From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life

by A. T. Mahan

VII

INCIDENTS OF WAR AND BLOCKADE SERVICE

1861–1862

The Congress, upon her return, was retained in commission, though entirely useless, either for fighting or blockade, under modern conditions. I suppose there were not yet enough of newer vessels to spare her value as a figure-head. She was sent afterwards to Hampton Roads, where in the following March she, with another sailing-frigate, the Cumberland, fell helpless victims to the first Confederate iron-clad. The staff of combatant sea officers was much changed; the captain, the senior three lieutenants, and the midshipmen being detached. Smith, the fourth lieutenant, remained as first; and, in the absence of her captain on other duty, commanded and fell at her death agony. I was sent first to the James Adger, a passenger-steamer then being converted in New York for blockade duty, for which she was very fit; but in ten days more I was moved on to the Pocahontas, a ship built for war, a very respectable little steam-corvette, the only one of her class—if such a bull as a class of one may be excused. She carried one ten-inch gun and four 32-pounders, all smooth-bores. There was, besides, one small nondescript rifled piece, upon which we looked with more curiosity than confidence. Indeed, unless memory deceive, the projectiles from it were quite as apt to go end over end as true. It was rarely used.

When I joined, the Pocahontas was lying off the Washington Navy-Yard, in the eastern branch of the Potomac, on duty connected with the patrol of the river; the Virginia bank of which was occupied by the Confederates, who were then erecting batteries to dispute the passage of vessels. After one excursion down-stream in this employment, the ship was detached to the combined expedition against Port Royal, South Carolina, the naval part of which was under the command of "Flag-Officer" Dupont. The point of assembly was Hampton Roads, whither we shortly proceeded, after filling with stores and receiving a new captain, Percival Drayton, a man greatly esteemed in the service of the day, and a South-Carolinian. Coincidently with us, but independently as to association, the steam-sloop Seminole, slightly larger, also started. We outstripped her; and as we passed a position where the Confederates were believed to be fortifying, our captain threw in a half-dozen shells. No reply was made, and we went on. Within a half-hour we heard firing behind us, apparently two-sided. The ship was turned round and headed up-river. In a few minutes we met the Seminole, her men still at the guns, a few ropes dangling loose, showing that she had, as they say, not been exchanging salutes. We had stirred up the hornets, and she had got the benefit; quite uselessly, her captain evidently felt, by his glum face and short answers to our solicitous hail. He was naturally put out, for no good could have come, beyond showing the position of the enemy's guns; while an awkward hit might have sent her back to the yard and lost her her share in the coming fray, one of the earliest in the war, and at that instant the only thing in sight on the naval horizon. As no harm resulted, the incident would not be worth mentioning except for a second occasion, which I will mention later, in which we gave the Seminole's captain cause for grim dissatisfaction.

The gathering of the clans, the ships of war and the transports laden with troops, in the lower Chesapeake had of course a strange element of excitement; for war, even in its incipiency, was new to almost all present, and the enthusiasm aroused by a great cause and approaching conflict was not balanced by that solemnizing outlook which experience gives. We lived in an atmosphere of blended exaltation and curiosity, of present novelty and glowing expectation. But business soon came upon us, in its ordinary lines; for we were not two days clear of the Capes, in early November, when there came on a gale of exceptional violence, the worst of it at midnight. It lasted for forty-eight hours, and must have occasioned great anxiety to the heads of the expedition; for among the curious conglomerate of heterogeneous material constituting both the ships of war and transports there were several river steamers, some of them small. Being utterly unpractised in such movements, an almost entire dispersal followed; in fact, I dare say many of the transport captains asked nothing better than to be out of other people's way. The Pocahontas found herself alone next morning; but, though small and slow, she was a veritable sea-bird for wind and wave. Not so all. One of our extemporized ships of war, rejoicing in the belligerent name of Isaac Smith, and carrying eight fairly heavy guns, which would have told in still water, had to throw them all overboard; and her share in the subsequent action was limited to a single long piece, rifled I believe, and to towing a sailing-corvette in the column.

There were some wrecks and some gallant rescues, the most conspicuous of which was that of the battalion of marines, embarked on board the Governor; a steamer, as I recollect, not strictly of the river order, but like those which ply outside on the Boston and Maine coast. She went down, but not before her living freight had been removed by the sailing-frigate Sabine. The first lieutenant of the latter, now the senior rear-admiral on the retired list of the navy, soon afterwards relieved Drayton in command of the Pocahontas; so that I then heard at first hand many particulars which I wish I could now repeat in his well-deserved honor. His distinguished share in the rescue was of common notoriety; the details only we learned from his modest but interesting account. The deliverance was facilitated by the two vessels being on soundings. The Governor anchored, and then the Sabine ahead of her, dropping down close to. The ground-tackle of our naval ships, as we abundantly tested during the war, would hold through anything, if the bottom let the anchor grip.

