, halfway into the last lane about a quarter of a mile above Boothville-Venice High School, the recorder screamed and the needle went off the dial, as we crossed over a massive anomaly. The hit was not in the river, but alongside and beneath part of the levee. Normally under a foot of water, the area between the jetty and levee was dry because the river was low this time of year. This enabled Walt to jump from the boat and walk the gradiometer sensor along the base of the levee as I received a prolonged reading on the recorder.

Obviously, we couldn’t say with certainty this was Manassas. The fact that this was the only massive target in the approximate area where she was recorded to have sunk was all we had going for us. I marked the site on my chart, noting the landmarks on the other side of the levee, and called it a day.

The next morning, we headed across the river and began our search of the water just off Fort St. Philip for the Confederate ironclad Louisiana. She was a monstrous ship, one of the largest the South built. She was 264 feet long with a beam of 62 feet. Her construction had not been completed before the battle, and she was towed down from New Orleans and moored to the bank slightly above Fort St. Philip as a floating battery. If her engines had been functional, the battle might have taken a different turn. But she could contribute little in keeping the Union fleet from running the gauntlet and taking the city of New Orleans.

After the battle, the Confederates set her on fire. Her mooring lines burned, and she began to drift downriver a short distance before being ripped apart by a massive blast when she was opposite the fort. We found a gigantic anomaly in the first hour of the search: no great feat, since I had studied a sketch of the exploding ironclad, showing a mushroom cloud of smoke erupting from the top of her casemate, done by Alfred Waud, the famous Civil War artist for Harper’s Weekly. The sketch put her directly off Fort St. Philip. She lies quite deep under the present shoreline in front of Fort St. Philip in a swampy area off the river. Her massive bulk contributed to the buildup of silt at the bend where she originally went down. Chris Goodwin, an archaeologist with an office in New Orleans, conducted an extensive survey over the site and, I believe, actually cored down to her wreck.

The third day, we searched the river for two other boats that went down in the battle: the Confederate gunboat Governor Moore and the Union gunboat Varuna—fittingly sunk by the Governor Moore. Moore has the distinction of having fired through her own bow after ramming Varuna, because her forward gun would have hurled its shot over the Union boat if she’d fired through her own port. Both ships went ashore within a hundred yards of each other.

We struck a large target to the south on the east bank around where Varuna ran aground to keep her from sinking, then continued upriver and found Governor Moore. She was easy to identify, because part of her, including the top of her boilers, was protruding from the water along the bank. The local boys often dive off of her boiler.

Walt and I had accomplished all we could. After bidding John farewell, we reluctantly departed our ritzy accommodations and headed for Baton Rouge, where we discovered the final resting place of the Confederate ironclad Arkansas.

I hope I’m forgiven for not spotting our targets with transits, as a true professional archaeologist would. By simply marking the wreck sites on charts with nearby landmarks, however, we’ve made it possible for anyone who follows our trail to have little trouble relocating the targets.

Total cost of the expedition?

$3,678.40.

Now, how can you beat that?

The story of Manassas, however, does not end here.

I turned over my records to the chief archaeologist for the Army Corps of Engineers, who contracted with Texas A&M University to do a magnetometer study of the site. I returned the following year with my wife, Barbara, and pinpointed the spot where Walt and I had found a huge magnetic anomaly. The investigation was led by Ervan Garrison and James Baker of the university.

The survey was conducted with a magnetometer, sidescan sonar, and subbottom profiler. The project determined that, indeed, a very strong anomaly existed over a large shoal that had formed over the site. The magnetometer readings of 8,000-plus gammas and the hard subbottom reflections indicated that an object the same size as Manassas was buried beneath the shoal where contemporary reports put the ironclad. They also found a large mass of steel dredge pipe directly opposite the site and eighteen feet deep in the river. I was surprised at this, since Walt and I recorded no ferrous activity away from the bank.

Everything was fine and dandy, until Garrison and Baker turned over their report to the Corps’s chief archaeologist. He blew a fuse, then caused an uproar, when he claimed the report was totally inconclusive and proved nothing. His refusal to accept the report was almost vehement in its condemnation.

The good people at A&M were dumbfounded. These were the nation’s leading experts in remote sensing. I read over the report and found it one of the most concise and detailed I’ve ever read. I was as mystified as Garrison and Baker.

