Glory In The Name

streaks of light appeared over the ocean, and the bells of the Yankee fleet rang out, two bells in the morning watch, 5:00 a.m.

They stood, cussed, staggered about, scratched and stretched. They gulped what passed for coffee, ate the porridge served out from the big cast-iron pot.

The men were still eating when signal flags broke out at the masthead of the flagship Minnesota and Barron, watching through a long telescope, announced, “That’s ‘Prepare to engage and follow my motions.’”

Bowater nodded. He was standing thirty feet away at the thirty-two-pounder smoothbore that he and the Cape Fears were manning.

Prepare to engage… It seemed there must be something they should do to prepare the fort for the coming onslaught. But there was nothing. Every gun that would bear was manned, loaded, run out. There was nothing that they could do now but wait.

Ruffin Tanner sat on the dirt parapet, looked out over the water, and Bowater looked at his face in profile, the morning light falling on him. “Tanner?”

The sailor turned. “Yessah?”

“Have we met before?”

“Yessah. I was the one steerin’ the boat when we fought that Yankee side-wheeler,” he said, but seeing that Bowater was not in a joking mood added, “And I think I seen you once, up to the dockyard in New York, oh, five years back. But we didn’t talk, sir.”

Bowater nodded. “I suppose not,” he said, but still there was something about Tanner’s face, some vague recognition, almost like that fleeting sensation of having experienced a place before, but more solid than that, more real.

The morning was quiet, just the sound of the surf on the beach and the scream of the sea birds, and soon the distant clank of chain coming aboard, as steam windlasses hauled up the Yankee fleet’s anchors.

It took the Union fleet an hour to get underway, and another hour to close with the fort. It was eight o’clock, the day already hot under the brilliant sun, when Susquehanna, leading the big ships, opened up. The shell whistled through the air with a sound that, once heard, was perfectly familiar. It landed on the beach, one hundred feet away, exploded in a spray of sand.

“Here they come, boys!” Commodore Barron shouted from where he stood on the parapet. “Get ready to fire on my word.”

Bowater watched the ships, felt the sweat on his palms, the crackling of electricity in his fingers, the jerky, excited motion in his limbs, the churning in his stomach. They were under fire now, and he wanted nothing more than to run and duck under the parapet. It was grit time, and all he could do was to stand there and fight it until his mind was merciful enough to shut down that instinct for self-preservation.

Another shot from Susquehanna, and then Wabash, both shells falling short as the Union gunners worked to get their range again. And still Barron stood unmoving on the parapet and did not give the order to return fire, as certain as was Samuel that Hatteras’s guns would not reach.

One by one the big ships paraded past, then backed their engines and dropped anchor. Together they made a movable fortress with seventy big guns bearing on the fort, against the three guns with which the fort could fire back.

Soon they were all firing, all the Yankee guns, the rain of shells coming in again, the burst of dirt and sand marching closer and closer to Fort Hatteras as the gunners adjusted aim from their stable platforms.

“Let ’em have it, boys!” Barron shouted and hopped down from the parapet as the Confederate gunners cheered. Bowater felt exuberant as he leaned over the barrel of his gun and sighted down its length; he felt charged and ready and all trace of fear was gone now. He yelled with the others, despite himself, yelled to let off the tension like a relief valve on a boiler.

He stepped back, pulled the lock cord taut. No need to adjust the lay of the gun; they had been fiddling with it obsessively for half an hour, waiting for the order to fire. The old thirty-two-pounder was aimed square at the high black side of the steam frigate Wabash, once the command of Samuel Barron. Bowater stepped back and jerked the cord, and the gun blasted off with a deafening roar, flung itself back against the breeching.

Bowater kept his eyes on Wabash, hoping to see splinters fly, but instead he saw a spout of water where his shot fell three hundred feet short.

“Another pound of power in the charge, Tanner,” he instructed, as he stepped over to the breech, twisted the elevation screw to raise the muzzle another few inches. He looked at the screw. Not much travel left. That had better do.

“Look, sir!” Tanner pointed over the parapet and Bowater followed his arm. Cumberland was underway, standing into the line of battle under a reefed fore course, topsails and topgallants, with no ugly plume of smoke belching out amidships. She was the only pure sailing vessel there, on either side.

Bowater shook his head. “Lovely.” But she was an anachronism, a ship from another time, from Lafayette’s age, and not the present. One had only to look at the Union fleet and the manner in which they moved onshore and off, oblivious to the state of wind and tide, to see that the days of the sailing ship were over, rail though the likes of Samuel Bowater might. He watched the stately, silent progress of the sailing man-of-war and felt a soft kind of a sadness come over him.

And then the first of the Union shells to find the parapet exploded, shook the earthworks on which Bowater stood, pelted him with dirt, and romantic notions fled.

“Run out!” he shouted, and the heavy gun was hauled up to the wall, Johnny St. Laurent and Nat St. Clair, landsmen Francis Pinette, Harper Rawson, and Bayard Quayle, Ordinary Seaman Dick Merrow, Cape Fears all, hauling on the gun tackles.

Bowater leaned over the barrel, called for the handspike until the gun was pointed again at Wabash’s midships, stood back, and fired. And once again, a spout of water for their efforts.

Boom, boom, the shells were coming in regular now, marching up the beach, landing on the parapets and the grounds contained within the fort. Bowater guessed that for every Union shell that dropped short, six hit the fort. He heard another gun, from the north, and when he looked in that direction he could see that Fort Clark was opening up on them as well, their own guns now loaded with Yankee shells and turned on them.

Oh, dear God…

A shell hit near enough that the flying dirt stung him in the face, made him flinch, but his men did not hesitate in their swabbing, loading, running out. Bowater twisted the elevation screw until it would turn no more. The gun was pointed as high as it would go, the barrel stuffed with all the powder it would bear.

Run out, aim, fire. A white spout of water, in perfect line with Wabash. Two hundred more feet and they would have smashed the heavy ball right through her side. But there was no physical way to coax another two hundred feet from the gun.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Barron shouted, the exasperation as clear as the words, and the sound in the fort of men working guns died away, and the only sound left, and it filled the air, was the whistle of shells, the explosion of shells, the flying earth, and the screams of the men whose luck had run out.

Samuel turned toward Number 8 gun, mounted on a naval carriage alongside his own. It was commanded by Lieutenant Murdaugh of the Winslow. Bowater met Murdaugh’s eye, and the lieutenant frowned in dismay, shook his head, and Bowater nodded his agreement.

And then Murdaugh and the gun and the men around it and the parapet seemed to be ripped apart in a blast of dirt and noise and brilliant light and screaming fragments of metal. Bowater saw the sky and the earthen wall spin past him, heard men screaming and metal screaming and a ringing in his ears like the note of a huge bell, sustained for an impossibly long time.

He hit the dirt with a jarring blow that knocked the wind from him, and for a second all he could do was thrash around, gasping, wide-eyed, thoughtless of anything but getting air into his lungs.

And then he caught his breath, pulled a deep lungful of air into his chest. He felt a burning pain in his leg and