With very few exceptions all were saved, officers and privates; but their clothes, except those they stood in, were left behind. The colonel was a notorious martinet, as well as something of a character; and a story ran that one of the subalterns had found himself at the start unable to appear in some detail of uniform, his trunks having gone astray. "A good soldier never separates from his baggage," said the colonel, gruffly, on hearing the excuse. After various adventures, common to missing personal effects, the lieutenant's trunks turned up at Port Royal. He looked sympathetically at the colonel's shorn plumes and meagre array, and said, reproachfully, "Colonel, where are your trunks? A good soldier should never separate from his baggage." But, doubtless, to follow it to the bottom of the sea would be an excess of zeal.

Not long afterwards I was shipmate with an assistant surgeon who had been detailed for duty on board the Governor, and had passed through the scenes of anxiety and confusion preceding the rescue. He told me one or two amusing incidents. An order being given to lighten the ship, four marines ran into the cabin where he was lying, seized a marble-top table, dropped the marble top on deck, and threw the wooden legs overboard. There was also on board a very young naval officer, barely out of the Academy. He was of Dutch blood and name—from central Pennsylvania, I think. Although without much experience, he was of the constitutionally self-possessed order, which enabled him to be very useful. After a good deal of exertion, he also came into the cabin. The surgeon asked him how things looked. "I think she will last about half an hour," he replied, and then composedly lay down and went to sleep.

There was in the hero of this anecdote a vein of eccentricity even then, and he eventually died insane and young. I knew him only slightly, but familiarly as to face. He had mild blue eyes and curly brown hair, with a constant half-smile in eyes as well as mouth. In temperament he was Dutch to the backbone—at least as we imagine Dutch. A comical anecdote was told me of him a few years later, illustrating his self-possession—cool to impudence. He was serving on one of our big steam-sloops, a flag-ship at the time, and had charge of working the cables on the gun-deck when anchoring. Going into a port where the water was very deep—Rio de Janeiro, I believe—the chain cables "got away," as the expression is; control was lost, and shackle after shackle tore out of the hawse-holes, leaping and thumping, rattling and roaring, stirring a lot of dust besides. Indeed, the violent friction of iron against iron in such cases not infrequently generates a stream of sparks. The weight of twenty fathoms of this linked iron mass hanging outside, aided by the momentum already established by the anchor's fall through a hundred feet, of course drags after it all that lies unstoppered within. I need not tell those who have witnessed such a commotion that the orderly silence of a ship of war breaks down somewhat. Every one who has any right to speak shouts, and repeats, in rapid succession, "Haul-to that chain! Why the something or other don't you haul-to?" while the unhappy compressor-men, saving their own wind to help their arms, struggle wildly with the situation, under a storm of obloquy. The admiral—by this time we had admirals—was a singular man, something of a lawyer, acute, thinking he knew just how far he might go in any case, and given at times to taking liberties with subordinates, which were not to them always as humorous as they seemed to him. In this instance he miscalculated somewhat. He was on deck at the moment, and when the chain had been at last stopped and secured, he said to the captain, "Alfred, send for the young man in charge of those chains, and give him a good setting-down. Ask him what he means by letting such things happen. Ride him down like a main-tack, Alfred—like the main-tack!" The main-tack is the chief rope controlling the biggest sail in the ship, and at times, close on the wind, it has to be got down into place by the brute force of half a hundred men, inch by inch, pull by pull. That is called riding down, and is clearly a process the reverse of conciliatory. The Dutchman was sent for, and soon his questioning blue eyes appeared over the hatch coaming. Alfred—as my own name is Alfred, I may explain that I was not that captain—Alfred was a mild person, and clearly did not like his job; he could not have come up to the admiral's standard. The latter saw it, and intervened: "Perhaps you had better leave it to me. I'll settle him." Fixing his eyes on the offender, he said, sternly, "What do you mean by this, sir? Why the h—l did you not stop that chain?" This exordium was doubtless the prelude to a fit oratorical display; but the culprit, looking quietly at him, replied, simply, "How the h—l could I?" This was a shift of wind for which the admiral was unprepared. He was taken flat back, like a screaming child receiving a glass of cold water in his face. After a moment's hesitation he turned to the captain, and said meekly, yet with evident humorous consciousness of a checkmate, "That's true, Alfred; how the h—l could he?"