“Then fire away, Lieutenant,” said Bowater, with a calm he did not feel.
“Take aim and fire!” Harwell shouted.
“Aim and fire, aye!” Williams shouted. He sighted down the gun, called for a bit of an adjustment, stepped back, bringing the lanyard taut.
Bowater felt the excitement build, clutched the iron rail tight, pressed his lips together. They were still approaching, their distance-off less than a mile, and the big Parrott was accurate up to a mile and a half. What…
Bowater’s thoughts were interrupted by the blast of the gun, the jet of gray smoke, the surprisingly violent recoil as the gun flung itself inboard, making the Cape Fear shudder from keel up.
Harwell was staring at the Wabash through his field glasses. He pointed to the sky and Williams waved his acknowledgment.
“Over, sir,” Harwell explained to Bowater. The gun crew jumped back to their places, swabbing and ramming home another shell.
A little more than two minutes passed before the big gun was run out again. Williams adjusted the elevating screw to his satisfaction, then stepped back and pulled the lanyard taut. A pause, and then he jerked the rope and the ten-pound Parrott roared out again.
Bowater kept his glass pressed to his eye, the Wabash filling the lens, and to his delight he saw a hole appear in her bulwark, blue sky where before there had been black hull, splinters big enough to see from a mile away tossed into the air.
“Hit!” shouted Harwell and the men cheered, waved hats, then fell to loading again.
“Well done, Lieutenant!” Bowater fixed the Wabash in his field glasses. It was chaos, as he reckoned it would be, an anthill kicked over. From less than a mile, Bowater could see perfectly well what was happening on the big steamer’s deck. Men were racing about, officers were crowding the quarterdeck, waving arms, men rushing over the foredeck and up the rigging. It was bedlam, Gulliver waking to find himself the captive of the Lilliputians.
Wabash carried nine-and ten-inch Dahlgrens. But her guns were not rifles, but smoothbores, already antiquated. After hundreds of years during which little changed in the way of naval warfare, things were suddenly developing so rapidly that it was difficult for any navy to keep pace.
Still, smoothbore or no, the Wabash ’s guns could blow them to kindling with one broadside, if Wabash could come to grips with them.
The Cape Fear hurled another shell and a hole appeared in the Wabash ’s side, and Bowater wondered what destruction that must have done to the lower deck. He wondered if Wabash was getting steam up. It would do them no good. Cape Fear would be gone before their screw bit water.
The forward gun went off once more, and Bowater saw wood fly off the after rail. It is like a turkey shoot, just an absolute turkey shoot. And once again, he found that the ease with which they were attacking the Union fleet left him feeling edgy and nervous.
He crossed over to the port side, looked out at Wabash with his telescope. There was another vessel now, a smaller one, side-wheeler, schooner rig, steaming around from behind the big steam sloop. Not much bigger than the Cape Fear. Was she going to tow Wabash off?
Bowater shifted his focus from the ship to the side-wheeler. Not towing Wabash off. She was, in fact, coming bow on to the Cape Fear. And then the puff of smoke, the scream of shell, the water plowed up forty yards away, and with it, at last, the flat report of the distant gun. A gunboat! For all the Yankees’ sea power, the only vessel that could get underway fast enough, the only one with a rifled gun that could reach out that far, was one not much larger than the Confederates’.
Harwell, beside him, was dancing with excitement. “Mr. Harwell, please have your gun crew redirect their fire to the gunboat.”
“Aye, sir!” Harwell practically shouted, and relayed the order.
They were closing fast, both vessels charging like knights-errant. The Cape Fear fired, missed, but not by more than a dozen yards. The Yankee fired again and charged on.
He must have more shells than we do… Bowater was counting the valuable projectiles as his gun crew blasted away. He wondered if the Yankee captain had to do the same. He wondered if he knew the Yankee captain, if they had been shipmates once.
The Cape Fear ’s gun went off, the deck shuddered under Bowater’s feet, and in the deafening blast, the Yankee’s gun seemed to fire in absolute silence, less than half a mile away. The last of the reverberations from the Cape Fear’s rifle were dying, and from that noise rose the scream of the Yankee’s shell, fast and loud. Bowater could see the black streak in the sky, right in line with his vessel, and then the shriek was like sharp pegs in his ears and the shell crashed through the cabin behind him, exploding in a great shower of shrapnel and wood and glass.
Before Bowater’s shocked face, an image of painted wood and dark paneling and Littlefield the helmsman, all exploding as if from some internal force. And then he was down, and the darkness washed over him, like the cold water in the dry dock, and once again he could not crawl free.
Hieronymus Taylor did not care for this, did not care for it at all. He paced back and forth, worried the cigar in his mouth, glared at the wheelhouse bell.
Generally, he preferred to be below. He would rather be in his engine room, surrounded by his beloved machinery, than up there in the light with the idiots and prima donnas of the master’s division. He preferred the precision of machinery to the vagaries of wind and tide and politics and chains of command.
It was a preference, and a passion, which he tried to convey to Wendy. He gave her a tour of the engine room, spoke passionately about Scotch boilers and fire tubes and blowdowns. He was absolutely poetic on the subject of winging fires with slice bars, on hot wells and feed water, on Stephenson links and trunks and rods and shafts and pillow blocks.
There was so much he wished to convey to her. He wanted to tell her about the monster that he and his men were able to conjure up, like wizards in storybooks. How they made this monster rise in the boiler, how they drove it under pressure through the pipes, made it work for them, contained it, dangerous beast that it was.
He wanted to tell her how the monster-invisible, deadly hot-was forced into the trunk, made to push the piston, and there it died. He wanted to tell her how the watery remains of the beast were pumped back into the boiler and the thing was raised again from the dead, how they performed this miracle in a continual circuit, again and again, drove this gunboat along in that manner.
It was just like the fellow said, “What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry…” Except it wasn’t an immortal hand at all, just a man, an engineer. That was the miracle of the thing.
He wanted to tell her because he thought she would understand. He had never shared that vision with anyone, never tried. The beats that haunted engine rooms would have looked at him as if he had two heads. The general run of mechanics and engineers could never see the poetry in the machine. They saw pipes and valves and condensers and such, but they could not see the magic, the absolute beauty, in such mechanical perfection. There were times when Hieronymus Taylor would look on his engine, with all its parts running with interlocking grace, knowing that inside those pipes and trunks and hot wells and condensers the beast was living and dying, and he would tear up—actually cry—for the sheer beauty of the thing.