Chapter 13

I had purposed offering some remarks upon the vast importance to Virginia and to the entire South of the timely acquisition of this extensive naval depot, with its immense supplies of munitions of war, and to notice briefly the damaging effects of its loss to the Government at Washington; but I deem it unnecessary…

– William H. Peters, Commissioner, to John Letcher, Governor of Virginia

Hieronymus Taylor sat on the stool at his workbench and puffed his butt end of a cigar to life. The Cape Fear was riding at her anchor. The fires were banked in the boiler and the doors and vents of the deckhouse that enclosed the fidley, the section of the deckhouse directly above the engine room, were open to the afternoon breeze, and the engine room was almost comfortable.

Taylor shook the flame out on his lucifer and tossed the smoldering match onto the workbench. He never took his eye off of Fireman First Class James Burgess.

Burgess had spent the past half hour tapping threads into a hole he had drilled into the side of one of the shoes on the eccentric-a circular piece of metal mounted off-center on the crankshaft that worked the engine’s valve gear. When the threads were cut, he screwed a bolt into the hole. Then he screwed an eyebolt into a deck beam a few feet above the eccentric.

All this Taylor watched without comment. He could not figure what Burgess was about. He thought about asking him, but the Scotsman was never very enlightening, even when questioned directly.

If it had been O’Malley fiddling with his engine without permission, he would have stomped him underfoot. O’Malley had no feel for engines. He suspected O’Malley’s engineer’s papers had been supplied by some fellow Mick working in some navy shithouse office.

Burgess was different. Burgess understood engines. With Burgess, Taylor just watched.

When the eyebolt was in place, Burgess pulled a length of quarter-inch manila line from his pocket. He tied a bowline in one end and looped it over

the bolt on the eccentric, then threaded the bitter end through the eyebolt.

That was as much as Hieronymus Taylor could endure. The chief slid off the stool, ambled over to where Burgess was working.

“Awright, Burgess, I give,” he said to the Scotsman’s back. “What in hell are you about?”

Burgess made a grunting noise that might have been a word. It sounded like “Wawarr.” Then, when Taylor did not respond, he elaborated, saying,

“Feer kaws.”

“Forgive me, but I can’t understand a goddamned thing you are saying.”

Burgess turned around. He spoke slowly and deliberately, as if to a child. “Washer. Fer washin clothes.”

Taylor nodded. “And how does it do that, exactly?”

Burgess pointed to the deck below, where the end of the rope dangled.

“Put a barrel there. Fill it full of water. Get ’er good an hot with steam. Cut the barrel head down, put a ruddy great weight on it, hang it from the line.”

Hieronymus nodded. That was all the explanation he would get. He knew that. But he understood. Dirty clothes go in the barrel of water, hot from the boiler. The round barrel head, cut down so there is clearance all around, goes on top. The line goes from an eyebolt in the barrel head, through the eyebolt overhead, to the bolt on the eccentric shoe. When the engine is turning the shoe goes up and down and the line from the shoe to the barrel head makes the barrel head go up and down, like the plunger in a butter churn. The clothes are agitated until they are clean.

“Well, damn. You are one clever son of a bitch. Fer a foreigner, I mean.”

“Do it on errey Scottish ship,” Burgess grunted and went back to his task.

Taylor smiled. This was a hell of an idea. “Moses!” he yelled.

“Yassuh?” Moses and a couple of the coal heavers were knocking clinker from the boiler grates.

“Git some of your boys topside, find us a barrel. Cut the head down,

’bout an inch around. Damn me, we gonna have the cleanest damned black gang in the navy.”

“Yassuh.” Moses left off what he was doing and took Billy and Joshua topside.

Taylor liked Moses. Moses did not argue and he did his work well without playing sullen, petty games, and he could sing like a son of a bitch,

and that was about all Taylor could ask of a coal passer, or any man, for that matter.

“Chief?”

Taylor looked up. Jacob, Bowater’s servant, was leaning into the deckhouse door, one deck up. “Captain’s compliments, Chief. Dinner in twenty minutes.”

“Aye.” Damn. Taylor usually ate by himself, or with his engine-room gang. But once a week Bowater invited him to dinner, and much as he would have liked to, he did not think he could refuse. Bowater might be a blueblood, slaveholding navy martinet, a man incapable of action, a yachtsman who would rather lounge about on the deckhouse roof and dabble with his paints and have his darkie bring him mint juleps than fight a war, but he was still the captain.

