August crept by, with its sweltering heat and dripping humidity. During the soft Virginia evenings, when the sun began to incline toward the west, and the Cape Fear was tied to the seawall or swinging on her hook, Hieronymus Taylor made his way aft to the fantail, violin under his arm, and sitting on the after rail coaxed lovely soft melodies from his instrument.
Moses Jones would soon drift aft, as if by pure chance, and he would lend his voice to Taylor’s music. They reminded Samuel, who would sometimes listen from the roof of the deckhouse, of two dancers in perfect sympathy with one another.
An illiterate coal passer and a poor, barely educated Southern peckerwood, but somehow, to Bowater’s amazement, they made music as if they were one person, and even he, who had no tolerance for the dreary sentimentality or the shallow joviality of popular music, found some merit in their performances. As did the other Cape Fears, who gathered every night to listen.
Early in the month the Yankees sent hot-air balloons aloft from the deck of a small steamer, with men in baskets suspended beneath to take a look at the Confederate works at Sewall’s Point. It was a novelty that warranted a few days’ discussions. And still the Union ships assembled, until they were so much a part of the coastline that neither Bowater nor any others of the Confederates on the shore south of Hampton Roads paid them any mind.
Until the afternoon of August 26, when they left.
It was a Monday. The day before, Bowater had wandered over to the riverfront park with a new canvas and easel. There had been several weeks of inclement weather, which had kept him from his usual painting, and that had made him anxious, a reaction which surprised him. It would not have occurred to him that he was anxious to see Wendy Atkins again, though thoughts of her still haunted him. More curiosity than anything, he told himself, a self-flagellating tendency to stoke his own irritation.
The Cape Fear was at the dock at Sewall’s Point, just south of Hampton Roads, off-loading ordnance. Despite the big Parrott gun in the bow and the twin howitzers, the tug was once again transporting supplies around the Elizabeth River. Bowater hoped to get into action again, indeed he never thought otherwise, but it would not be shelling the Union fleet. No one thought the United States Navy would be caught napping twice.
“Fleet’s getting up steam,” a captain of artillery noted as he and Bowater and Taylor watched the Cape Fears swaying a smoothbore thirty-two-pounder off the fantail and onto its waiting carriage.
“Is that a fact?” Here was some interesting news. The sharp edge that Bowater had felt after his fight with the steamer was now growing dull again.
Bowater and Taylor followed the gunner up the wooden steps, past the dusty earthworks, the mounds of dirt piled up to augment the fortification already in place.
They climbed up to the top of the rampart, above the black barrels of the guns that leered out over the water. Before them, spread out like a lake, the blue water of Hampton Roads. A little over three miles to the north, Fortress Monroe. Five miles off and a little north of west was Newport News Point, and between them, like a series of black dashes on the blue water, the massed fleet of the United States.
Bowater pulled his telescope from his pocket, snapped it open, and focused it north. He could pick out the Wabash and the Minnesota. Plumes of black smoke were crawling up from their stacks. Steam frigates getting underway. The wind was light out of the south. When Samuel Bowater was a young boy, no man-of-war could have left the Chesapeake Bay in those conditions. But the steam engine had changed that, had changed the entire nature of war at sea. Now schedules, and not wind and tide, dictated fleet movements. Now engineers lorded it over captains.
“That’s a lot of damned ships.” The artilleryman’s observation yanked Bowater from his reverie.
“And that don’t count the ships still on blockade. Or comin’ in from foreign ports,” Taylor added.
The three men stood silent for several minutes and looked at the fleet. The profile of one of the big steamers began to change, to foreshorten.
“Wabash is underway,” Bowater said.
“Where you think they’re goin’?” the artilleryman asked.
“Hard to say. Charleston? Cape Fear? New Orleans? They have more choices than ships, to be sure.”
“Wherever it is,” Taylor said, “some poor Southrons are in for a whole lot of hurt.”
Thirty hours later, as the Cape Fear picked up her mooring off the dockyard, with the sun just a few hours from setting, they discovered where the fleet was bound, and who was in for the hurt.
“Boat’s putting out, sir.”
Ruffin Tanner, who had remained with the Cape Fear, was lashing the helm, looking out the wheelhouse window, as Bowater wrote in the log, 4:43—Done with engine.
Samuel turned and stepped across the wheelhouse and looked where Tanner pointed. A longboat pulling for them. Odd. He picked up the field glasses that he kept near the wheel, fixed the boat in the lenses. Flag Officer Forrest in the stern sheets. Odder still.
“Mr. Harwell!” The luff looked up from the foredeck. “It appears that Flag Officer Forrest is coming aboard. Please arrange for some kind of side party,” he said, and Harwell, who absolutely lived for such pomp, saluted and hurried off.
Five minutes later, Forrest stepped aboard to a credible display involving rifles and cutlasses and Eustis Babcock’s bosun’s pipe. Forrest exchanged salutes with the officers and Bowater led him up to the wheelhouse.
“They did a good job here, damned good,” Forrest said, looking around the rebuilt bridge and cabin and nodding his head. “They do good work, when they do work. Now see here, Bowater. Just got word. That damned Union fleet’s anchored at Hatteras Inlet. Got a chart?”
“Yes, sir.” Bowater pulled the chart of the coast from Cape Lookout to Cape Henry, unrolled it, and placed weights on the corners.
“There.” Forrest put a meaty finger down on the narrow Hatteras Island. “All those ships, you saw them. They’re going to blow hell out of the forts. We have two forts there, Hatteras and Clark. Gibraltar they ain’t.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve been there. Delivered ordnance to them twice now.”
“Yes, yes. ’Course you have. Good. Because you’re going to do it again. We’ve got to try and reinforce them. They don’t have above four hundred men, against all those abolition kangaroos Welles sent down there. Commodore Barron will be going down with Winslow soon as he can get underway. You’ll report to him. Get your ship alongside and get all the ordnance you can take.”
“And we are to leave?”
“Immediately, Captain. Immediately. As I hear it the Yankees are already knocking the stuffing out of those forts.”
“Aye, sir.” Bowater stepped over to the engine-room bell, gave a single jingle. Stand by. He waited to hear Hieronymus Taylor cursing from two decks down.
Twenty minutes later, they were tied up alongside the dockyard. With the fires freshly banked it took no time to get head up steam again. It took longer for Bowater to explain to a fuming Chief Taylor why his engine, which he had put happily to bed, was being called on once more. At last, when he seemed sure that Bowater understood the great favor being rendered, Taylor stooped to spread the fires in the boiler.
Goddamned engineers…
The ordnance workers were ready for them: a wagonful of shells and fuses, powder and round shot, whatever could be spared for the beleaguered forts on Hatteras.