Glory In The Name

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