Hieronymus tossed what was left of his cigar into the furnace, climbed grudgingly up the ladder and aft to his cabin. He wished Burgess had finished the clothes washer the day before. Taylor could not help but feel like slovenly white trash in Bowater’s patrician presence. It annoyed him, and it annoyed him more that he let Bowater get to him in that manner. He wished they had a bath down in the engine room. Or a shower bath, that would be even better. Rig a barrel to the overhead, run a steam line into it, tap in a valve…

Taylor stopped in midstride, saw the whole thing form in his head. Yes.

He wondered if Burgess or any of his damned Scots had ever come up with that one.

“Massa Samuel?”

Samuel Bowater looked up from the reports from department heads, Hieronymus Taylor’s insufferably dreary description of the state of the engine.

“Yes, Jacob?”

“Dinner in twenty minute, suh. Chief Taylor and Missuh Harwell joinin’

you, suh.”

“Right. Very well. Thank you, Jacob. Please get my painting gear together. I’ll be going ashore after lunch.”

“Yes, suh,” Jacob said, then, good servant that he was, disappeared.

Bowater sighed and set the reports aside. They had been puttering around the same ten-mile stretch of river, from Gosport to Sewall’s Point,

for two months now. Two months, while somewhere beyond that waterfront, somewhere up the river and in the country beyond, the pressure of war built like steam in a boiler. Bowater knew it would blow soon, and he did not want to be at a safe distance when it did.

They had been busy enough; they had not been idle. At the end of May they joined in the effort to raise the remains of the Merrimack from the river bottom. They had sealed her up as best they could, pumped her out until her own buoyancy lifted her out of the mud.

With the Cape Fear alongside, she was eased into the flooded dry dock and her keel was allowed to settle down on angle blocks and her blackened sides were supported with shores wedged between her timbers and the side of the dry dock. The water was pumped out of the dock. The Merrimack, charred on the topside and unscathed below, rested safe and dry in Confederate hands, while Confederate minds wrestled with the question of what to do with her.

Captain, now Flag Officer, French Forrest, whom Samuel knew from the old navy, had been given charge of the navy yard. Under his able command the yard was made whole and defensible. The buildings that the retreating Yankees had burned were rebuilt. Batteries were erected along the outer walls.

The Cape Fear and the smaller tug Harmony were set to work as ordnance transports, hauling guns to the newly erected batteries on Craney Island and Fort Powhatan and Aquia Creek, distributing the largess that the Federals had left in their wake.

Twice they made the 120-mile trip down the canal through the aptly named Great Dismal Swamp to Albemarle Sound, past Roanoke Island and into Pamlico Sound. There, on the sandy, windswept Hatteras Island, south of the massive and blind Cape Hatteras light, the Confederate Army was erecting two sand-and-mud forts to keep the Yankees out of the protected sounds and the rivers that ran deep into Confederate country. The tugs from Norfolk brought guns, ammunition, supplies, all former property of the United States.

The work was hot, dull, uninspiring. The Cape Fear had hauled tons of ordnance, but she herself remained unarmed. There was no chance that she could be anything but a tug. And as long as that was true, then Bowater knew he could be nothing more than a spectator to the greatest military

undertaking he was likely to see in his lifetime. The thought made him desperate.

Samuel Bowater stood and stretched. He was certain that the others, Harwell and Taylor, blamed him for their inaction, thought that perhaps he was backward in his effort to join the fighting. They did not know about his constant requests of Forrest that the vessel be mounted with a gun for offensive action, his letters to the navy office at the new capital in Richmond for new orders, the repeated instructions to remain at Norfolk under Forrest’s command until instructed otherwise. They did not know and he would not tell them, because it was not their business.

He smoothed his pants and pulled on his blue frock coat. Generally he ate by himself in his cabin, but today was the crew’s day off and his weekly Saturday dinner with his officers. On so perfect a summer day, the roof of the deckhouse made a wonderful spot to dine.

Landsman Dick Merrow walked around the front of the wheelhouse and rang the bell, two sets of two. Four bells in the afternoon watch, two o’clock in the afternoon. Dinnertime. Bowater stepped out of his cabin, stepped through the door to the boat deck, which formed the roof of the deckhouse. Lieutenant Harwell was already there, trying to look casual but not too casual as he waited for his captain. Taylor was not yet there.

