Inadvertently New Ironsides’s gunners solved the stalemate by shooting through Black Prince’s mizzenmast. It screamed as it splintered, then with a groan fell over the side and onto the Americans’ deck. Ulric instantly saw it as a bridge. He scrambled to the mast, pulled himself up by the strength of his arms and good leg, then forced his leg under him to rise to a standing position. He did not dash over the mast; rather, he hobbled almost crablike, dragging and swinging his cork leg after him. Yet the young man who had danced across the dance floors of Washington with such grace summoned every last bit of that coordination and control to pick his way across that rounded, splintered, and rope-twisted mast. If he had been able to pay attention he would not have been able to tell which group of men was more incredulous at the sight-the British manning the stern Armstrong pivot gun or his own Marine gun crew. Finally reaching the enemy’s side, he let himself down onto his good leg and sagged from the impact. He was on the deck of Black Prince. He barely had time to look up and see the gleam of a bayonet with a red coat behind it rushing toward him.
Oblivious to the drama on the surface, the admiral’s two small submersibles had waited for just this moment for Black Prince to close. Their torpedoes bulged at the end of long spars. Finding the ship through the glass ports in the light filtering down from the cloudless sky, they made gentle contact with the iron hull with the strong magnet on the end of the torpedo. Once the torpedoes were locked onto the hull they backed off, unraveling the electric wires that connected with batteries inside the boats. Before the wires went completely taut, the circuits were closed.
Ulric had barely drawn himself up. The Royal Marine’s bayonet was plunging toward his chest when the deck heaved, throwing him onto one of the Armstrongs. The gun crew had been thrown off their feet as well and were just getting up when the deck heaved again. An awful groaning came from deep within the ship.
Installed low in Black Prince, her engines had survived the hard pounding as her gang stoked the forty furnaces feeding the ten boilers that generated the steam for its 5,210-horsepower engines. But the torpedoes had struck where the Dahlgrens could not reach, bending the shaft and rupturing some of the furnaces. Burning coal, white-hot ash, and clinker spewed out among the stokers, who screamed out their last moments in hell. Water rushed in through the torn hull, flooding the engine rooms as the guns above continued to fight. When the seawater reached the boilers, they began to explode.
The ship’s death agony was not yet apparent to the men on deck getting to their feet. The tars were game and came for Ulric again. He had drawn his Navy Colt and dropped the first two men. A third struck him a numbing blow on the shoulder with a rammer; the pistol fell from his hand. The tar drew back to brain him, but he went down under the rush of men in blue coats. Ulric’s own Marines had followed him over the mast armed with cutlasses and pikes from the ready racks. He was pulled to his feet by strong arms.
On the bridge, Captain Wainwright was desperately trying to reach the engine room through the metal voice pipes and the mechanical telegraph connected to it. The shrieks at the end of the voice pipe told him the worst. Everyone in the conning tower had been frozen listening to the death below. The shudders that pulsed up through the deck from the exploding boilers jarred everyone back to life. Wainwright knew his ship was lost. He found Seymour had slumped into his chair. “Admiral, Black Prince is mortally wounded. She can do no more. I must save the men who are left.” Seymour’s jaw set in a vise as the ship groaned in its death throes; he could only nod.
Wainwright left the conning tower to personally haul down the colors, an act he would not delegate to a man of lower rank. He made his way through the shambles on the spar deck. He could feel the ship beginning to settle under him as it listed to larboard. The smoke from the guns and a dozen fires on the deck hid the stern in its wispy black arms. He made out a group on the stern around the pivot gun and was about to order them to abandon ship, when the breeze quickened to part the smoke. They were not his men.
The officer among them was a young, fair man, leaning against the gun. A man raised a pistol to shoot, but the officer knocked it up to discharge in the air. The officer straightened up and touched the muzzle of his own pistol to his forehead in salute. “Colonel Dahlgren, United States Army, sir.”
Wainwright was a hard man to fluster, and even this scene could not break through the iron presence of a naval officer. He touched the brim of his cap, “Captain Wainwright, commanding Her Majesty’s Ship Black Prince, sir.”
As the deck began to cant even more, Dahlgren coolly asked, “Do you strike, sir?”
“Damnation, sir. I do.”
SOUTH AGER DOCK, CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, 7:32 PM, OCTOBER 8, 1863
For more than two hours the crowds massed along the battery and the Charleston docks had been barely able to control their excitement. They could not actually see the battle six miles away beyond Fort Sumter and Morris Island, but they could hear the continuous rumble of the guns and see the pall of smoke. It was more than just gunpowder smoke. The funeral pyres of great wooden ships go straight up into the heavens. Signals from Fort Sumter added little.
That changed as the signal officer at Beauregard’s side read the waving flags from his telescope. His voice shaking he said, “Sumter reports a huge British warship is sailing into the harbor.” That could only mean that the British had won the naval battle. The arrival of the ship was the act in international law that would declare the hated blockade broken. Those on the crowded balcony spontaneously shouted in triumph. Word was shouted down to the street and spread with electric speed. The crowds erupted in near hysterical cheering, with rebel yells keening over the water. Beauregard announced that he would personally welcome the ship at the Ager Dock, and he bounded down the stairs, his staff running after. He shouted an order to have the Army Band meet him there.
Charleston’s cheering crowds were the last thing on the mind of the captain of the Resistance. With most of his guns out action, a third of his crew dead or wounded, and his hull filling with water from the ruptured waterline armor, Chamberlain knew he had three bad choices. He could continue to fight his few guns and go under, he could try to make it to Bermuda and go down in less than ten miles, or he could break off action and take his ship into Charleston and probably go under before he reached a pier. If he was lucky, he could run it aground or dock it where it could be saved. Seeing Black Prince strike instantly decided his mind. His engines were still game; the water had not reached them yet. There was a good chance he could make the five miles to the city. The Housatonic pursued but sheered off when she came under the fire of the Confederate harbor forts.
As he approached Fort Sumter, he could see the cheering garrison lining its rubbled walls, and a tug emerged from around the masked side of the island and chugged toward the Resistance, blowing frantically on its whistle. Thank God, Chamberlain thought. The Resistance would need all the help it could get. She was slowing down; the water filling the hull was a drag on the engines. The tug kept blowing its whistle, and Chamberlain could see figures on the deck waving their arms frantically.
Resistance was finally within hailing distance of the tug when she hit the mine. The ship shuddered. Chamberlain could hear the scream of twisting and snapping hull plates from within the depths of the ship. Still the engines thundered to keep Resistance moving. He shouted into the speaking tube to the chief engineer who reported that the engine compartment was secure but that the water was quickly rising to the level of the boilers. He could not guarantee how much longer he would dare leave the black gang in the stokehold. “Give me everything you have got, then get the men out.” He turned to one of his officers. “Start getting the wounded up on deck. I don’t want them down there if we founder and sink.”