Chapter 34

As the enemy’s force was overwhelming, we commenced the action at long range, but as our shells fell short, whilst his burst over and around us, we were eventually compelled to lessen the distance.

– Flag Officer William F. Lynch to Stephen R. Mallory The boiler did not blow, the panic passed, and Taylor shouted, “Moses!

The boiler hit?”

He could not see the black man. A shell fragment had ripped a hole in the stack, three feet above the boiler. Black smoke came roiling out, filling the engine room. If the boat deck that formed the roof of the fidley had not been blown out they would have been completely blind, and quickly overcome.

The main steam pipe was fractured and a plume of steam was shooting out, whistling like a banshee’s moan as it poured its white cloud into the engine room, right between Taylor and Jones. It made an impassable barrier of invisible steam and scalding hot-water vapor the width of the ship.

“Boiler near knocked clean off her mounts, but she holding!” Jones shouted.

“Tommy, what the hell’s wrong?” No answer, just screaming. “What the hell’s wrong with Tommy?”

“He got hit. Inna leg!”

Taylor tried to see through the geyser of steam. “Can’t ya help him, for God’s sake?”

“Boss, I’se holdin dis boiler up wid a slice bar! I let go, da whole damn t’ing gonna go!”

Goddamn it…

Steam was hissing out of the fractured pipe in a great white cloud.

Taylor could feel the hot, condensed water on his face, like a thousand biting gnats. If the pipe burst, they were dead in the water. If the boiler blew, they were just dead.

“All right, all right…” Taylor inched toward the steam, ducked under the pipe, squeezed between the side of the coal bunker and the jet of hot vapor. He looked over his head at the pipe, hanging precariously. Don’t

break, don’t break, don’t break… He eased himself under and then he was on the other side of the steam.

Moses Jones was standing beside the boiler. One of the mounts was shot through, and he had shoved a slice bar under, levered the boiler up. The muscles stood out proud on his arms, sweat was dripping off his face. He couldn’t hold it much longer.

Tommy was screaming, thrashing on the deck plates. Taylor could see a jagged piece of metal sticking out of his leg, another in his stomach.

“Jefferson!” Taylor shouted. He could not see the other coal passer.

“Jefferson!” Taylor ran past the boiler, looked down the side of the big metal tube. Jefferson’s body was tossed forward, sprawled out on the deck plates. One hand was on the firebox. Taylor could smell the burning flesh.

Where Jefferson’s head was, he could not tell.

Goddamn it! Just when I get these sons of bitches trained up… He raced back, said, “You’ll have to wait your turn, Tommy.” If the boiler blew, then two shrapnel wounds would be the least of his problems. Taylor grabbed on to the slice bar, took up the pressure. “I got it! I got it!”

With a groan Moses let go and Taylor took the full weight, and he could not imagine how the coal passer had held it that long. Son of a bitch…

“Burgess! Burgess!”

The Scotsman was there, ducking under the fractured pipe, and in his hand a jack. He ducked low, shoved the jack under the boiler, twisted the screw. Taylor felt the weight coming off the bar, off his arm muscles, and he breathed deep in relief.

All right…all right… The sound of the battle was louder now, with the roof of the engine room blown off, and it was rattling him. He heard the anchor chain rumbling through the hawsepipe. Drifting toward the Yankees.

Bowater had dropped the hook. All right…think…

“Chief! Chief!”

What the hell…

“What!”

It was Tanner, looking down through the great hole that was the boat deck. “Captain needs a report, Chief! Will you be able to get steam up again?”

Steam? Got steam coming out our ass. Good thing that whore’s son didn’t ring the bell, I’d wring his fucking neck…

Think…think…

“Tell Bowater, turns on the screw in ten minutes!”

“Ten minutes, aye!”