“Please, Mr. Harwell, sit,” Bowater said, and the lieutenant nodded his eager head and sat to the right of the captain’s place. The boat, hanging in its davits, cast a shade over the table, and that and the soft breeze made the setting most idyllic. The table was set with the silver and bone china service and crystal glasses that Samuel had brought with him for his captain’s table.

Jacob stepped forward and poured wine for the two officers. “So…”

Bowater began, but he was interrupted by the sound of Taylor’s shoes pounding the ladder and he climbed up to the deckhouse roof.

“Forgive me, Captain, for my tardiness,” he said, his tone just shy of insubordinate. He was dressed in his uniform coat and hat, though the coat was unbuttoned and hanging open, and the visor of his hat was creased and pulled low over his eyes. But he had made an obvious effort to clean up, and that was something, though he had stopped short of shaving.

“Damn.” Taylor looked around, breathed deep. “It is a fine day indeed for dining al fresco, ” pronounced as if referring to a man named Alan Fresco. “I have got to get out of that damned engine room and up here on the boat deck more often.”

“Please, Chief, be seated,” Bowater said. “Have you decided to grow a beard?” He recalled the promise he had made to himself to be more tolerant of Hieronymus Taylor. He was a fine engineer, for what that was worth.

“Thankee, sir.” Taylor sat. “Beard? Perhaps I will.” He picked up the wine bottle before Jacob could get to it, poured himself a glass. “I’ll just have a taste, here, if you don’t mind, sir,” he said.

“Please, Mr. Taylor, help yourself.”

More shoes on the ladder, and the coal heavers Billy Jefferson and Nat St. Clair appeared carrying silver trays with silver covers, their white gloves in sharp contrast to their dark skin. Behind them, imperious, Johnny St.

Laurent fussed and directed, like an overzealous lieutenant dressing his lines.

When at last the trays were set to the cook’s satisfaction, Billy and Nat stepped back while St. Laurent whipped off the covers with a magician’s flourish. Underneath, a leg of lamb, roasted to a brown perfection and nestled in a bed of new potatoes. St. Laurent allowed them only a glance before he returned the covers and Billy and Nat distributed bowls of soup.

“We start wid a fine malecotony soup today, and for de main course, roast leg of lamb on a bed of pomme de terre a la Maitre d’Hotel and fresh asparagus, followed by a claret jelly and fresh fruit.”

“Excellent, Cook,” Bowater said, and the chef nodded, as if there was no question, then snapped his fingers and the servers disappeared down the ladder, with St. Laurent following behind.

“Well, hell, Captain, I don’t know how I managed to find the one darkie cooks all this Frenchified stuff. Don’t even know how to make a decent gumbo or fried chicken,” Taylor said.

“Hardly a failing. Was he really the chef at the Chateau Dupre Hotel?”

“Aw, hell no. He was the fella mixed up the sauces or something. He’s jest putting on airs. I reckon he learned a thing or two about cooking, jest watchin them real chefs.”

“He did indeed. So how did he happen to come with you?”

“They was some mess he got himself in. Something to do with the wife of one of the cooks there at that hotel. I never did get the whole story. Just knew he had to get the hell out of New Orleans, but fast. I was heading to Wilmington, took him along.”

Bowater nodded. “You were friends?”

“He used to shovel coal for me. Paddle wheeler we used to work, New Orleans to Vicksburg on a regular run.”

“I see.” Samuel could sense the layers upon layers of story that formed the bedrock of their acquaintance, Hieronymus Taylor and Johnny St.

Laurent. He wondered briefly if there was anyone who would come to him if they were in dire need of help. No one that he could think of.

“Sir?” Harwell interjected. Bowater looked at the luff and could see that he had something to say and was ready to burst if he did not say it.

“Yes, Mr. Harwell?”

“When I was ashore this morning, sir, I found out what they are planning for the old Merrimack.”

“Oh, yes?” Judging from the lieutenant’s expression, it was something more than just rebuilding her as a steam frigate.

“Go on, Lieutenant,” Taylor said. “I am like to perish with anticipation.”

“Well, sir,” Harwell said, addressing himself only to Bowater, “it appears they are going to rebuild her as an ironclad.”

“Do you mean like that French monstrosity, Le Gloire?”

“No sir. No masts at all. More like a floating battery, but with engines.

They will use Merrimack’s old engines. An iron casement and bows and stern, submerged I believe.”

