“Burgess, you take over here. See what you can do about patching the stack. I have to go report to the old man. Moses, let’s get her up to about fifteen pounds and see how she takes it.”
Taylor found the ladder up to the deck above, climbed it. He stopped, looked back. “Yeah, and see if you can do somethin’ for Tommy, too.” He took the last rungs, stepped out onto the side deck. He had not realized how choked the engine room was until he pulled in a lungful of fresh air. It was the most wonderful thing in the world. He blinked in the light of the dull overcast, stumbled forward along the deck.
The Yankee fleet was half a mile away, muzzle flashes blinking like fireflies. The water around the Cape Fear and the rest of the mosquito fleet was torn up with the falling shells, and the Confederates were returning fire at a desultory rate. Three shells… Taylor remembered; that was all the Cape Fear had left. The others could not be doing much better.
He climbed up the ladder at the forward end of the deckhouse, stepped onto the boat deck. Bowater was standing there, his hand resting on the remains of a mangled rail, looking out over the fight as if he was watching a sporting event, one in which he had little interest.
Cool son of a bitch… Taylor thought. Bowater looked at him, his right eyebrow shot up.
“Chief, are we taking on water?”
“No, no, had the fire hose turned on me. No fire, no leak. Main steam line took a hard one when that shell exploded, fractured but didn’t break. Got a fishplate on it. It’ll hold for now. We should be able to get underway in a couple of minutes.”
Bowater nodded. “Good, good. Any casualties?”
“Washington got his head took clean off. Tommy’s cut up some, but I was a little busy to see how bad.”
“Merrow!” Bowater called out to the deckhand standing by. “Get St. Laurent and the two of you get down to the engine room, see what you can do for Tommy.”
“Aye!”
“How’s the fight goin, Cap’n?”
“It is going the way one might have predicted. Actually, not so bad. We’ve lost Curlew.” Bowater pointed toward the swampy shoreline that formed the west side of Croatan Sound. The side-wheeler was hard aground, listing to starboard. “Shell went right through her, either came out the bottom or buckled her plate. She just barely made it to shore before she sank.”
The boat deck began to tremble underfoot with the familiar throb of the engine, turning slow. “Reckon we have steam up, Cap’n.”
“Good. Mr. Harwell!” Harwell, who had been nursing his last remaining shells, looked up from the foredeck. “Weigh anchor, please!”
Taylor and Bowater stood at the forward edge of the boat deck, watched the battle raging all around them.
“There goes Forrest, ” Taylor observed. The screw tug, which had been standing in line abreast with her companions, was now drifting back, spinning around slowly in the weak tidal flow. They watched her drift away. There were a hundred things that could have put her out, from a thrown prop to a cracked bearing to a shell in her boiler that scalded half her crew to death.
A splash at her bow and her anchor was down. The tug straightened, stopped her drift, but she was out of the fight. Two down. Nearly a third of the fleet knocked out.
They banged away for another hour and a half. Harwell shot off the last rounds, and then they were spectators, like watching a play, like sitting through hours of Hamlet, fully aware that the Prince of Denmark has no hope to live past the curtain.
Five o’clock and the light was fading fast and the Union ships retired. Fort Bartow was a near wreck, the mosquito fleet battered. Coal was running low, there was not above a dozen shells left among all the Confederate fleet.
With the winter night coming on fast, they stripped Curlew of anything worth having. Sea Bird took Forrest, her propeller disabled, in tow, and the little ships steamed north, forty miles to Elizabeth City.
It was a black night, and the ships had no lights showing, because they did not know what the Union fleet was about. Bowater paced the wheelhouse, peered out into the dark, gave orders to the helmsman, the engine room. Nervous work.
And so it was with a lovely sensation of relief that the first gray light of dawn showed the fleet in relatively good order, steaming line ahead, and the mouth of the Pasquotank River opening up before them.
They anchored up at Elizabeth City, hauled the Forrest up on the ways. They could hear gunfire from Roanoke Island, artillery and small-arms fire. It was a horrible thing to hear, but there was nothing they could do. The Yankees were ashore; it was a land fight now. And even if it was not, they had no ammunition, and they were finding there was none to be had at Elizabeth City.
Lynch sent Hunter to Norfolk to retrieve ammunition. He appointed William Parker to organize the town’s defenses. Parker organized the local militia to man the pathetic fort at Cobb’s Point, pressed an old schooner into service as a makeshift battery.
Around noon the firing at Roanoke Island slackened and then stopped, like a dying man taking his last breath, and everyone in the mosquito fleet knew that the Yankee machine had rolled over the Southern defenses. Bowater could not shake the feeling that they had not done enough, but in his most honest, most private analysis, he could not imagine what more they could have done.
The Yankees’ next step would be Elizabeth City and the mosquito fleet, the last ember of resistance. The men on Roanoke Island had stood and fought to the last, until they were absolutely overrun. Now it was the navy’s turn.
They waited through the next day, sent boats down sound to reconnoiter the Yankees, preparing to get underway. That night the captains met. They agreed to fight until the ammunition was gone, then try to escape. Failing that, they would run their vessels ashore, burn them, destroy the signal books, save their men. The fleet was arranged in line abreast, bows pointing downriver. They divided up what ammunition they had.
It was 3:00 a.m. when Samuel Bowater returned to the Cape Fear, staggered into his cabin, fell facedown on his bunk. He did not take off his coat or his shoes, or his sword or pistol. Even in sleep he was careful not to put his shoes on the bed.
Jacob roused him before dawn. He staggered into the wheelhouse. It was bitter cold. The steam pipes were popping and crackling as Hieronymus Taylor got up a head of steam in the boiler and the first wafts of hot vapor blew through.
Men moved about the deck like clumsy shadows, clearing for action, ready to greet the dawn at quarters, as men-of-war in times of conflict had done for a century or more. They cleared away the bow gun and the howitzers, loaded and ran them out, then retreated to the warmth of the galley, with the old man’s permission, to wait for what would happen next. They huddled against the bulkheads, scarfing toasted bread with cheese, sun-dried-tomato-and-chive omelettes, and deviled partridge, cold.
Bowater ate his omelette standing in the wheelhouse, and though his concentration was taken up with the gathering dawn, the slow revelation of the mosquito fleet at anchor, the riverbanks on either hand, he could not help but notice the extraordinary lightness of the eggs, the perfect blend of savory cheese and sharp chive, the subtlety of the tomatoes that St. Laurent had dried himself. Samuel had seen them, months before, spread out on racks on the boat deck, had nearly ordered them struck below. They were very unseamanlike and disorderly. But he held his tongue, guessing he would be glad for it. And he was.
More and more of the river revealed itself: tangled shoreline, rippled gray water, stubby oak and pine along the shores. And downriver, rising above a western bend, columns of dark smoke, bending in the offshore breeze. The Union squadron, underway.