Thieves Of Mercy

rates at Trafalgar. Hand-to-hand combat across the massive decks of line-of-battle ships, a beautiful thing, lost to history, killed, like so many things, by the steam engine and rifled ordnance.

He sighed, perfectly aware of how juvenile his daydreams were, on a par with dime novels read by boys who dreamed of the romance of war. Stembel was at least beyond that. There was nothing romantic in the ugly war in which he was now engaged. The romance of naval combat belonged to an earlier age.

Downriver the mortar boat fired, and Stembel felt the concussion of the blast and the recoil against the sides of his ship, like sitting inside a drum while someone beats it. Then quiet, and above his head the steady scrape, scrape, scrape of holystones on decks. It was the same sound that Nelson would have heard above his great cabin, the morning of Trafalgar. Some things had not changed, but it was mostly the mundane things. Paperwork. Holystones.

Then the sound of footsteps, and Stembel sat upright. He could hear the urgency in the steps as if they were speaking in some familiar, rhythmic code. He heard the steps on the ladder and he felt his heart race, heard the steps outside his cabin door stop, the fist banging the door, the voice of a midshipman calling, “Captain Stembel, sir!” and all he could think was, Oh, dear God, why do I not have steam up?

The River Defense Fleet came on in line ahead, just as they had planned the night before. The General Bragg, long and lean, her walking beam engine driving her with a bone in her teeth, the General Sumter next in line, a side-wheeler like Bragg but smaller. Next came the General Sterling Price, big and boxy, awkward- looking compared with the ships in the van. In the Price’s wake came the General Joseph Page and the General Earl Van Dorn, almost side by side, as if in a race, and behind them, more or less in line, the rest of the fleet, the flagship Little Rebel and the others.

To Samuel Bowater, standing beside the wheelhouse, it seemed clear that one of them, the Page or the Van Dorn, was getting out of line, trying to charge ahead of her assigned position. Since he was not privy to the battle instructions, Bowater did not know which of the ships was breaking formation. But he could guess.

“Yeeeeehaaa!” Mississippi Mike screamed with the sheer thrill of the thing. Plum Point seemed to fall back and the river opened up in front of them, and there, tied to the bank, with no steam up that Bowater could see, one of the despised Union gunboats; just below it, one of the floating mortars, which, with virtual impunity, inflicted such misery on troops huddled in the river forts. They were alone. The rest of the fleet was farther up the river, tied to the bank, pants around their ankles.

“Yeeeehaaaa! Son of a bitch!” Mike grabbed the engine room bell and rang it again, though to Bowater’s certain knowledge he had already rung up full speed five minutes before. Bowater could all but hear Guthrie cursing from three decks down.

The black smoke poured from the Page’s twin stacks, the walking beam worked itself up and down as if it was possessed. Bowater grinned. It was infectious.

In the past year Bowater had felt the touch of this wild recklessness more than once, blasting away at the Union fleet in Hampton Roads, defending Elizabeth City against the Yankee invaders until the ammunition was gone, then ramming and boarding. Incredible, but it was only a little more than two weeks before that he had driven the ironclad Yazoo River into the night battle below New Orleans.

There was a wild abandon to such a brawl, a release unlike any other, an extreme of emotion that could not be had by imitation, and Bowater could see how a man could become addicted.

Samuel Bowater and his men had no business being where they were. Their orders were to report to Shirley’s yard, to assist in getting the Tennessee ready to launch. But Samuel had found the sight of the half-built hull greatly discouraging. And when Sullivan had learned of the coming fight on the river, and asked Bowater to come along to augment the Page’s crew with his own, Bowater found he could not resist. The thought of fiddling around in a shipyard while a real fight was going on upriver was intolerable.

So here he was. And he felt guilty, exhilarated, wary, and ready to fight, all at once.

“You’re right, Captain, devil take me, you are right!” Sullivan shouted over the cumulative noise of the racing side-wheelers.

“About what?”

“Mississippi Mike’s mother! You know, Mississippi Mike in the book? She marries Mike’s uncle-damn me to hell, that’s gonna get ’em talkin! Just hope the boys in New York ’ll go for it!”

“They might not be so shocked in New York. They see a lot of that sort of thing.”

“Reckon you’re right! Oh, look, that old peckerwood ironclad’s getting under way! Ha ha ha! Too late for you, boys!”

The ironclad was drifting away from the bank. Thick black smoke was rolling from her twin funnels. They had caught the Yankee with no steam up, and now her engineers were throwing whatever they had on the fires-pitch pine, turpentine, oil-soaked rags-to get head up steam.

That was a mistake, Bowater thought. Should have stayed tied to the bank. A ship captain’s first instinct was always to get under way, to get sea room to fight. But in this case the iron ship was better off with one side pressed against the shore, protected, while they fought the enemy off with their broadside. Now they were drifting and helpless.

Well, not helpless, entirely. As the Bragg raced for the Yankee ship, water creaming around the riverboat’s submerged ram, the ironclad fired. From ten feet away she blasted the Rebel with her starboard broadside guns, four thirty-two-pounders, from what Bowater could see. The impact was lost from sight behind the deckhouse, but Bowater saw the shot come out the other side, blowing sections out of the superstructure, sending planks and splinters and heaps of cotton into the air in a cloud of flying debris.

But the gunfire did not slow the Bragg in the least. She slammed bow-first into the Yankee ironclad, which, fortunately for the Yankees, had slewed around at the last moment, leaving the Bragg with only a glancing blow.

“Did she hole the bastard, ya reckon?” Sullivan shouted the question. He was in a frenzy, dancing in place, leaning forward on the rail, like a dog straining at the leash. Bowater half expected Mike’s tongue to come lolling out of his mouth.

“I think so. See, they’re locked together.”

The Bragg and the ironclad seemed to embrace one another as they spun in the stream, and it was clear that the Bragg’s ram was stuck in the ironclad’s side. If the ironclad went down, she could take the Confederate ship with her.

The ironclad fired again, with the Bragg pressed against her so close that she could not even run her guns out. The heavy balls ripped through the riverboat’s fragile upper works, but the blast seemed to shake the Bragg loose. She backed away, turning sideways in the stream, seemingly out of control, as the Price charged past, putting every ounce of steam she had behind her wild run at the listing Yankee.

“Come left, come left!” Sullivan shouted into the wheelhouse, then charged in and grabbed the wheel himself, helped Baxter spin it over. The Bragg was drifting down on them, not under command, for what reason they could not see.

“Did her boiler blow?” Sullivan asked.

“I don’t think so,” Bowater said. There was no evidence of that. It might have been a rudder gone, or tiller ropes.

The General Page did a wild turn clear of the drifting riverboat, and as she did the Van Dorn came charging past, making for the ironclad.

“Oh, you son of a bitch!” Sullivan roared, hurling more abuse on the River Defense boat than Bowater had ever heard him shout at the enemy. “Son of a bitch is goin for our meat!”

But Bowater’s eyes were on the General Sterling Price, racing to take the place of the Bragg, steaming into the storm of iron the Yankee was firing at her. She slammed into the ironclad aft, twisting her around in the river. The Price shuddered her full length, as if she had struck a reef. The ironclad rolled away under the impact, firing her guns into the Price as the riverboat hit and kept on going. The sound of rending wood, the screech of structural members