For a moment, no one said a thing, and in silence they considered that.

An ironclad, with no sailing rig. A self-propelled floating iron battery.

“She’ll look like a damned turtle,” Taylor observed and grinned at the thought. “Be just like a turtle, slow and strong.”

“She will be a vulgar monstrosity,” Bowater said. Merrimack, with her shortened masts and her tall, black, ugly stack, was no beauty herself. All of these steam vessels, these hermaphrodites, half sail, half steam, lacked the grace and beauty of the old sailing navy. Was there any steamer that could compare to the beauty of a sailing frigate?

Once, not long after his graduation from the Navy School, Bowater had seen from the deck of his ship the USS Constitution underway, a full press of canvas to topgallant studding sails. The image was clean in his mind, like an etching. There was nothing else made by the hand of man that could compare to that for grace, beauty, and silent and unassuming power. She was from a different time, a more elegant time, and the men who sailed ships like that were very different from the men who mucked about in dark and filthy engine rooms.

“She will be ugly, Captain, but she will be lethal as well,” Taylor said.

“I’ll take power over beauty any day.”

“Of course you would, Mr. Taylor.” It was what Samuel Bowater would expect from the engineers and mechanics of the world. A new direction for mankind, a rhumb line to the end of civilization.

“Anyway, they should have guns enough for her,” Taylor said through a mouthful of lamb. “Don’t reckon we’ve hauled away everything the Yankees left behind.” Then, in another tone, sotto voce, he added, “Reckon there should be guns enough for any boat in the navy…”

Bowater stiffened. It was not the words-he had not heard for certain what Taylor said-but the tone. Insinuation? Was the engineer hinting at something backward in Bowater’s nature?

“What are you saying, Chief?” Bowater saw Harwell tense.

“I’m saying, if there was a gun on this here tugboat, we might stand a chance of getting into some fightin’.”

Bowater leaned back, eyes on Taylor’s unshaven face, his carefully arranged look of innocence.

What am I supposed to say? He had been pleading with Forrest since the flag officer’s arrival to mount a gun on the Cape Fear’s foredeck, but Forrest had refused him every time, told him they could not waste ordnance arming tugs.

But Bowater could not tell Taylor that. It was none of Taylor’s affair. He did not wish to set the precedent of inferiors asking after the captain’s business. But neither could he let Taylor think he was shy about wanting to get into the fight.

Checkmate…with one question he has trapped me…

“Chief, these questions are not the business of the engineering division.

But let me say that I am attempting to improve our armament by way of the proper channels.”

Taylor grunted, made a laughing sound. “Proper channels ain’t gonna get you a goddamned thing, we both know it.”

“And so that is an end to it.”

“Is it?” There was a smoothness to Taylor’s tone, like a snake-oil salesman, and it made Bowater wary and intrigued all at once.

For a long moment they sat there, silent, each holding the other’s eyes, each needing the other for his existence and hating it.

Bowater spoke first. “Go on,” he said. He said it softly, as if afraid to speak loud, afraid to admit that he wanted to listen. Here was forbidden fruit, Bowater could sense it. It frightened him, attracted him. He wanted to arm the Cape Fear, wanted it more than anything he could recall. He could feel that he was about to cross a line. He did not know what to think.

The ordnance house reminded Samuel Bowater of a buffet table laid out for the gods of war.

All of the guns that the retreating Yankees had spiked and rolled into the river had been recovered and the spikes removed from their vents. Stretched out in great rows were gun upon gun, some in carriages, some lying on the granite floor. There were massive 9-inch and eleven-inch Dahlgrens, howitzers of every size; twenty-four-pound, twelve-pound, six-pound.

Long, sleek rifled barrels were lined up like fish on ice at the market, from the enormous, crushing hundred-pound Dahlgren through thirty-pound, twenty-pound, twelve, and ten.

There were James rifles and mortars and old smoothbores of antiquated design, the venerable thirty-two-pounders, and twenty-four-pounders, once the mainstay of the sailing navy’s broadside. There were twelve-pounders, nines, and fours. But like the smoothbore rifles that so many of the infantry were carrying, North and South, those guns were of another age, quickly being eclipsed by the rifled barrel and the exploding shell.

“Well, damn, Cap’n Bowater,” Taylor whispered. “I do not know where to begin.” He said it soft. They had no business doing what they were doing.

