Rork was not pleased that he was not in the landing party. Wake told him he was staying with the schooner and would keep ten men aboard. Fifteen would go with Wake, crowded into the St. James’s long boat. Rork listened carefully as Wake outlined the plan for the initial landing, which would be made by the navy’s landing party.
Wake’s boat would join the four other schooners’ boats, with ten men in each, and the steamers’ boats with fifteen men in each. The tug would not furnish any men to the landing party since she would need all she had to tend to the towlines and man her guns and engine. That made a total of one hundred sailors going ashore under Wake’s command. After the sailors were ashore just upriver from the mouth, the boats would all withdraw with their skeleton crews to be towed to the transport and anchored out in the deep water with the gunboats. There the boats would embark the 195th Infantry and carry the soldiers from the transport ship to the beachhead as fast as they could be towed. It would be a distance of three miles each way.
The tug David would be crucial to getting the men and their equipment and field guns ashore as quickly as possible. And all of this had to be done within two hours of the high tide. Timing and efficiency were of paramount importance. If one link in the chain of planned events broke, the entire endeavor would be doomed.
Rork was quiet as his captain presented the outline to him. Both of them knew their opinions of this operation were similar, and both knew there was nothing for it now but to try to make it work. As he was explaining the plan, Wake kept remembering what Rork had said the day before about fools’ confidence. He was appreciative that Rork wasn’t repeating it now.
They estimated high tide at the mouth of the Timucuahatchee River to be near eight o’clock in the morning, two hours after the sun would lighten the sky. Actually, no one was sure of when it would be since the tides on this coast tended to be somewhat erratic and few of the sailors knew this section of the coast well at all. The fleet was to anchor before the next day’s dawn and supposed to be already landing the sailors when the sun rose, to get there just ahead of the top of the tide and use the flood and the ebb to beach. Wake knew that the navigation tonight by West and Partington would be the determining factor in the achievement of that timetable. If the speed was too slow they would arrive too late, too fast and they might arrive before the sunset glow had left the sky and be silhouetted against it to the west.
There was a sliver of a moon that night. Wake insisted that all off-watch men get as much sleep as possible so that only the men of the first watch saw its rising, a cold orange that turned to liquid silver, like some slow-motion signal rocket from the eastern horizon. The sailors who saw it were disturbed by the moon’s appearance, for they knew that by the time they would be anchored it would shine a glow of light on the sea, just enough that a shore lookout might see the distant shapes of ships upon the Gulf. The beauty of that celestial display was lost in the ominous consequences of its splendor, and the men of the St. James turned their backs to it as they would an alluring whore who was known to rob a sailor.
Wake was unable to follow his own order to get rest and stayed on deck for the night. On the third bell of the first watch the Nygaard, in the van of the fleet, swung to the east. The gunboats, ferryboat, tug, and transport followed her around, each with a schooner under tow. Wake did the mathematics. It was now one-thirty in the morning and they were making about five knots and had seventeen miles to go to reach the anchoring point for the larger ships, that is if the navigation on the turn was correct. This would be a very close-run thing. They would have just enough time to anchor and launch the boats, load them and get them under the tug’s tow to the shore before the sun came up in strength—if nothing went wrong between now and then.
Wake was in his cabin at the chart table when he heard the commotion on deck. The watch had just changed and at first he thought the men were bantering back and forth in the nervous prelude to action. Then he heard a man, he thought it was Cantrell in the starboard gun crew, loudly exclaim something about something looking like a volcano going up. Seconds later Wake reached the deck and saw Faber and the watch standers lining the starboard railing, pointing toward something ahead of the ship. Then he saw the object of their comments and made an oath himself.
The stack of the Fort Brooklyn did indeed look like a volcano. Sparks and cinders were shooting high into the air, followed by dense billows
