Frederick Douglass quickly went down to the main deck and toward the steamboat's bow. If he had to swim for it, he didn't want to have to swim around the boat before striking out for the northern bank of the Ohio. Nothing could have induced him to stay aboard if the boat grounded itself in Confederate territory. If those militiamen caught him, they would sell him into slavery. He'd been free for more than forty years, all his adult life. He was ready to die trying to stay free before going back into bondage.
"Surrender!" the militiaman shouted again. When the Queen of the Ohio kept steaming along, the fellow turned to his battery and waved. The gun crews had been standing around watching the side-wheeler. Now one crew sprang into action.
"Are they going to shoot at us?" an unshaven deck passenger in dirty overalls asked.
"They can't," his equally grubby female companion answered. "They wouldn't."
The Napoleon roared. Flame and smoke belched from its muzzle. The cannonball splashed into the river in front of the steamboat. The gun rolled backwards with the recoil. The artillerymen began reloading. The other three crews were serving their pieces, too.
"That one was a warning," the Kentuckian shouted to the Queen of the Ohio. "Surrender or we blow y'all out of the water."
Passengers cried out in alarm and dismay. From the pilothouse up above came an order delivered with such furious vehemence that it cut through the rising din: "Tie down the safety valves and pour on the ether! Get us the hell out of here!"
An order like that meant the steamboat was liable to explode even if the boiler didn't take a hit from the Confederate guns. Douglass couldn't have cared less. He clapped his hands together, applauding the captain's good sense: surrender, for him, was unthinkable. The sooner they got out of range of those Napoleons, the better.
The rest of the battery opened up on the sidewheeler, in earnest this time. One ball whizzed over her, a clean miss. Another went into the river just short of her, throwing water up onto Douglass and the other passengers standing nearby. The third carried away the top couple of feet of one smokestack. The Rebels jumped up and down as if they'd sunk the Queen of the Ohio. Their commander's furious yells set them to swabbing out and reloading again.
"My God!" Jack's groans from above reached Douglass' ears. "What do we do?"
"I think we'd better get down onto the main deck," his wife answered-she, evidently, had sense enough for both of them. "If the boat catches fire, we'll have to go into the river."
Passengers by the score flooded out of the steamboat's cabins and salons, down the stairs, and onto the main deck. Some went to starboard, to stare across the river at the militiamen shooting at them. Some ran to port, as if they were assured of safety because they couldn't see the Confederate guns from there.
Those guns proved any such safety illusory a moment later. A ball slammed into the Queen of the Ohio superstructure and tore through the boat's timbers as if they were made of pasteboard. A fusillade of screams-some women's, some men's-from the port side said the ball had torn through one of the passengers, too.
"Dear sweet Jesus!" somebody shouted. "If we take a hit in the boiler, this whole damn boat'll go up like it was filled with powder."
That had already occurred to Douglass. He wondered if it had occurred to the Confederate gunners, too. Maybe, to them, it was all good fun, like boys gigging frogs. But the frogs died in earnest- and so would a couple of hundred civilians, if the Rebs chanced to make a lucky, or rather an unlucky, shot… or if, in their exertions to flee the battery, the crew overstrained the boiler and it went up without being hit.
On the heels of that thought came another, even worse. "How many guns await us around the next bend of the river?" the Negro orator asked the heavens.
"Shut your mouth, you damn nigger," snapped a white woman who looked like somebody's maiden aunt. Douglass fell silent, but that didn't matter. If one battery of guns was out along the Ohio, scores would be- U.S. guns as well as C.S., he supposed, but the Confederate cannon were the ones that worried him.
Boom! Wham! A cannonball slammed into the steamboat's starboard paddlewheel. Wood splinters flew. One of them stabbed a man, who shrieked like a damned soul. The wheel kept turning, though now it put Douglass in mind of a man smiling with a missing tooth.
Under his feet, the Queen of the Ohio quivered like a racehorse suddenly given the whip. She fairly leaped forward in the water. Great gouts of smoke and sparks poured from her newly uneven stacks. The riverbank seemed almost a blur, such was the sidewheeler's speed.
But the boat's fastest clip was a pathetic creep when measured against the speed of a twelve-pound iron ball. More splashes around the Queen of the Ohio said the crews firing at her were not masters of their trade. But more crashes and screams said they didn't need to be masters to score hits. "Have we got a doctor on board?" somebody shouted.
Then another shout rose, far more terrible: "Fire!" Not all the smoke shrouding the steamboat was coming from the stacks, not any more. She was built of wood and bore many coats of paint. One of those hits from hot iron might have ignited her. Or a cannonball might have spilled the coals from a stove in the galley or broken a kerosene lamp or… When he thought about it, Douglass realized how many unpleasant possibilities there were.
"Buckets!" somebody shouted. "The pump!" someone else yelled. Douglass hadn't known the boat carried a pump, but it was irrelevant, anyhow. Peering back, he saw the whole stern of the Queen of the Ohio engulfed in flames. A glance told him no one would be able to put out that fire.
A glance must have told the steamboat captain the same thing. The Queen of the Ohio turned hard to port, making straight for the U.S. bank of the river. A steward shouted, "Brace yourselves, folks! We're going to ground, and we're going to ground hard. Soon as we do, everybody off by the bow. Gentlemen, help the ladies, please." He might have been talking about dance figures, not a matter of life and death.
The Queen of the Ohio ran aground with force surely great enough to tear the bottom out of her-not that that mattered at the moment. Douglass had been grasping a pillar. The impact tore his grip loose. He landed on one hand, hard. Scrambling to his feet, he struggled toward the rail. A drop of about ten feet separated the deck from the muddy riverbank.
"May I assist you, ma'am?" he asked the woman closest to him: the sour spinster who'd cursed him for daring to suggest the Confederates might have more guns along the Ohio than this one battery.
She climbed over the rail, nimble despite her long skirt and petticoats, and jumped down on her own without even bothering to give him a no. A woman of strong convictions, he thought. Others were not so fussy about letting him take their pale hands in his dark ones and letting him put his black arms around their waists to help them down to safety. Some of them even thanked him.
After a while, the white man next to him said, "Well, Sambo, I reckon it's about time we light out for the tall timber ourselves." Douglass didn't think the fellow intended to offend; he likely would have called someone from the Emerald Isle Mick or a Jew Abe in the same way- classification, not insult.
Whatever the case there, he was right. Despite the best efforts of the men fighting the flames, they were racing forward. The crackling roar dinned in Douglass' ears; he could feel the heat on his skin and through his clothes. A hot cinder landed on the back of his hand. With an oath, he brushed it away.
He looked around to make sure no women were left on the side-wheeler. He saw none. When he looked back, the man who'd called him Sambo had already gone over the rail. Other men shoved forward, intent on doing the same. Douglass decided he could honorably leave. He swung over the rail, sat on the very edge of the bow, and jumped.