“‘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.