Glory In The Name

River shudder, even half a mile upstream. In just a few moments of fighting the smoke had become thick enough to make some of the gunfire look muted, dull bursts of color in the dark and the gloom.

Quillin appeared in the pilothouse looking for orders.

“You recall, Mr. Risley, Horatio Nelson’s words, just before Trafalgar?” Bowater said. “‘No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.’ That must be our strategy tonight, because I think we’ll get no instructions from the flag. So let us plunge right in.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Risley said. The quartermaster took the helm again. “Find the closest damn Yankee and steer right for her,” the pilot instructed.

More footsteps on the platform and Hieronymus Taylor appeared, ubiquitous cigar in mouth, his frock coat open, his hands in his trouser pockets. “Forgive my intrusion,” he said. He looked forward, out the slit of a window, at the panorama of violence under their bow. “Ho-ly God…”

“What is the report from the engine room?” Bowater asked, irritated. He was irritated about the Negroes, irritated about Taylor’s being there in the pilothouse, irritated in general with the man.

“All’s well, Cap’n Bowater. Boilers blown down, fires are clean, grates are clean, steam’s up.”

“You have coal heavers enough?”

“We have coal heavers enough.”

Bowater turned back to the fight before him, tried to ignore Taylor. The rest of the mosquito fleet was scrambling, slipping anchors, steaming downriver. Risley ordered a hard turn to starboard to avoid collision with one of the River Defense Fleet. It was helter skelter, with no organized line of battle, and Bowater wondered if there wasn’t as much danger of colliding with friend as there was of being run down by their enemies.

“Well, reckon I’ll crawl back in my hole,” Taylor said, and when Bowater failed to respond, added, “Captain?”

Bowater turned. Taylor wore a strange look on his face. Not contrition, not arrogance, not apology. Something else. A touch of sentiment, perhaps.

“Cap’n Bowater, we have been through quite a bit together, you and me. I got to say it now. You are one cold, patrician son of a bitch, but you got grit. It’s been a pleasure.”

Taylor extended his hand, and the words and the gesture were so genuine that Bowater was taken aback. He would not have credited the man with such sincerity.

Bowater took the extended hand, enveloped it in his two hands, and shook. “Chief Taylor, you are one insufferable pain in the ass, but you are a hell of an engineer.”

Taylor smiled around his cigar. “Cap’n, if you live through this here jaunt, and I don’t, I would surely admire it if you could see that put on my headstone.”

“It’ll be done.”

Taylor regarded the men in the pilothouse. He snapped a crisp salute. “Morituri te salutamus,” he said, then turned, disappeared into the gloom of the ironclad’s lower deck.

They had halved the distance in the time that he had spoken with Taylor, the fast-flowing Mississippi River sweeping them down on the enemy. The fight had mounted in its intensity, the smoke and noise and gunfire building on itself. The first of the Yankee ships was just now coming between the forts, blasting away with both broadsides, pushing on upriver.

And the forts were giving it back. Five days of shelling seemed to have made no difference. The big guns were blazing away so that the walls of the forts might have been on fire, so solid was the sheet of muzzle flash.

The smoke rolled over the river, more and more smoke, hanging like an acrid fog, glowing orange. And through that smoke the ships moved, the big, slow-moving Yankee screw steamers, the little ships of the Confederate defenders. Into that hailstorm of iron, Samuel Bowater pushed the Yazoo River.

He turned to the midshipman, Mr. Worley, and said, “Go below. Tell the gun captains to fire at any target on which their guns will bear. They are to fire at will.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” the mid said, a bit too loud and high-pitched, and he hurried off.

A gunboat was leading the Yankee line, a schooner-rigged screw-driven craft, 150 feet or so in length. “There! Steer for her!” Bowater said, pointing through the slot, and as he did a tugboat appeared out of the gloom, crossing their bow, starboard to port. In the flashing gunfire Bowater could make out the Confederate flag on her stern. He got out no more than the first syllable of a helm command before they struck.

The men in the pilothouse staggered as the two vessels hit, and Quillin shouted, “Damned idiot!”

Bowater looked out the slot. The tug was hung up on their bow and men were rushing along her deck, shouting, waving arms. The gunfire was so continuous now that the whole scene was lit in orange, the tug silhouetted against the flames of Fort Jackson’s barrage.

Bowater grabbed the telegraphs, gave a ring, shoved the handles to full ahead. No time for this horseshit… The engines responded immediately, the Yazoo River surged ahead, pushing itself into the tug. With a snapping and crunching sound, audible over the gunfire, the tug peeled off the Yazoo River’s bow, bumped against her side, disappeared astern, and the ironclad was once again racing toward the fight.

The Yankee gunboat was surrounded, Confederate ships pounding her from all sides, more maneuvering to board. No room for another. “Pilot, do you see that big ship, the one coming up next?” Bowater was shouting now, he could not be heard otherwise over the gunfire.

“Aye!”

“We’ll make for her!”

The broadside below opened up, the guns of the ironclad Yazoo River firing for the first time in anger. The casement shuddered, the smoke swirled up from the gundeck, sucked out of the slits in the pilothouse. With it, the squeal of carriage wheels on the deck, the rumble of the guns being run out, and another gun, and another. The flames from the muzzles lashed out from the side of his ship, the muzzles themselves hidden from his view over the edge of the casement.

The embattled Yankee gunboat passed down the Yazoo River’s port side and the next ship in line loomed up, and Bowater sucked in his breath. It is the Pensacola! Dear God, it is my Pensacola!

Four years he had served as second officer aboard that ship. There was not one inch of her that he did not know, that he had not been personally involved with in some way or another. Four years of his life played out on those decks, and though he would not admit to the sentiment, he had come to love her dearly, as much as any man had ever loved a ship, and that was very much indeed. And there she was and she was trying to kill him.

Forward and below, the Yazoo River’s guns fired away, point-blank range, nine-inch shells and thirty-two-pound round shot, right into the guts of his old ship. Bowater clenched his fists. Pensacola must hit back, and no one knew better than he how hard a punch she could throw.

They were just abreast the Pensacola’s foremast when the Yankee sloop opened up on them, eleven nine-inch Dahlgrens to a broadside, a forty-two-pound rifle. For an instant there was nothing to be seen through the pilothouse slot but a sheet of flame. A shell glanced off the casement, whirled past with a hysterical scream, but more hit square, made the iron ring out with a deafening clang-like being trapped in a church bell-made the entire vessel shudder and roll.

The Yazoo River fired back, even as the last of the Pensacola’s shells were slamming into her armored sides, but now there was a new sound that cut though the gunfire. Screaming. The wounded.

Bowater looked around for Quillin, but the luff had gone below to supervise the guns. “Mr. Risley, you have the con! Back and fill to keep alongside Pensacola…the big Yankee there! I’m going below for a moment!”

“Aye, sir!” Risley said. Bowater took the steps at a run, plunged down into the gloom of the gundeck. It was a dark place, even on a sunny day, but in the night, with the smoke of battle, it was like a place from another world. The row of lanterns amidships swayed with the slight rocking of the ironclad in the river and cast their pools of pale light over the scene. Men swarmed around the guns, toiling at their charges-they put Bowater in mind of Roman slaves condemned to the mines.

It was hot in the casement, certainly above one hundred degrees. Samuel felt the sweat stand out on his