Taylor looked around. The engine room was dark, a hellish place of choking black smoke and deadly steam. The main steam line was cut through and the return water was leaking as well, and steam was jetting out where a shell fragment had taken a steam pressure gauge clean off. There was hissing back by the engine, but Taylor could not see what was causing that.

It was all secondary to the main steam line. If the steam continued to jet out of the fracture rather than make its way to the cylinder, then the Cape Fear was going nowhere.

“Moses, rig up that fire hose and charge the line. Burgess, get me a mess of them croker sacks up by the ash hoist.”

“Wadda ’ell’s a croker sack?”

“Croker sack, croker sack, you know, them burlap bags up there!”

Burgess nodded, disappeared into the smoke. Taylor skirted the jet of steam, worked his way to the starboard side, the workbench. Steam and smoke swirled around, the smell of condensing water vapor mixed with the output of the firebox. The cloud twisted and swirled and sucked out of the hole in the boat deck above. Dull light from the sky overhead filtered down through the haze. The battle sounded loud, shells flying, bursting, big guns going off. Tommy was whimpering now.

Taylor bumped into the workbench before he saw it, reached out with his hand. The steam from the main steam line was hitting the bench square, but after flying the full width of the ship it had cooled enough that he could reach into it, quick.

His hand darted like a snake, fell on a wrench, pulled it back. The metal was hot and wet. He lashed out again. His hand hit the empty bench, he felt around, one second, two seconds, the steam was starting to hurt. His hand touched heavy leather gloves, and he snatched them and pulled them from the jet.

He pulled the gloves on. They were hot and wet too. He knelt down, reached back into the steam, felt around in the storage bins under the bench.

Through the thick leather he felt fishplates-one for the return water pipe, another for the auxiliary steam, and finally one the diameter of the main steam pipe. He pulled it out, worked his way back to the port side.

Moses appeared like a phantom in the smoke. He held the fire hose.

Water gushed out. The pump was driven by auxiliary steam-not affected by the fractured main steam line. He directed the nozzle at the bilge.

Burgess was there with the croker sacks. “Wrap them around my arms, tight,” Taylor instructed.

“Lemme do this,” Burgess protested, but Taylor shook his head and Burgess knew there was no time to argue. He wrapped the croker sacks around Taylor’s arms, tied them in place with lengths of spun yarn.

Taylor turned to Moses Jones. “You keep that goddamned water on me while I’m near the steam. You know the drill.”

“Yes, boss.”

Taylor took the fishplate in hand. It looked like a short piece of pipe, cut in two lengthwise, with flanges on the edges. In cross section they looked like a flattened Greek. The two halves of the fishplate would go over the break in the main steam pipe. They would be secured together by bolts that fitted through holes in the flanges. A simple five-minute fix if you didn’t have to do it in a smoke-filled engine room with a jet of live steam in your face.

Taylor unscrewed the bolts and separated the two halves of the fishplate.

He approached the hissing jet of steam and Moses turned the fire hose on him, soaking him down, keeping a constant stream of brackish water on him to prevent his being scalded by the steam.

Taylor blinked hard. The smoke burned his eyes and made it hard to see.

The white plume that formed ten inches from the pipe was the water vapor, steam condensing in the air. That was not the problem. The actual steam coming out of the pipe was clear, invisible. It was that steam, which he could not see, that could turn him into a scalded horror, begging to die.

He reached up and clapped the fishplate over the main steam pipe, near the leak, inserted the bolts, threaded the nuts. It was clumsy work with the heavy gloves. Twice he dropped nuts, wasted six minutes finding them in the smoke.

His eyes burned and his throat burned and he felt faint for want of water, and from breathing smoke. The blast from the fire hose made it hard to stand, and sometimes his balance would shift and the water from the hose would knock him toward the hissing steam and he would have to fight to keep from being pushed into it.

And all the time he was braced for the pipe to break clean through, to hit him square with a blast of pure, invisible steam.

