There were lanterns hanging everywhere, and tools and parts and debris scattered over the deck and stacked on benches against the outboard sides of the engine room. It looked like a disaster, but it still looked better than it had three days before.
Isherwood listened to the thump, the twenty seconds of silence, the thump again of the pistons and realized that that was what had waked him. The thumping, the heartbeat of the ship. Slow, just three revolutions per minute, dockside, but there it was. Merrimack was alive.
On the day that Fort Sumter had surrendered, on the day that Samuel Bowater had boarded the train to Montgomery, Benjamin Isherwood had taken the Bay Line steamer from Washington, D.C., to the Gosport Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth on a secret mission.
He stepped off the little steamer and onto the docks of Portsmouth and was greeted with the sensation that his secret orders were now none too secret. There were ugly glances thrown his way, fingers pointed with no attempt at discretion, conversations interrupted and immediately resumed in hushed tones as he hurried by, head down, eyes front.
The Gosport Naval Shipyard was surrounded by a brick wall, ten feet high and eighteen inches thick. In terms of real defense it was meaningless, but it gave Isherwood some sense of relief as he passed through the iron gate. He had seen no overt signs of hostility or preparations by the Rebels to storm the naval yard, but he could sense it was coming, and he was not alone in that thought.
The yard’s commander, Commodore Charles S. McCauley, had looked displeased to see him, and he probably was. He looked a bit drunk, and he probably was that as well.
“Ah, Isherwood, yes. Got Welles’s note just today, said you were coming…” The old man—he was sixty-eight—searched his desk as if he was looking for something, then sat back, looked at Isherwood, said, “Ah…”
“Sir, as the Secretary related to you, it is his desire to see the Merrimack is brought to Philadelphia. He has asked that I personally oversee the refit of her engines.”
“Ah, yes, Merrimack. She is in dreadful shape, Mr. Isherwood, you will find. Her engines were nothing to crow about in her best days.”
“So I understand, sir.” Isherwood was not overly interested in McCauley’s opinion. McCauley had told the yard’s chief engineer, Robert Danby, that it would take a month to get Merrimack underway, which was absurd. But most of the officers at the yard were Southerners, and they were influencing McCauley, and the old man was neither strong-willed enough nor sober enough to make up his own mind.
“Very well, Mr. Isherwood, do what you will…”
And so he had. He and Danby, working around the clock, twelve-hour shifts, supervising whatever men they could scrape up to swing a hammer or turn a wrench.
The machinery was in a bad way. The braces had been pulled out of the boilers, the engines torn apart, air pumps disabled, their components scattered around the machine shops and blacksmith shops that crowded the huge shipyard.
Night and day for four days they labored, and now he heard the giant’s heartbeat, the steady thump of the pistons. The ship was stirring. In order to get to sea now, they needed only permission.
Isherwood stood with a groan and tried to shake the kinks out of his legs.
“What do you say to that, Chief?”
Isherwood turned. Danby was there, his face smeared with grease, his hands black, a filthy bandage with a dark spot of dried blood tied around one finger. “Don’t she sound fine?”
“She sounds like hell, Mr. Danby, but she’ll do. Let me go talk to the old man.”
They had gone to visit McCauley the day before, he and Danby, and reported the machinery ready in all respects. They had hoped for the order to fire her up and go. But McCauley had hesitated, told them they would be in season the next morning to get up steam.
Now it was next morning. The fires had been lit around midnight, and sometime around daybreak the water in the huge boilers began to produce steam. Now the engines turned slowly, and the only things keeping Merrimack in Norfolk were the chain and rope fasts holding her to the dock, and McCauley’s orders.
Wearily, like soldiers in the aftermath of battle, Isherwood and Danby climbed the ladder from the engine room, emerging into the blessed coolness of the tween decks, then climbed up the scuttle and onto the main deck.
It was nine o’clock and the sun was brilliant in the spring sky, and Isherwood was a little disoriented. It had been full night when he had gone down into the bowels of the Merrimack.
He paused and took a moment to look around and realign himself. Merrimack was an awesome vessel, 275 feet long and thirty-eight feet on the beam. She normally carried forty guns: fourteen eight-inch guns, two ten-inch, and twenty-four nine-inch, a powerful battery. The guns were off her now, making her deck seem even more expansive.
She was too much ship to let her fall into the hands of the Rebels rumored to be massing outside the walls and setting up batteries across the river. With Merrimack alone, the Confederates could cause real trouble for the Union navy. Time to get her out of there.
Isherwood and Danby walked down the brow from the Merrimack’s deck to the shore and across the big shipyard, their shoes loud on the cobblestones in the quiet morning. It should not have been quiet—the yard should have been in full production at that hour, with hammers falling and forges and heavy machinery and capstans and draft animals all filling the air with noise—but it was not. Most of the civilian workers were gone, either unwilling to work for the old government or unwilling to let their neighbors see them doing so. Those still reporting to work spent the day lolling around their work stations or doing desultory chores. They all seemed to be waiting. Waiting for orders, waiting to see who it was who would be giving orders come the end of the day.
The engineers walked past the looming twin ship houses with their odd A-frame shape, a third one under construction, past the foundries, machine shops, boiler shops, sail lofts, timber sheds, burnetizing house, riggers’ lofts, and ropewalk.
It was no wonder that the Rebels were starting to gather like vultures, ready to fall on that place. Gosport was the most extensive and valuable shipyard in the country.
Isherwood and Danby walked past the huge granite dry dock, and Isherwood thought, The secessionists would dearly love to have hold of that … There were only two in the country, and no real navy could be without one.
They arrived at last at McCauley’s office. There was no one in the outer office. McCauley’s door was open. Isherwood stepped across the room, rapped lightly on the doorframe.
“Commodore?”
“Ah, Isherwood, come in come in…damned secretary is gone, a damnable Democrat, took off with the secesh trash…ever since Lincoln called up them men, every damned one reckons it’s war…like rats, sir, rats from a sinking ship, if you’ll pardon the old saw…
Isherwood and Danby exchanged glances. The commodore was not doing so well. His frock coat was tossed over the back of his chair, his hair was wild. There were stains on his shirt, from what, Isherwood could not tell. From the doorjamb he could smell the booze.
“Commodore, I am here to report that the machinery aboard Merrimack is ready. We have steam up and the engines are turning now.”