“Sir, I have just spoken with Commander Robb, whose loyalties I frankly question. He could not have told me the truth.”
“I’ve spoken with Robb. We both agree Merrimack should remain. You may draw the fires and stand down to an engine watch.”
“Sir…”
McCauley slammed the flat of his hand down on the desk, a more energetic move than Alden would have thought him capable of, and Alden started. “Goddamn it!” McCauley shouted. “Do you think I have not examined this from all angles? Goddamn it! Fifty-two years I have been in this navy, was a captain while you were still at your mother’s tit, sir, and I will not have you in here questioning my every order!”
Alden straightened, came to attention. McCauley was no traitor, but traitors had his ear and they had swayed him and he would not be swayed back. He had made the last decision that he had the energy to make, Alden could see that, and that decision would stand.
“Aye, aye, sir. I will go and see the fires are drawn.” He turned and left the office, and he knew he would not return.
A cable length from the Merrimack he stopped and ran his eyes over her. She was a grand and solid thing, with her high black sides and the single white band running from gunport to gunport. She had none of the elegant sweep of the ships of an earlier era—her sheer was perfectly straight—but what that lost her in grace it added in giving her a formidable, martial look. If she was the descendant of the great high-pooped, gilded men-of-war of centuries past, then she had evolved into something leaner, more efficient, more deadly, the naval equivalent of Mr. Darwin’s theory.
She did not look so magnificent now, with her masts and yards all gone, down to the lower masts, and not a bit of standing rigging to support those. Smoke was rolling out of her funnel, midway between the fore and main masts, a thick black smoke, and Alden knew that down in the belly of the ship Isherwood was pushing the men to get the fires up and the boilers churning and the steam pumping through the pipes.
Isherwood. Alden did not think he had the strength to tell him.
The Merrimack had been in commission less than six years. She had cost the United States nearly $700,000 to build. She had had her problems, sure, and she was not much to look at now, dockside and stripped of her rig. But she was in her heart a magnificent ship.
I should just damn well take her anyway, Alden thought. Just cast off, let her drift out into the stream…Murray at the helm, one of the firemen at forward lookout… He felt a tremor of excitement as the idea built in his head. Just take the Merrimack anyway, and damn McCauley and his orders.
But he could not and he knew it, and the fantasy faded away. He was a naval officer, had been for all of his adult life, and the habit of obeying orders was far too deeply ingrained for him to ignore it now. Like a peddler’s horse that has tramped the same route every day of its life, and knows no other, so Commander James Alden could not alter the route along which his sense of duty and respect for rank led him.
He felt sick, down deep in his stomach, as he stepped up the brow. He crossed the deck to the scuttle and climbed slowly down to the engine room, where he would tell Benjamin Isherwood to draw the fires and let the beast die.
8
Under the orders of Flag Officer Paulding, was inaugurated and in part consummated one of the most cowardly and disgraceful acts which has ever disgraced the Government of a civilized people.
— Major General William B. Taliaferro, Virginia Provisional Army, to John Letcher, Governor of Virginia
It took the Confederate States Ship Cape Fear a little over fifty hours’ steaming, Cape Fear to Cape Henry.
From Wilmington, it was three miles downriver, feeling their way in the moonlight, to the point where the Cape Fear River opened wide and Bowater could feel the tension ease as the muddy banks and their hidden snags receded from view. They passed Orton’s Point and finally, with Smith’s Island looming, turned southeast, leaving Zeek’s Island to starboard. Fifteen miles from the dock at Wilmington they steamed through New Inlet and met the long rollers of the Atlantic Ocean.
Then it was northeast and forty miles off the low, treacherous shore of North Carolina, the Outer Banks. Once Samuel had determined that tricky Diamond Shoals were well astern, dead reckoning with the chart spread on the table in his cabin, it was a near-ninety-degree course change to northwest and the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay.
That was pretty much how Captain Samuel Bowater had figured it. Fifty hours, Wilmington to Cape Henry, and that had them steaming into the bay in full darkness, and running past Fortress Monroe and the naval installations at Newport News and Norfolk in the dead hours, the least watchful hours. They could anchor once they were well up the James River, once they were safely in the bosom of Virginia.
Three hours and ten minutes after he had stepped aboard, they had slipped the fasts and worked their way out into the stream. The chief engineer, Hieronymus M. Taylor—Bowater smiled as he recalled the name—had said five hours to get head up steam, but that was the sort of thing engineers always said. Made them look particularly efficient when they had steam up in half that time.
Engineers …
In the days of sail, an officer learned it all. He could navigate, sure, and work his ship in a harbor or in a storm. But he could also knot and splice, he could lay aloft to stow sail, he could stand a trick at the helm, and had done so. He could set up standing rigging and send spars down to the deck and act as gun captain or sailing master or mast captain. There was no part of any job on board that the captain had not, at some point, done himself.
But with the advent of the steam engine, that all changed. Now there was someone aboard his ship who knew more about its most vital part than he. It was a relationship that Samuel Bowater was still struggling to define.
Goddamned engineers…
He had begun defining it for his present circumstance the second he stepped aboard. It had not been his intention to get underway immediately—first light in the morning would have been sufficient—but one look at Hieronymus Taylor and Bowater knew that the first conversation he had with that man had better end with an order, and an unequivocal one. The relationship of superior to inferior had to be established immediately and forcefully. Bowater knew men like Taylor—rough, uneducated, surly—and knew they had to be handled in the same way one handled a bad-tempered servant.
So he ordered steam up, turned his back on the engineer, ordered the luff to show him the master’s cabin.
Harwell turned to the tasks with a will, overseeing every aspect of carrying the trunks and bags aboard and maneuvering them down the port side deck that ran the length of the deckhouse, fifty feet, to a ladder that ran from the front of the deckhouse to the wheelhouse above.
Harwell gestured for Bowater to go first. “The captain’s cabin, sir, is in the wheelhouse, just behind the wheelhouse. I hope you will find that convenient.”
Bowater stepped through the wheelhouse with its big varnished wheel and bell lanyard for communicating with the engine room, and through the open door into the cabin beyond. The walls of the cabin were also painted white, gleaming and spotless, and the deck was covered in the traditional black-and-white-checkered canvas. The overhead was white as well, with varnished deck beams at regular intervals. There were windows with curtains on three sides, and even in the evening sun the cabin was wonderfully lit.
On one wall was a built-in bunk, against another a washstand. A generous table was lashed down against the forward bulkhead. In all it was a very agreeable space, light and airy as a deckhouse.