At last the fishplate was on, set loose, and Taylor slid it down the pipe toward the break. It moved easy, covered half the fracture. The note of the steam went up in pitch as the hole through which it passed was cut in half.

Taylor pushed. It would go no farther.

Damn… He turned around. There was Burgess with a big hammer, holding it out to him. Taylor took the hammer, tapped it on the flange, tapped harder and harder still. He wound up, swung hard, and it occurred to him, midswing, that he could break the steam pipe that way, cripple them for good, put himself in the way of a faceful of steam.

Too late to check the swing; the hammer struck with a clang like a broken bell. The fishplate shifted six inches aft and the fracture was covered. The note went up again, the steam now squeezing out from behind the plate. Steam was a beast, it had to be contained, it fought to get loose, through any tiny place it could find. It was a malleable beast-no hole was too small. It was a deadly beast if you got too close.

Taylor reached up with the wrench, clapped it on the nuts, began to work them around. He could feel the steam-pure, invisible steam-on the leather gloves, and soon he had to jerk his hand away. Turn, turn, pull his hands away, working the wrench with the blast of water from the fire hose playing over his shoulders, his back, his head.

It took twenty minutes, all told, but finally it was over, the beast was back in the pipe. Taylor ran his leather-clad hand over the fishplate. He could feel no jet of steam, could see no white plume where the steam was condensing.

“That should hold us till the next time,” he announced. He stepped away from the pipe, and Moses directed the fire hose back to the bilge. The smoke was lifting up through the boat deck. Visibility in the engine room was better now.

“Good job,” Taylor said. He was burned, his eyes and throat raw. He was faint with the heat and he was soaked clean through.

“Burgess, you take over here. See what you can do about patching the stack. I have to go report to the old man. Moses, let’s get her up to about fifteen pounds and see how she takes it.”

Taylor found the ladder up to the deck above, climbed it. He stopped, looked back. “Yeah, and see if you can do somethin’ for Tommy, too.” He

took the last rungs, stepped out onto the side deck. He had not realized how choked the engine room was until he pulled in a lungful of fresh air. It was the most wonderful thing in the world. He blinked in the light of the dull overcast, stumbled forward along the deck.

The Yankee fleet was half a mile away, muzzle flashes blinking like fireflies. The water around the Cape Fear and the rest of the mosquito fleet was torn up with the falling shells, and the Confederates were returning fire at a desultory rate. Three shells… Taylor remembered; that was all the Cape Fear had left. The others could not be doing much better.

He climbed up the ladder at the forward end of the deckhouse, stepped onto the boat deck. Bowater was standing there, his hand resting on the remains of a mangled rail, looking out over the fight as if he was watching a sporting event, one in which he had little interest.

Cool son of a bitch… Taylor thought. Bowater looked at him, his right eyebrow shot up.

“Chief, are we taking on water?”

“No, no, had the fire hose turned on me. No fire, no leak. Main steam line took a hard one when that shell exploded, fractured but didn’t break.

Got a fishplate on it. It’ll hold for now. We should be able to get underway in a couple of minutes.”

Bowater nodded. “Good, good. Any casualties?”

“Washington got his head took clean off. Tommy’s cut up some, but I was a little busy to see how bad.”

“Merrow!” Bowater called out to the deckhand standing by. “Get St.

Laurent and the two of you get down to the engine room, see what you can do for Tommy.”

“Aye!”

“How’s the fight goin, Cap’n?”

“It is going the way one might have predicted. Actually, not so bad.

We’ve lost Curlew.” Bowater pointed toward the swampy shoreline that formed the west side of Croatan Sound. The side-wheeler was hard aground, listing to starboard. “Shell went right through her, either came out the bottom or buckled her plate. She just barely made it to shore before she sank.”

The boat deck began to tremble underfoot with the familiar throb of the engine, turning slow. “Reckon we have steam up, Cap’n.”

“Good. Mr. Harwell!” Harwell, who had been nursing his last remaining shells, looked up from the foredeck. “Weigh anchor, please!”

