The oars came up in two straight rows, and the man in the bow hooked onto the sagging Merrimack with his boat hook and pulled the boat along her black side. Ten feet above their heads the white band along her gundeck made a ghostly trail the full 275 feet of her massive hull. At regular intervals along the white band, the empty gunports gaped open, like mouths trying in vain to protest. One of the Wabash class, the most powerful, most valuable men-of-war in the United States Navy. She seemed too substantial to be destroyed.
“Here, sir.” The bowman had reached the gunport to which they had earlier run the train of combustible material—rope, ladders, grating, hawsers—which they had laid in the form of a big letter V forward of the mainmast and then doused with turpentine.
The bowman gave a final pull of the boat hook and then checked the motion as Wise came up level with the gunport. Cotton waste and frayed rope hung out of the square hole in an unsightly fashion. Wise sighed, looked around one last time, tried to put off doing that terrible thing, but there was no delaying it.
He pulled an oilskin pouch from his pocket, fished out a match, and struck the match on the gunnel of the boat. It sputtered and flared and caught, and Wise held it to the cotton waste. The flame jumped onto the spirit-soaked cotton, consumed it, moved inboard along the flammable trail.
“All right…shove off, give way, all.” The bowman pushed the boat off from Merrimack’s side and the oars came down and the boat pulled away. Wise pushed the tiller over and turned to look back at his own handiwork. His foot kicked a binnacle lantern lying in the bottom of the boat. He had saved it out of Merrimack earlier—why, he did not know. Because he had to save something, perhaps.
The oarsmen dipped their blades and pulled, dipped and pulled. They were twenty feet from the steam frigate when Wise turned back again to see if the flames had taken, and as he did the decks and gunports, the masts and rails seemed to explode in flame.
The shock of light and heat slammed into the boat, and Wise threw his arm up over his eyes.
He heard one of the men curse, and the confusion of an oar crabbing, oars banging on oars. Flames burst from each of the Merrimack’s gunports. Fire mounted up the lower masts, like the stakes in an old-time witch-burning. From over the high bulwarks they could see the flames run fore and aft along the deck, they could hear the low roar of the inferno, and now from the shoreline they could hear shouts of outrage, the sounds of the mob spurred to action, but it was too late for them.
“Well hell, sir,” the bowman called. “Reckon she’s afire now.”
“Reckon. Very well, let’s get a move on. We got more to do like her.” Wise turned his back on the burning Merrimack. He was blind now in the dark, after staring into those wicked flames. He pushed the tiller over and headed for where he knew the Germantown to be.
Paulding had ordered him to see about firing the Merrimack and he had done it, done it damned well, and now that honorable ship, the pride of the United States Navy, was engulfed in flames. In his stomach he felt physically sick. It was the most shameful duty he had ever been ordered to perform.
Together, as if they were puppets on one string, the heads of Samuel Bowater, Thadeous Harwell, and Hieronymus Taylor all moved right to left as they traced the line of the rocket streaking up, almost directly overhead.
“Well, now, that’s got to mean some damned thing…” Taylor observed.
Bowater pulled his eyes from the sky just as the rocket burst into flaming fragments. The three of them were standing on the roof of the deckhouse, where they could get an unobstructed view all around.
He looked to port and the town of Norfolk, and to starboard at the Gosport naval yard, two hundred yards away. If something was acting, Bowater had guessed it would be at the naval yard, and it seemed he had guessed right.
He could hear a ship winning her anchor, he could see boats moving, men on shore, their rifles gleaming. The occasional smattering of gunfire. There was a powder-keg atmosphere, ready to blow, and Bowater was not sure where to put his ship to keep her clear of the blast.
“Look here, sir,” said Harwell, and Bowater looked where he was pointing. A line of flame, a ship on fire, perhaps, it was hard to tell.
“Now, what in hell…” Taylor began and then suddenly the line of flame exploded into a great sheet of fire, illuminating the ship fore and aft, spilling out of the long line of gunports, climbing up the lower masts.
“Ho-ly…” Taylor muttered.
“That’s one of the Wabash-class frigates,” Bowater said. He could see her perfectly in the flames of her own destruction.
“I think she’s Merrimack, sir,” Harwell offered. “They’ve fired Merrimack.”
For a brief instant Bowater considered coming alongside her, wondered if the Cape Fear’s pumps were equal to the task of saving the burning ship. He opened his mouth to speak, and then the whole world seemed to explode into flames.
10
The flag of Virginia floats over the yard.
— George T. Sinclair to Stephen R. Mallory
Beyond the pyre that was the frigate Merrimack , first one, then another, then another of the massive A-framed ship houses burst into flame, the base of each building engulfed, the fire licking its way up the curved sides. At the other end of the yard, where Samuel knew the ropewalk and sail loft and rigging loft to be, now suddenly there was only fire. In a flash the dark night was turned into a brilliant inferno.
Across the river came shouts of rage, impotent gunfire.
“They’re firing the yard!” Samuel said, and even he could not keep from shouting that time.
“Who, sir?” asked Harwell.
“Got to be the damned Yankees,” Taylor said. “Got to be them damned Yankees running away and burnin the yard behind ’em.”
A bell rang and Bowater turned and out of the dark thrashed the steam frigate Pawnee, with her high sides and straight sheer and ugly, foreshortened masts. Samuel Bowater knew her well.
Black smoke poured from her funnel and the water creamed white around her bows as she gathered way. The burning ships and yard washed her in yellow light and weird dancing shadows. Samuel could see men lining her rails and imagined they were marines, ready for whatever else the night would bring.
From her after chocks, a hawser ran straight back, like a leash, and made off to the end was the USS Cumberland, which Pawnee had in tow. Unlike the squat Pawnee, Cumberland had the lofty spars, longer bowsprit, and jib boom and more elegant sheer of a pure sailing vessel. But without steam, she was helpless in the light air.
“Ahoy, the tug!” A voice came from Pawnee’s quarterdeck.
“Ahoy!” Bowater shouted back.
“Come up on Cumberland’s starboard side and make fast! Go on, get a move on!”
“Aye, aye!” he shouted, then turned to his officers. “We have to go ashore, see what we can do. Mr. Harwell, assemble a landing party. Tell off five steady hands.”
“Aye, aye, sir. And sir, may I lead the party?”
“No, Luff. I’ll go. I need you here.”
“Aye, sir,” Harwell said, and Bowater could see the genuine disappointment. But he could not send Harwell. He did not know himself what he would do once he was ashore.
“Mind if I tag along, Cap’n?” Taylor asked. He had his hands in his pockets and was leaning back some, as if loitering by the woodstove at the general store.