Glory In The Name

at which water turned to steam was ordered by the laws of physics, not Samuel Bowater.

He had to move, to expend some of his restless energy. He climbed down the ladder, around the side deck. Find out how long until steam was up? No, he couldn’t ask Taylor that. Couldn’t show his eagerness. Think of something that would lead to the answer.

He opened the engine-room door, looked down the fidley. Chief Taylor was not there, not that he could see. He closed the door, walked farther along to the door of Taylor’s cabin. He wrapped on the door, which swung open under the tap of his knuckles.

“Chief Taylor?” Bowater leaned into the room. It occurred to him that he had never seen the inside of Taylor’s cabin. “Chief?” No response.

The yellow sunlight spilled in from the cabin’s only window. On the desk beside the door, a big, leather-bound book lay open, with papers and pencils scattered about.

“Hmm…” Taylor did not strike Samuel as a reading man. He took a step closer, lifted the cover. The Principles and Practice and Explanation of the Machinery Used in Steam Navigation; Examples of British and American Steam Vessels and Papers on the Properties of Steam and on the Steam Engine in its General Application, Originally compiled by Thomas Tredgold, CE. MDCCCLI.

Bowater laid the book down again, read part of the page to which it was open. Let t₁ be the temperature of the water at a dangerous pressure; t the temperature at the working pressure; Q the quantity of heat, in British units, transferred to the water per minute- then the equation T=W(t₁-t) is approximately correct.

He shook his head. Hieronymus Taylor was the kind of engineer who started as a coal passer and picked up bits and pieces along the way-learned how to clean a grate, wield an oil can, rebuild an air pump, until at last he was running the black gang. Perhaps he had an aptitude for such things, which would help. But Samuel did not think him the kind of engineer to delve into such theoreticals. He would not have credited Taylor with the education to read even the title of that book.

And yet there were the notes and equations and comments on the text, written in the cramped scrawl that Samuel recognized from countless engineering division reports.

Curious as he was, Bowater recalled that he was doing something utterly improper. He stepped out of the cabin, eased the door shut. Walking forward, he met Chief Taylor coming aft.

“Ah, Chief. I was looking for you. I just wanted to double-check that we had clean fires for our work today.”

Taylor was in shirtsleeves, and with the sun full on him it was difficult for Bowater to look directly at his white shirt. He had noticed, just in the past week or so, that the formerly unkempt black gang were now wearing uniforms and work clothing of pristine cleanliness. Not just Taylor and the firemen, but even the Negro coal passers seemed to have crisp, clean outfits when they gathered on the fantail for their evening sing-alongs.

Bowater’s clothes were washed on the foredeck by Jacob, who also washed Mr. Harwell’s clothes as a courtesy. The deck crew were given buckets and soap and allowed to do their wash once a week, dipping fresh water straight from the river. But Samuel never saw any of the engineering department wash their clothes, and yet, here they were, the cleanest on board, even though they worked in the filthiest environment.

Samuel did not begrudge them their superior cleanliness, but he was damned curious as to how they did it. He would not, of course, ask, because he was certain Taylor wanted him to. He would rather not know.

“Grates are all clean, bunkers full, black gang scrubbed and dried. Head up steam in one hour. I have some of my boys ashore, gettin’ some piping I need. Boat should be back, twenty minutes or so.”

“Very well. See that they are. I want to be underway the minute steam is at service gauge.”

“The very minute, Cap’n,” Taylor smiled.

Bowater climbed up to the wheelhouse, sat at the small desk in his cabin. Mail had come that morning. He picked up the letter on top, smiled as he looked at the printed stationery. NAVY DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C. He had received enough of those over the course of his career. He had not reckoned on receiving any more.

He snatched up his scrimshaw whalebone letter opener, cut the letter open. He could well guess at its contents.

NAVY DEPARTMENT, May 7, 1861

SIR: Your letter of the 22d ultimo, tendering your resignation as a lieutenant in the U. S. Navy, has been received.

By direction of the President your name has been stricken from the rolls of the Navy from that date.

I am, respectfully, your obedient servant,

GIDEON WELLES

Secretary of the Navy

Bowater read the terse words, read them again and again, and an unexpected sadness came over him, a touch of shame, that all the arguments about the legitimacy of his actions could not entirely erase.

An officer had always held the right to resign his commission. There was nothing dishonorable about it. If the officer’s conduct was under question, however, there were several options available to the navy by which they might censure that officer, even at the very moment he moved beyond their grasp.

One such punishment was dismissal from the service, throwing him out before he had the chance to honorably resign. Worse, dismissal with striking the officer’s name from the record, as if he had never been.

But the ultimate censure was the one that Bowater held in his hands: dismissal and striking of the officer’s name by order of the President. There was no equivocation, no appeal. The officer was cashiered.

In the early days of secession, officers had been allowed to resign without dismissal of any sort. When Gideon Welles took over, that changed. His was a scorched-earth policy, no quarter given.

Bowater stared at the note. He had never really expected anything else, had never thought to preserve his place in the old navy in case seccession didn’t pan out. Still, an Academy education and fourteen years of service were not so easily dismissed.

To hell with you, Gideon Welles, my “obedient servant,” he thought, and crumpled the letter up and tossed it in the wastebasket. That was the past, a life that was gone, and he was blessed to have a second life now, a thing denied most men. I do believe I will go punch a few holes in your ships, Mr. Secretary.

He looked at the next letter, from his father, and opened it up. It was written in the neat, tight hand that Samuel knew so well. He read it through. It was a very businesslike report: effects of the blockade, the state of Charleston’s defenses, who was off in military service, price increases. Samuel smiled despite himself. William Bowater, Esq. He wondered sometimes if his father had not been some dour Boston Puritan in an earlier life, as those dabblers in mysticism were wont to believe.

He went through his father’s letter again. There was something comforting in the stolid and unexcitable prose. With everything falling apart, with the entire order of his universe in flux, it was nice to see that one thing at least remained unchanged.

Lord, he is a stoic, and I am some kind of damned poet… He hated the thought as he thought it. The idea of himself as an artist felt facile and shallow.

From the top of the ladder, Hieronymus Taylor could look down the fidley on his engine room and his beloved engine, with the great maze of pipes: steam and return water, eduction pipes and intake pipes and discharge pipes, running to cylinder, air pumps, hot well, condensers, boiler, feed water, so amazingly complex, such a tangled web, unfathomable to the uninitiated, and yet not an inch of it that he did not fully comprehend, and hardly a bit of it that he had not laid hands on at one time or another.

A thing of beauty, like a symphony wonderfully written and wonderfully played, all the disparate parts, iron and steam, working together to create that final whole, pssst, clunk, pssst, clunk, pssst, clunk, thirty rotations per minute.

He ran his eyes over the entire space, the engine room, the boiler room on the other side of the open bulkhead,