Taylor and Bowater stood at the forward edge of the boat deck, watched the battle raging all around them.

“There goes Forrest, ” Taylor observed. The screw tug, which had been standing in line abreast with her companions, was now drifting back, spinning around slowly in the weak tidal flow. They watched her drift away.

There were a hundred things that could have put her out, from a thrown prop to a cracked bearing to a shell in her boiler that scalded half her crew to death.

A splash at her bow and her anchor was down. The tug straightened, stopped her drift, but she was out of the fight. Two down. Nearly a third of the fleet knocked out.

They banged away for another hour and a half. Harwell shot off the last rounds, and then they were spectators, like watching a play, like sitting through hours of Hamlet, fully aware that the Prince of Denmark has no hope to live past the curtain.

Five o’clock and the light was fading fast and the Union ships retired.

Fort Bartow was a near wreck, the mosquito fleet battered. Coal was running low, there was not above a dozen shells left among all the Confederate fleet.

With the winter night coming on fast, they stripped Curlew of anything worth having. Sea Bird took Forrest, her propeller disabled, in tow, and the little ships steamed north, forty miles to Elizabeth City.

It was a black night, and the ships had no lights showing, because they did not know what the Union fleet was about. Bowater paced the wheelhouse, peered out into the dark, gave orders to the helmsman, the engine room. Nervous work.

And so it was with a lovely sensation of relief that the first gray light of dawn showed the fleet in relatively good order, steaming line ahead, and the mouth of the Pasquotank River opening up before them.

They anchored up at Elizabeth City, hauled the Forrest up on the ways.

They could hear gunfire from Roanoke Island, artillery and small-arms fire.

It was a horrible thing to hear, but there was nothing they could do. The Yankees were ashore; it was a land fight now. And even if it was not, they had no ammunition, and they were finding there was none to be had at Elizabeth City.

Lynch sent Hunter to Norfolk to retrieve ammunition. He appointed William Parker to organize the town’s defenses. Parker organized the local militia to man the pathetic fort at Cobb’s Point, pressed an old schooner into service as a makeshift battery.

Around noon the firing at Roanoke Island slackened and then stopped, like a dying man taking his last breath, and everyone in the mosquito fleet knew that the Yankee machine had rolled over the Southern defenses.

Bowater could not shake the feeling that they had not done enough, but in his most honest, most private analysis, he could not imagine what more they could have done.

The Yankees’ next step would be Elizabeth City and the mosquito fleet, the last ember of resistance. The men on Roanoke Island had stood and fought to the last, until they were absolutely overrun. Now it was the navy’s turn.

They waited through the next day, sent boats down sound to reconnoiter the Yankees, preparing to get underway. That night the captains met. They agreed to fight until the ammunition was gone, then try to escape. Failing that, they would run their vessels ashore, burn them, destroy the signal books, save their men. The fleet was arranged in line abreast, bows pointing downriver. They divided up what ammunition they had.

It was 3:00 a.m. when Samuel Bowater returned to the Cape Fear, staggered into his cabin, fell facedown on his bunk. He did not take off his coat or his shoes, or his sword or pistol. Even in sleep he was careful not to put his shoes on the bed.

Jacob roused him before dawn. He staggered into the wheelhouse. It was bitter cold. The steam pipes were popping and crackling as Hieronymus Taylor got up a head of steam in the boiler and the first wafts of hot vapor blew through.

Men moved about the deck like clumsy shadows, clearing for action, ready to greet the dawn at quarters, as men-of-war in times of conflict had done for a century or more. They cleared away the bow gun and the howitzers, loaded and ran them out, then retreated to the warmth of the galley, with the old man’s permission, to wait for what would happen next.

They huddled against the bulkheads, scarfing toasted bread with cheese, sun-dried-tomato-and-chive omelettes, and deviled partridge, cold.