The Corps archaeologist then called in a local marine archaeologist to do another survey of the site. After investigating, he went on television to bemoan the agony of defeat by proclaiming that the magnetic anomaly was not Manassas but a pile of old pipe dumped there in the 1920s.

This made absolutely no sense to anyone. Our target was practically under the levee, not eighteen feet deep and thirty-six feet out into the river. That was the pipe, but where had it come from? The Army Corps’s rejection of A&M’s mag study struck me as strange. The mystery wasn’t solved until much later.

Fifteen years passed before I returned to the Manassas site. Ralph Wilbanks, Wes Hall, Craig Dirgo, Dirk Cussler, and I had just finished an expedition to find the Republic of Texas Navy ship Invincible, without much luck. Working off Ralph’s boat, Diversity, we dredged a site off Galveston and identified it as a shipwreck, but nothing more specific, since we couldn’t find any artifacts. From Texas, we towed Ralph’s boat to the Mississippi River Delta.

My thought was that since mag technology had improved and Ralph and Wes were far more professional than Walt and I, it was time to go back and check out the Manassas site again.

We lowered Diversity down a boat ramp in Venice and leisurely studied the west bank of the Mississippi with Ralph’s state-of-the-art magnetometer. While Ralph steered, Wes ran the mag. Just as it had fifteen years earlier, the recorder’s needle showed a steady line that meant the cupboard was bare of wrecks.

I watched the shoreline carefully, keeping a keen eye on the landmarks across the river and the top of a big oak tree that was not far from the site. I also noticed that many huge rocks had been laid against the shore by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Before I could alert the team that we were entering the target zone, Wes let out a gasp as the magnetometer went into hysterics.

“What’s your reading?” Ralph asked, turning.

“Eleven thousand gammas,” Wes muttered. He’d rarely ever seen a reading that huge.

“We’ve passed between the pipe and Manassas,” I explained. Ralph finished the run almost to Fort Jackson before turning around and making another survey along the bank. This time, by hugging the base of the levee, we got a lower reading, since the sensor was farther from the submerged pipe.

“There’s something big running on an angle under the levee,” Wes announced, examining his mag records.

We couldn’t get ashore, because the river was running too high and the shoal between the bank and the levee was underwater. Returning to Venice, we pulled Diversity out of the water and hauled it to the Manassas site. There we walked the mag up and down the levee. The signals were still there, but not as strong.

After dinner, a few of us were sitting in the bar of the boat marina in Venice when an older fellow came up and offered to buy us a drink. He was of medium height, with a tanned face and a finely brushed mane of white hair. He said he had retired a few years before from the Army Corps of Engineers and lived just outside Venice.

“You them fellas looking for that old Confederate ironclad?” he inquired.

“We’re the ones,” I answered.

“I remember some other fellas was looking for her a long time back.”

“That was me, about fifteen years back.”

“You sure got scammed by the Corps report, didn’t you?”

I looked at him. “Scammed?”

“Sure, after you found the Manassas, word came down from the chief archaeologist and his boss to drop a load of old dredge pipe on top of it. Boy, was he shook up when that Texas bunch ignored the pipe and concentrated on the wreck under the levee.”

“The pipe was dumped there after we found the wreck?” I asked, baffled.

“That’s the way it went.”

“But why?”

“The Corps had planned a big project to reinforce the west levee. If the state archaeology commission had got wind of an old shipwreck under it, they’d have named it a historic site and stopped the Corps from throwing rock on top of it. That’s why the Texas survey was tossed out and another survey contracted that said there was no shipwreck, only a bunch of dredge pipe.”

I felt like a man who’d come awake after a hernia operation. I never did understand why a first-class remote-sensing survey was rejected out of hand. I thought it ridiculous then. Now I can see why.

The old guy and I talked long into the night. I shouldn’t say “old guy.” We must have been about the same age. I can’t recall a more satisfying evening.

There are currently plans afoot by John Hunley and a group of interested Louisiana citizens to dig an exploratory hole on the site and see if the Manassas is truly there. If so, its removal and restoration would stand alongside that of the Confederate submarine Hunley. Not only is she the first armored ship built in America, but she is the first one actually to see combat. The battle between Monitor and Merrimack did not take place for another five months.

Over the years, the chief archaeologist and I had exchanged Christmas cards. On the back of the last card I sent, I wrote, “You dog.” Then I proceeded briefly to relate the story I’d heard from the retired Corps worker.

I never heard from him again.