Glory In The Name

saw Lieutenant Poindexter across the yard.

“Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” Alden shouted, and Poindexter stopped and waved. Alden hurried over to him. “Lieutenant, we’ve received orders to go. Isherwood is stoking the boilers up. I need you to single up the fasts and have the ship winded. We’ve no time to lose.”

“Single up the fasts…?”

“Yes, Lieutenant. It is customary when leaving a dock. What in hell is the matter with you?”

“It’s just…well, sir, I reckon you need to get permission from Commander Robb.”

“Robb?” Commander Robert Robb was the executive officer of the shipyard. “I have orders from Commodore McCauley!”

“Well, pardon, sir, it’s just, I think we need Commander Robb’s permission to do that…”

Alden looked at Poindexter, and where before he had seen a handsome young lieutenant of the United States Navy, he now saw a loathsome, ugly thing. Like Tucker. A man whose loyalties were not where Alden had thought.

Involuntarily he glanced to his right and left. It was like a dream, as if he suddenly realized that he was not in the place he thought he was, that the people he took to be friends and comrades were really people he did not know.

Without a word he abandoned Poindexter to his halfhearted protestations and headed back to McCauley’s office, his pace just short of a run.

“Whoa, there, Commander!”

Alden looked up. Standing in his way was Commander Robb. Had Robb not spoken, Alden would have run him down like a ship in a fog.

“See here, Robb…what’s the meaning of Poindexter telling me we need your permission to get Merrimack underway? I’ve orders from McCauley, and I don’t reckon I need any others…”

“Hold up, there, Mr. Alden!” Robb held up his hands in mock defense. “No one is saying that Commodore McCauley isn’t in charge here. But I am the executive officer, as you well know, and these things must come from me.”

Alden drew a breath. “Very well, then, may I have permission to single fasts and wind the ship?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I’m sorry, Commander. You may not have the ship.”

Alden just shook his head. He had no words.

“Commodore McCauley has changed his mind. We need to keep the Merrimack here. If we try to move her now it will only infuriate the thousands of troops mustered in town.”

Alden glared at Robb through narrowed eyes. Robb’s soft voice, the accent of northern Virginia, sounded to Alden like the strident shriek of a traitor, howling out his perfidy. “Damn you…”

“Yes, yes. Now please go and draw your fires.”

“To hell with you, sir. I will not take orders from a traitor.” Alden pushed past Robb, made a point of physically pushing him out of the way, and stamped into McCauley’s office.

“Sir!” Alden shouted. McCauley looked up, his eyes bleary and rimmed with red, his face gray and sagging. He looked much worse than he had even that morning, and Alden, who had intended to shout at him, softened his approach.

“Sir, I have just spoken with Commander Robb, whose loyalties I frankly question. He could not have told me the truth.”

“I’ve spoken with Robb. We both agree Merrimack should remain. You may draw the fires and stand down to an engine watch.”

“Sir…”

McCauley slammed the flat of his hand down on the desk, a more energetic move than Alden would have thought him capable of, and Alden started. “Goddamn it!” McCauley shouted. “Do you think I have not examined this from all angles? Goddamn it! Fifty-two years I have been in this navy, was a captain while you were still at your mother’s tit, sir, and I will not have you in here questioning my every order!”

Alden straightened, came to attention. McCauley was no traitor, but traitors had his ear and they had swayed him and he would not be swayed back. He had made the last decision that he had the energy to make, Alden could see that, and that decision would stand.

“Aye, aye, sir. I will go and see the fires are drawn.” He turned and left the office, and he knew he would not return.

A cable length from the Merrimack he stopped and ran his eyes over her. She was a grand and solid thing, with her high black sides and the single white band running from gunport to gunport. She had none of the elegant sweep of the ships of an earlier era-her sheer was perfectly straight-but what that lost her in grace it added in giving her a formidable, martial look. If she was the descendant of the great high-pooped, gilded men-of-war of centuries past, then she had evolved into something leaner, more efficient, more deadly, the naval equivalent of Mr. Darwin’s theory.

She did not look so magnificent now, with her masts and yards all gone, down to the lower masts, and not a bit of standing rigging to support those. Smoke was rolling out of her funnel, midway between the fore and main masts, a thick black smoke, and Alden knew that down in the belly of the ship Isherwood was pushing the men to get the fires up and the boilers churning and the steam pumping through the pipes.

Isherwood. Alden did not think he had the strength to tell him.

The Merrimack had been in commission less than six years. She had cost the United States nearly $700,000 to build. She had had her problems, sure, and she was not much to look at now, dockside and stripped of her rig. But she was in her heart a magnificent ship.

I should just damn well take her anyway, Alden thought. Just cast off, let her drift out into the stream…Murray at the helm, one of the firemen at forward lookout… He felt a tremor of excitement as the idea built in his head. Just take the Merrimack anyway, and damn McCauley and his orders.

But he could not and he knew it, and the fantasy faded away. He was a naval officer, had been for all of his adult life, and the habit of obeying orders was far too deeply ingrained for him to ignore it now. Like a peddler’s horse that has tramped the same route every day of its life, and knows no other, so Commander James Alden could not alter the route along which his sense of duty and respect for rank led him.

He felt sick, down deep in his stomach, as he stepped up the brow. He crossed the deck to the scuttle and climbed slowly down to the engine room, where he would tell Benjamin Isherwood to draw the fires and let the beast die.

8

Under the orders of Flag Officer Paulding, was inaugurated and in part consummated one of the most cowardly and disgraceful acts which has ever disgraced the Government of a civilized people.

– Major General William B. Taliaferro, Virginia Provisional Army, to John Letcher, Governor of Virginia

It took the Confederate States Ship Cape Fear a little over fifty hours’ steaming, Cape Fear to Cape Henry.

From Wilmington, it was three miles downriver, feeling their way in the moonlight, to the point where the Cape Fear River opened wide and Bowater could feel the tension ease as the muddy banks and their hidden snags receded from view. They passed Orton’s Point and finally, with Smith’s Island looming, turned southeast, leaving Zeek’s Island to starboard. Fifteen miles from the dock at Wilmington they steamed through New Inlet and met the long rollers of the Atlantic Ocean.

Then it was northeast and forty miles off the low, treacherous shore of North Carolina, the Outer Banks. Once