Glory In The Name

eyes from the beast.

“Sir?” Whitfield shouted, and Pope finally looked away, shook his head. He felt sick to his stomach, utterly unable to think. They were surrounded here, wrapped up by the wicked delta and all its horrors, caught in Rebel territory, and under attack.

Room! He needed room! Sea room! “Slip the cable!” Pope shouted. “Get a red lantern aloft!” His hand reached for the grip of his sword, where it rested during times of such crisis, but his sword was not there, and he recalled that he was in shirtsleeves.

Damn… He thought of dashing below, but could not leave the deck. He had the sensation that the Richmond was listing to port. Has that damned ram sunk us? he wondered, and the panic began to creep in like the imaginary water rising in the hold.

“Sir?” Pope’s steward appeared in front of him, holding his coat and hat and sword and pistol. Without a word Pope slipped his arms into the sleeves of the coat, fastened the buttons, put his cap on his head, allowed the steward to buckle the sword around his waist. He experienced a new sense of calm as he donned the uniform and felt the weight of the weapon hanging from the belt.

“Sir?” Whitfield was in front of him. “It appears that Vincennes has slipped her cables. I see her getting her fore topsail set.”

“Very good.” From the foredeck came a great rumbling sound as Richmond’s own anchor chain was let go, rattling through the hawsepipe, making the entire ship vibrate as the chain disappeared into the brackish water of the delta.

Pope whirled around suddenly, remembering the ram. She was a few hundred yards away, downstream, lurking, waiting her chance, it would seem, a black shape on the near-black water. Pope fastened his eyes on the iron hump as the river lapped around the thing, and he loathed it, loathed it more than any thing or any person he had ever encountered.

Then the noise of the running chain ended, and then a final splash as the bitter end hit the river, and then nothing.

“Slow ahead!” Pope shouted, and the master, stationed by the helm, rang up slow ahead and Pope hoped there was steam enough to move the vessel against the stream. He could see the smoke coming in puffs from the tall stack amidships. The firemen were probably throwing oil or resin or whatever on the coal to get it to light off fast. He could feel the turn of the screws, the Richmond inching ahead.

“Keep firing on that damned ram, Mr. Whitfield!” Pope shouted, and the port battery began to blast away again in a frenetic, frantic way, like a blinded man lashing out with his fists.

From upriver, more heavy guns, as Preble joined in, the round shot from her port-side thirty-two-pounders churning up the river. They were making a deadly crossfire over the ram, iron and flame hurling out over the water, but Pope could not tell if they were having any effect whatsoever.

He could sense the Richmond turning, her head swinging downriver. He looked forward, saw the Preble, now on the port bow, now on the starboard as the Richmond slewed around.

He turned to the helmsman, a curse on his lips, but the man at the wheel was turning it hard, trying to correct. “She don’t answer, Captain!” the helmsman shouted, bracing for the old man’s wrath.

Not enough steam! The boilers did not have enough steam pressure to give the ship headway, and the rudder would not bite. The Richmond was out of control, turning sideways to the current, helpless, with the ram out there in the night.

“Goddamn it!” Pope shouted out loud. It was chaos and he could not make it slow down. Everything seemed to be exploding at once; he could not think.

“There goes the ram, sir!” Whitfield shouted, and Pope’s heart leaped, thinking the terrible thing was coming for them again, but it was not. Pope followed the luff’s pointed finger. The ram was steaming upriver, making for Preble’s port bow, away from the Richmond and the Vincennes, which was already standing into South West Pass.

“Damnation…” It did not appear as if Preble had slipped her cable. “Get underway, damn it!” Pope shouted, uselessly.

From the back of the turtle, a light sputtered, a tiny yellow light, and a second later a red rocket arched up and away, making a bold slash of color against the night sky.

“What in hell is that for?” Pope wondered out loud.

“Sir.” The carpenter was in front of him now, saluting. “Ram stove in three planks, sir, about two feet below the waterline. Hole’s about five inches, I’d say. Pumps can keep up, sir, till I’ve plugged it some.”

“Very good. Carry on.” At last, some good news, and Pope felt reason to hope that he might pull this off, that his career might not be destroyed by the attack of the infernal machine.

“Sir, look here!” It was Whitfield again. Pope was coming to loathe the sound of his voice. The luff was looking upriver. Three bright spots of light, low down on the water; they looked like three evenly spaced bonfires.

What the hell now? Pope snatched up his telescope, fixed one of the bright spots in the lens. Flames leaped and danced across his vision, illuminating the water around the raft on which the fire burned.

“Fire raft! Dear God, they are sending fire rafts!” Pope shouted. They were sending fire rafts and he was broadside to the current, out of control, with barely the steam pressure to turn the screws. And suddenly, where there had been optimism, there was now the vision of his squadron engulfed in flames.

Robley Paine stood in the wheelhouse of the Yazoo River, watched the fireworks on the water. The ship trembled underfoot as the twin paddle wheels turned slowly astern, holding the riverboat in place against the current.

First to attack, per the plan, had been the ram, the Manassas. Formerly the towboat Enoch Train, she was now an ironclad, her topsides a rounded hump of half-submerged narrow iron plate, about 150 feet long, thirty feet wide. On her bow was mounted a pointed iron ram, and from her rounded foredeck a sixty-four-pound Dahlgren peered forward.

She was an amazing engine of war, and the more Robley looked on her, the more he wanted such a thing for himself. The Union navy would not be beaten by ships of equal size. The Confederacy was unable to build ships of equal size. The Yankees must be defeated by technological advances, such as the Manassas, the first ironclad built in the Western Hemisphere.

Spread out over the river, upstream of the Yankees, was the Confederate fleet. The flagship was the 830-ton steam sloop McRae, armed with a sixty-four-pounder mounted on a pivot, four eight-inch Columbiads, and a rifled twenty-four-pounder. With her navy crew and complement of Confederate States Marines, she was run with an efficiency that made Robley despair for the sloppy, disinterested civilian mercenaries he was forced to ship.

The rest of the fleet: the five-hundred-ton side-wheel steamer Calhoun, with one twenty-four-pounder and two eighteen-pounder Dahlgren guns; the steamer Ivy, just a bit smaller than Calhoun, with one eight-inch rifle; the steamers Jackson and Tuscarora; and the cutter Pickens, with an eight-inch Columbiad and four twenty-four-pound carronades. An odd hodgepodge of former merchant ships and assorted guns, but it was the waterborne defense of the southern Mississippi. Between the five of them they did not carry the firepower of even the Richmond alone. But they had surprise, and they had the ram, and those seemed to be working well.

One of the Yankee ships was blazing away, and Paine guessed it was the Richmond and that the ram had done her business.

Then another ship, closer to the Confederate fleet, began to fire the guns of her broadside. The two ships were lashing out. There was a desperate, panicked quality to their firing. Robley nodded his head as he watched the fusillade. Good, good… At last, something was being done. The filthy invaders who had murdered his sons were paying for it now.

Mr. Kinney, the pilot, was showing no sign of approval. He had in fact been muttering curses under his breath for some time. But now, as the second ship opened fire, he became more vocal.