“Not with the Dahlgrens, I shouldn’t think,” Bowater said. Taylor nodded. All the reinforcement in the world would not render the bulwark and decks of the Cape Fear strong enough to support one of those monsters.

They walked down the rows of guns, looking them over, like buyers before a horse auction. “It would be a waste of time to put a smoothbore on board,” Taylor suggested, and Bowater concurred, so they moved quickly past the older guns.

They came at last to the Parrott rifles, and they stopped there and ran their eyes over the long tapered barrels with their distinctive reinforcement at the breech.

“Now this might be more of what we need,” Bowater said. In fact, he had worked out long ago exactly what gun he would like to see on the Cape Fear’s foredeck, but for some reason he could not bring himself to admit as much.

Taylor nodded again. “Ten-pound Parrott weighs just under a thousand pounds… That kind of weight would put the boat down by the head, I should think.”

“It just might.”

Taylor looked up and met Bowater’s eyes, and there was something mischievous in his expression. “Might balance her a bit…one gun off the bow and another off the stern…”

Bowater took a deep breath. He and Taylor had worked out this ruse de guerre over dessert, in the shade of the boat on the Cape Fear’s boat deck.

They talked in elliptical, half-finished sentences. Bowater could not bring himself to speak more boldly. This sort of trickery was antithetical to everything Bowater was and believed and was trained to be. If honor and ethics were a rope to climb, then he had just slid down many feet. But he had to get into the fight.

The two men looked down at the guns again.

“Ten-pound Parrott forward. Two twelve-pound howitzers aft,” Bowater said in a tone that suggested the matter was settled.

Footsteps on the granite floor echoed around the building, and Bowater and Taylor looked up to see Commander Archibald Fairfax approach.

Fairfax was in charge of ordnance at Norfolk, an able and active officer. He had managed to rework a number of the old smoothbore thirty-two-pounders, reinforcing their breeches and rifling them, bringing them into the modern age.

He was also in charge of fitting out the vessels stationed at the yard.

“Captain Bowater, a pleasure, sir,” he said.

“Commander, good day,” Bowater said, extending a hand. “I do not believe you have met my chief engineer. Mr. Hieronymus Taylor, Commander Fairfax.”

“Commander,” Taylor said, shaking his hand. One glance told him Fairfax was old navy, through and through.

“What can I do for you, Captain Bowater?”

Bowater felt a tingling in his hands, an unsettled feeling in his gut. Up until now it had all been theoretical, which was bad enough. But now the

moment was there. Now he had to lie to a superior officer, or give it up.

“We came by to see about the new guns for Fort Powhatan,” Bowater said, and when Fairfax looked understandably confused, he added, “The ten-pound Parrott and the two twelve-pound howitzers.”

There…that wasn’t so bad… He felt the rope slip though his hands.

Fairfax shook his head. “I was not aware that Fort Powhatan was to get more guns. Who gave you that order?”

“We were up there yesterday. Captain Cocke said he had sent word to you. He was under the impression it was all arranged.”

“No…this is the first I hear of it.”

“Well, hell, sir…beg your pardon, Commander,” Taylor said. Bowater hoped he would not make a hash of things now. “I can draw the fires, but now we’re going to have to take on more fresh water before we get head up steam again. We’ll need more coal, too. Got just enough on board to steam there and back with steam up now.”

“Very well, Chief,” Bowater said. “There is nothing for it.” He shook his head, turned to Fairfax. “I swear this happens every time, sir. One bureaucratic mix-up and we are set back two days.”

“Well, perhaps not,” Fairfax said. “If Cocke intended to ask for those guns, I should think the paperwork is somewhere. Be a waste for you to leave empty-handed. Why don’t you take those guns aboard and I’ll see what became of Cocke’s requisition.”

“Thank you, sir,” Bowater said. “That sort of efficiency is not something you would have heard of in the old navy.”

“No, indeed, Mr. Bowater. If we have any advantage at all over the United States Navy, it is that we are not so entrenched and somnambulant.

Feel free to press whomever you need from the yard to help with the guns.

Mr. Taylor, a pleasure to meet you. Good day, gentlemen.”

“Good day,” the officers of the Cape Fear said in chorus. Commodore Fairfax turned and walked away.

Done. They had their guns. And Bowater felt like a new-minted whore, just finished with her first trick. He wondered if that sort of thing got easier, and what the implications were if it did.

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