Glory In The Name

fleet’s anchored at Hatteras Inlet. Got a chart?”

“Yes, sir.” Bowater pulled the chart of the coast from Cape Lookout to Cape Henry, unrolled it, and placed weights on the corners.

“There.” Forrest put a meaty finger down on the narrow Hatteras Island. “All those ships, you saw them. They’re going to blow hell out of the forts. We have two forts there, Hatteras and Clark. Gibraltar they ain’t.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve been there. Delivered ordnance to them twice now.”

“Yes, yes. ’Course you have. Good. Because you’re going to do it again. We’ve got to try and reinforce them. They don’t have above four hundred men, against all those abolition kangaroos Welles sent down there. Commodore Barron will be going down with Winslow soon as he can get underway. You’ll report to him. Get your ship alongside and get all the ordnance you can take.”

“And we are to leave?”

“Immediately, Captain. Immediately. As I hear it the Yankees are already knocking the stuffing out of those forts.”

“Aye, sir.” Bowater stepped over to the engine-room bell, gave a single jingle. Stand by. He waited to hear Hieronymus Taylor cursing from two decks down.

Twenty minutes later, they were tied up alongside the dockyard. With the fires freshly banked it took no time to get head up steam again. It took longer for Bowater to explain to a fuming Chief Taylor why his engine, which he had put happily to bed, was being called on once more. At last, when he seemed sure that Bowater understood the great favor being rendered, Taylor stooped to spread the fires in the boiler.

Goddamned engineers…

The ordnance workers were ready for them: a wagonful of shells and fuses, powder and round shot, whatever could be spared for the beleaguered forts on Hatteras.

With the sun an hour from setting, they cast off and headed downriver, to where the wide Elizabeth grew more and more narrow and channeled at last into the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, a thirty-five-mile cut through the wild Great Dismal Swamp.

The canal was mostly straight, and not terribly wide, only one hundred feet or so in most places. The vegetation grew right up to the banks, tall stands of cyprus trees lining the canal so that, in the gathering dusk, one had the sense of steaming down a city street, with tall buildings to port and starboard.

Samuel Bowater stood just outside the door of the wheelhouse, peering into the deep shadows that fell over the water. They were steaming at half ahead, the fastest that he dared go down that dark river.

“Come left, just a bit there…” he called into the wheelhouse, and Tanner repeated, “Left, just a bit…”

“Good…steady as she goes.” Bowater did not know how long they could keep this up, how dark would be too dark to steam down the canal. The sun was gone, and just the last tenacious threads of light were hanging in the west.

“A little right now…” And then the Cape Fear eased to a stop. Not a jarring crash, like hitting a rock, just a gentle cessation of movement, hardly noticeable, really, the feel of a slow-moving steamer running up on the mud.

Bowater reached up and gave the engine-room bell two jingles, stop. He looked forward, as far as he could, down the waterway, which was not far. The cyprus trees and the swamp grass seemed to melt into the water, so that he could not tell where one began and the other left off.

He grabbed the bell again, rang three jingles: done with engine.

All hands were called at eight bells in the night watch, four o’clock in the morning. In the predawn dark they ate and went to quarters.

Down in the engine room a grousing Hieronymus Taylor, bleary-eyed and rumpled, ordered Moses Jones to spread the fire while he stripped down, stumbled behind the condenser, and washed away some of the sleep and the film of grime and sweat under the warm spray of the engine room’s now functioning shower bath. He toweled off, dressed, lit a cigar, and was feeling something near content when the wheelhouse rang down one jingle, stand by, followed two minutes later by three bells and a jingle, full astern.

Taylor nodded to himself as he shifted the reversing lever and twisted the throttle open. Patrician put her in the mud…thought so…

Samuel Bowater leaned over the rail of the deckhouse. The water of the Dismal Swamp Canal, dyed brown by the tannin from the ubiquitous trees, was churning into a white froth, boiling up from the turns of the Cape Fear’s big prop. He looked up at the tree line, slipping ahead, as if the trees were marching on without them, but in fact it was the Cape Fear moving, backing out of her mud berth. He let out a quiet sigh of relief. It would have delighted Hieronymus Taylor to no end if they had had to use a steam winch to pull her off. The chief would have made simply giving the order a nightmare of humiliation.

They backed into the canal, and Bowater rang half ahead, then twenty minutes later, full ahead. It was warm and still behind the bulwark of cyprus trees, and the Cape Fear plowed her furrow south, and with each mile Bowater felt more and more anxious to get his cargo of ordnance to the forts before they were overrun by the Yankees.

They broke out of the Great Dismal Swamp before noon, steamed past Elizabeth City and down the Pasquotank River and into the wide-open water of Albemarle Sound, like a great saltwater lake. They chugged across the sound and past Roanoke Island and turned south toward Hatteras. To the east, the low, sandy dunes of the barrier islands. From the wheelhouse Samuel could catch glimpses of the Atlantic, stretching away to the horizon, beyond the barren yellow strips of land.

“Sir?” Thadeous Harwell stood forward of the wheelhouse, peering south with the big telescope. “Sir, perhaps you should see this.”

Bowater took the glass, pointed it in the indicated direction, sweeping along the line of low sand dunes and swatches of stunted trees, only just visible from the wheelhouse. He saw the dark vertical line that was the Cape Hatteras light. And then, south of that, he stopped.

It looked like a fog bank, or a low-lying cloud, but Samuel knew it could not be those things. It was smoke from artillery, the cumulative output of the guns of the United States fleet, billowing up high in the air, a dull gray cloud rising as high as the lighthouse itself.

“Dear God…” Bowater muttered. It took a frightening number of big guns to make a cloud like that. He wondered if they were too late. It did not seem possible the Confederates could stand up to such pounding.

For the rest of the morning and afternoon they plowed their way south. The Cape Fear was moving as fast as she could, a bit more than five knots. Samuel Bowater, graduate of the Navy School, understood displacement and theoretical hull speed, was familiar with William Froude’s latest Wave Line Theory, but that did not stop him from hating it all, and wishing a little more speed from the deep-draft tug.

They were still miles away when they heard the cannon fire, a deep rumble, very like thunder, but continuous, absolutely unrelenting. Soon they could see the spray of dirt and sand as the shells exploded on the low forts and the island, the infrequent jets of water as the Yankee ordnance overshot its targets and dropped into Pamlico Sound, on the landward side of Hatteras Island.

It was late in the afternoon when Bowater conned the Cape Fear into the shallow harbor, more an indentation in the beach, behind Hatteras Island. The screams of shells through the air, the constant explosions on the fort and the beach around, blotted out any other sound; the Cape Fear’s engines, the anchor chain running out, the wind, which was brisk, everything. It was as if the fort was under a rain cloud, an isolated cloud that poured its deluge down on that spot alone. Hardly a shot fell that did not kick up a spray of earth from the ramparts. The gunfire from the fleet was deadly accurate.

Bowater picked up the field glasses, focused them on Fort Hatteras. The dirt was flying in tall brown spouts with each explosion of the Yankee ordnance, flying skyward like surf hitting a rocky shore. He could see no movement from the fort, save for the flying earth and the Confederate flag, standing straight in the stiff wind.

He shifted his gaze to the north, three-quarters of a mile. Fort Clark seemed to be spared the Yankees’ attention. He could see no explosions there, no rain of shells.

“Oh, damn…” It was not clear at first. He had to take a longer look. But then he saw it was not the Confederate