“And then there's Ireland,” said Russell.
Palmerston groaned. “Dear God, what a mess. Along with this ridiculous Republic of New Ireland that Lincoln has permitted the Fenians to proclaim within the confines of Canada, we have the uproar of Sepoys enforcing the law in Ireland itself.”
Replacing British regulars who'd been shipped to Virginia, two regiments of Indian Sepoys had been installed as garrison troops in unruly Ireland, with more to follow. The move had been a disaster. The indigenous Irish population had been outraged at being ruled by dark-skinned men, and there had been serious rioting. Then, a few days after the riots had begun to subside, an Irish woman claimed she had been raped and her husband killed by Sepoys. True or not, the rioting was renewed with a fury and had become almost a full-blown rebellion, with many hundreds dead and wounded on each side. The Sepoys had been overwhelmed by the Irish mobs, with only a lucky few finding ships to take them to England. Many of the captured Sepoys had been lynched by Irish rebels. Worse, this meant that British regulars would have to retake a rebellious Ireland that was now armed with the weapons taken from the Sepoys.
Russell looked at him solemnly. “Yet I have heard that Lincoln will not negotiate an end to the war under any circumstances.” Palmerston grasped the arm of his chair until his knuckles showed white. “Then he's a fool.”
“But a fool who will not give in. What then, Prime Minister?”
“If that unhappy chance should arise, we will deal with it. We will make plans,” Palmerston said. “Unwelcome and unpleasant plans, but plans nonetheless. A truly great power must know when to compromise.”
There was so much British shipping in the Chesapeake Bay-Hampton Roads area that several score transports and numerous small naval vessels were anchored well out of the James River. In some areas the congested anchorage was literally hull to hull with ships anchored and awaiting the return to England. They awaited convoys to form up for the journey when unloading was finished, which, since there were no major port facilities in the area, was stretching out from a time standpoint. Getting men and horses off the ships had been the first priority, and now the equipment and supplies were getting their turn. The work of unloading was proceeding, but with glacial slowness.
If any of the lookouts on either the Confederate shore batteries or the British picket ships noted the ugly, slow-moving steamship as she approached the clogged anchorage, they only gave her a cursory glance. The decrepit craft looked like she'd been through more than a few storms and was the product of sloppy care. Someone would later say he thought she looked like she'd been put together by a committee of drunks. At any rate, she was deemed harmless.
They were wrong.
The ugly duckling drew next to a group of British merchant ships that had been lashed together to permit ease of handling of their cargoes. A sailor on one looked at the strange steamer that was only about a hundred yards away and closing steadily. He paled. A large gun barrel showed from what looked like a pile of lumber on her deck.
He never got a chance to sound a warning. The gun roared, sending a shell through the thin hull of his ship as well as the one behind her. A second gun thundered and smashed into two more hulls. The concussion from the guns caused the flimsily built false deck and cargo to fall off the attacker. There, in the midst of Hampton Roads, stood a Union ironclad with the Stars and Stripes waving proudly from her stern.
It was thePotomac, and her twin turrets revolved like the eyes of some malevolent beast. There was nothing the British ships could do. They had no steam up and their sails were furled. Even if they wished to get under way, they couldn't, as many had virtually all their crews on shore, drinking themselves blind in the taverns and whorehouses of Norfolk and Richmond. They were helpless as tethered lambs while the lion slowly prowled and selected its prey.
Some of the remaining crews panicked and cut their anchor cables. This allowed the ships to move with the currents, crashing into other ships or running ashore. A lucky few found themselves drifting safely away, but most found themselves in as much danger as they had been before. As thePotomac approached, those sailors who had remained onboard solved their personal problems by abandoning their ships and diving into the water.
ThePotomac mounted four twelve-inch guns, and one of them fired every minute or so in methodic execution. Each shell meant the death of a helpless merchant. Fires began and, with no one available to put them out, swept through tarred rigging and over painted, wooden decks, and then, as flaming embers, flew from ship to ship. Within a short while, the British merchant fleet was the scene of a conflagration of epic proportions.
The Confederate shore batteries were the first to respond, but they were hampered by the fact that thePotomac was moving slowly but nimbly in and about the British shipping. Thus, while the batteries fired rapidly, many of their shots either missed or struck the Potomac's victims, and those few that did strike the ironclad bounced off harmlessly.
An attack on Hampton Roads and the James River was absolutely the last thing the Royal Navy had expected from the minuscule Union navy. The British warships damaged in the previous fighting had returned to England under escort. This meant that the Royal Navy's presence was far less than the fleet that had escorted the merchants to what was presumed to be security. Even theWarrior had departed on a cruise towards New York, where it was presumed that the Union ships would head. Like their merchant counterparts, the remaining wooden British warships were not in the slightest bit ready to move against an enemy whose presence had been unimaginable only a few moments before.
Admiral Chads was ashore when thePotomac launched her assault and all he could do was stand and listen, a stricken look on his face, while, in the distance, smoke billowed from burning ships. A pair of armed sloops raced to stop thePotomac, but the ironclad virtually ignored their feeble efforts as she continued to savage the transport fleet. Occasionally, some unloaded cargo proved particularly explosive or flammable, and a ship went up with a whoosh or a thunderous boom.
Onboard thePotomac. Commodore David Glasgow Farragut looked through a telescope that poked from one of the turrets and howled with glee at the carnage he had wrought. “That'll teach the bastards,” he said. He had to shout to be heard over the roar of the one-sided battle. “This is what we should have done to them when they tried to sail past us.”
Newly transferred from theHudson. Lieutenant George Dewey merely smiled. Farragut was his mentor, and the young lieutenant felt that he had chosen a damned good one. Farragut had slipped into Baltimore and driven the shipyard to focus its repair efforts on one ship-thePotomac. As a result, damaged plates had been repaired in record time while ammunition was hauled onboard. With only a few days' food and water, they had waited until intelligence said that the main part of the British war fleet had departed for other ports, deeming the situation safe and secure. Then they had pounced. Disguised as a tramp, she had been ignored until too late.
Dewey pulled his watch out of his pocket and checked the time. “I think we should depart, sir.”
Farragut scowled in mock anger. “What, and end this fine party?”
“We've used eighty percent of our shells and the Brits have had time to get steam up. They'll be after us very soon and we'll need ammunition to fight our way back.”
Farragut sniffed his disappointment. He gave the cease-fire order and turned away. He was convinced the British would trail him from a distance and try to harm him with a lucky, fluke shot. They had no urge to close on his twelve-inchers and be blown back to Liverpool. The ironclad was master of America's inland seas.