Thieves Of Mercy

hands she could not feel. She looked as far north as she could.

At first there was nothing. Only the dark water, barely distinct from the land. But slowly, slowly, from the north, something came into view, something moving on the water. No masts that she could see, no paddle-wheel boxes, no high superstructure or sweeping sheer of gunnels. It did not seem to be a ship at all, just a dark menacing presence, some leviathan making its way toward Norfolk, something sent up from hell to punish them all, Yankee and Southerner alike.

She stared at it, puzzled, cocked her head. And then like a flash

of inspiration it came to her. She looked at Molly and Molly nod

ded. “Virginia,” she whispered. The mighty Confederate ironclad.

t had been five hours before that when Josiah Tattnall returned to his cabin and stretched out in his

bunk fully clothed-“all standing,” as the sailors said-save for his shoes and sword belt. He lay for a while in the dark, listening to the wild sounds of the men lightening the ship, the drag and bang of the dismantling: galley, cabins, mess tables, fresh water, spirits, food, boatswain’s stores, personal effects, all of it gathered up, wrenched free, carried up, tossed overboard. Gangs of men formed human chains to pass the tons of pig iron ballast up from the bilges.

Tattnall could envision the great mass of jetsam floating around

Virginia and piling up on the bottom. He wondered if they would

go aground on all the material they were throwing over the side.

He closed his eyes, enveloped by the din of the men struggling to save his ship. He had had command of her for less than two months, but he loved her as much as any ship he had ever sailed. She was the most powerful thing afloat in all the Americas. All the world, most likely. Proof of what the Confederate States of America could accomplish, even with so little.

His thoughts drifted off to ships past, to when he was young and strong and never fell ill, when it seemed his life would go on forever and nothing would ever slow him down. He fell asleep and dreamed disquieting dreams of ships and stormy seas and threatening coasts.

He awoke later with someone shaking his arm. He opened his eyes, came instantly awake, a thing bred into him from years of command, when a summons from dead sleep invariably meant he was needed to step in where disaster was imminent, when he had to rush topside and begin making decisions the instant his feet hit the quarterdeck.

“Yes?” In the feeble light of a single lantern he could see the troubled face of Catesby Jones.

“Sir, we have thrown over everything we can. We have raised the ship. She’s drawing eighteen feet now, sir.”

“Very good.” Tattnall stood awkwardly. Jones made no effort to help, and Tattnall was glad of it. He felt feeble enough without receiving a patronizing hand. “Let’s get under way.”

“Ah, sir…” Jones equivocated, and the tone in his voice made Tattnall look sharp at him. “There is a problem. The pilots now say they can’t take the ship above the Jamestown Flats, even with an eighteen-foot draft.”

“They…” Tattnall did not know what to say. “They say… they can’t get the ship up the river?”

“No, sir.”

“Well… goddamn them, they have said any number of times they could, if we raised her to eighteen feet. You have heard them. Damn it, I asked them again just this evening!”

“Yes, sir.”

Tattnall took a deep breath. He had to hear it from the pilots. Before he went into the rage he felt building, he had to hear what the pilots had to say.

Without a word to Jones he stepped from his small cabin into the open space at the forward end of the berthing deck. The other cabins, he saw, had been disassembled, the bulkheads no doubt flung over the side, but his had been left untouched. In the light of the single lantern hanging from the overhead he found the ladder to the gun deck and climbed up, quicker than he had climbed a ladder in some years.

The gun deck was more brightly lit, with lanterns down the centerline of the ship. Most of the ship’s company were there, within the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot casemate. Even with all those men the space looked empty now, with everything but guns gone by the board.

Tattnall looked around quickly, then snapped to Jones, “Pass the word for the pilots.”

“Yes, sir.” Jones hurried off. Two minutes later he returned with the pilots, Parrish and Wright, miserably in tow.

“Sir,” Parrish said.

“Sir,” Wright said.

Tattnall glared at them. He meant to ask them what this was all about, but he could not make the words come out. He was paralyzed by fury. The two pilots looked sheepish, miserable, and guilty.

“Sir,” Parrish began again, “we represented to you that we could get the Virginia to within forty miles of Richmond. But you must understand, that was in the event that we had an easterly wind. You see, an easterly will raise the level in the river enough to carry eighteen feet that far up. But as you know, sir, we have had westerlies, two days of westerlies, and they have had quite the opposite effect. We simply do not have the depth of water now to get the ship upriver.”

Tattnall was silent for a moment more. The pilots fidgeted like children. “Sir, if you could raise the ship to fourteen feet draft, I do believe we could get upriver,” Wright said, as if trying to be helpful.

“She cannot be raised to fourteen feet,” Tattnall said.

“Yes, sir. We are very sorry, sir, but we cannot raise the level of the water above what it is.”

The whole thing seemed unreal, it was all too horrible. Tattnall had long seen the moment coming when Norfolk would fall to the Yankees. He had examined every option. There were only two that he would consider.

The first was to save the ship. Lighten her, get her up to Richmond. The option he had chosen. But if that could not be done, then his second choice would have been an all-out assault on the Union Navy. Fling himself and his ship at the wooden walls, plow through them, tear them up the way Old Buck had done. Eventually the Virginia would have been rammed and sunk-the Yankees had brought ships to Hampton Roads for just that purpose-but not before the ironclad had struck the Federals another serious and devastating blow. Perhaps even sunk that damned Monitor once and for all.

That second option had always held some appeal, suicidal though it was. Tattnall knew he would not live forever. Hell, he would be lucky to live through the war. To die with guns blazing, surrounded by the shattered fleet of an enemy, that was how an old man-of-war’s man should go. Like Nelson. And the men would have followed, would have stood to their guns with the water rising around their ankles, because they were the men of the Virginia, and they were Southerners. If the pilots had told him about the effect of the westerly wind, his decision that evening would have been very different.

They had known all along, the bastards. They themselves pointed out that it had been blowing westerly for two days. They might have mentioned something.

But they did not, and now the pilots had robbed him of the attack option. With the Virginia raised by four feet, the bottom edge of her iron casement was out of the water, and two feet of her vulnerable wooden hull was exposed. A ship that hours before had been invulnerable to any shot fired by seagoing artillery now could be sent to the bottom by a tugboat with a rifled gun in the bow.

It was one thing to attack the Union fleet in a mighty ironclad impervious to shot. Quite another to go into harm’s way with an Achilles’ heel two hundred and seventy-five feet long and two feet wide. He could not ask his men to do that. He could not. The pilots had stripped him of any choice.

Tattnall glared at the two men and they made a halfhearted attempt to meet his eyes. Why did you do this? Tattnall wondered. He did not think they were traitors. Cowards… damned cowards… That was the answer. They knew what Old Tat would do with the ship if he could not get her to Richmond. They did not want to be part of such a desperate fight.

“Get out of my sight,” Tattnall growled and the pilots saluted and scurried away. The flag officer turned to the Lieutenants Jones.

“Those yellow bastards have sunk us,” he announced. “Goddamn their miserable hides. Goddamn the whole race of ’em. We can’t save the ship, and we can’t let her fall into the Yankees’ hands. We can save the crew. Sailors are near as scarce as ironclads. We’ll put her on shore near Craney Island. Get the men off, then burn her. Let the