Bowater ate his omelette standing in the wheelhouse, and though his concentration was taken up with the gathering dawn, the slow revelation of

the mosquito fleet at anchor, the riverbanks on either hand, he could not help but notice the extraordinary lightness of the eggs, the perfect blend of savory cheese and sharp chive, the subtlety of the tomatoes that St. Laurent had dried himself. Samuel had seen them, months before, spread out on racks on the boat deck, had nearly ordered them struck below. They were very unseamanlike and disorderly. But he held his tongue, guessing he would be glad for it. And he was.

More and more of the river revealed itself: tangled shoreline, rippled gray water, stubby oak and pine along the shores. And downriver, rising above a western bend, columns of dark smoke, bending in the offshore breeze. The Union squadron, underway.

Harwell appeared for orders. “Luff, I imagine they will employ their former tactics, steam in circles around the fort, pound it to rubble. I hope those militiamen will stand up to it.”

“I hope so, sir. They may be militia, but they are Southern militia, and I would warrant them for standing as tall as any abolitionist regular.”

“Let us hope you are right. Now please assemble the gun crews and have them stand ready. We’ll wait for what presents itself.”

“Aye, sir,” Harwell said, saluted, hurried off.

Such enthusiasm, such patriotism… Bowater thought. Is Harwell a naive romantic, or am I a cynical, unsentimental cad? Or is it both?

Samuel Bowater watched the young luff get the men to quarters. He was giving them some words of encouragement, he could tell.

Morituri te salutamus, Bowater thought.

Lieutenant Thadeous Harwell stood behind the breech of the big Parrott gun, hands clasped behind his back, looking down river.

Gladly do I lay down this life for my beloved Southern home, and only regret that I shall not live to fight on…

No…

Happy am I to lay down my life for my…for this, my beloved Southern…

beloved Confederacy…

There, that has more of a classical sound…

Happy am I to lay down my life for this, my beloved Confederacy, and only regret that I shall not live to fight on…

Good.

He ran it over, again and again, in his head. Said it out loud, but softly, like a prayer, so no one would hear. The trick with dying words, he imagined, was to commit them to memory so well that one could not forget them when the time came. He could not imagine what must go through a man’s mind at the time. Probably a lot. If he wanted to go out with some noble words on his lips, he had best be ready.

“Happy am I…”

By eight-thirty the Union fleet was in sight. The ships came steaming around the bend, trailing their black plumes of smoke. Through field glasses Bowater could see the churning white water around their bows. They were coming on fast, fourteen Yankee gunboats stretched across the river, a waterborne cavalry charge. The Confederates were as ready as they were going to get.

Waiting, waiting… Once again. Bowater could feel his stomach twisting like a fish on a hook. He regretted the second helping of omelette.

Wait for it, wait for it… Bowater found himself thinking, over and over.

Just a handful of minutes and the Union fleet would be under the fort’s guns, and it would be a three-way exchange of fire-Union fleet, mosquito fleet, Fort Cobb. Roanoke once more.

Line ahead now, they came up with Fort Cobb and the fort opened up on them, the thirty-two-pounders blasting away with their flat, echoing report, kicking up spouts in the river. The Union ships returned fire, rifled shells and spherical case shot. One by one they blasted the fort as they passed.

Bowater waited, waited for the lead Yankee to turn, to start the big circling maneuver that would take the ships by the fort again and again until they had reduced it to nothing. Just as they had done at Hatteras. Just as they had done at Roanoke Island. So fixed was this idea in his mind that nearly the entire enemy fleet was past the fort, and was coming on, before he realized they were not going to do it again.

They were bypassing the fort, giving it one good shot and then ignoring it, giving it the attention it deserved, which was very little. It was the mosquito fleet they wanted, and they were coming straight on, full-speed, right for their quarry. It would be ship to ship this time. It would be Trafalgar in miniature, not Roanoke Island. It would be the Yankees’

advantage, three to one.

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