My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field

by Charles Carleton Coffin

The crowd hustled him about, but he had a few old friends, who took his part, and he succeeded in making his escape.

Captain Phelps looked a moment at the Grampus. He saw her wheels move. She was starting off.

“Out with the starboard gun! Give her a shot!”

Lieutenant Bishop runs his eye along the sights of the great eleven-inch gun, which has been loaded and run out of the porthole in a twinkling.

There is a flash. A great cloud puffs out into the fog, and the shot screams through the air and is lost to sight. We cannot see where it fell. Another—another. Boom!—boom!—boom!—from the Cincinnati and Carondelet. But the Grampus is light-heeled. The distance widens. You can hardly see her, and at last she vanishes like a ghost from sight.

We were not more than four or five miles from the head of the island. One by one the boats rounded to along the Kentucky shore. The sailors sprang upon the land, carrying out the strong warps, and fastening us to the trunks of the buttonwood-trees.

There was a clearing and a miserable log-hut near by. The family had fled, frightened by the cannonade. We found them cowering in the woods,—a man, his wife and daughter. The land all around them was exceedingly rich, but they were very poor. All they had to eat was hog and hominy. They had been told that the Union troops would rob them of all they had, which was not likely, because they had nothing worth stealing! They were trembling with fear, but when they found the soldiers and sailors well-behaved and peaceable, they forgot their terror.

The fog lifts at last, and we can see the white tents of the Rebels on the Tennessee shore. There are the batteries, with the cannon grim and black pointing up stream. Round the point of land is the island. A half-dozen steamboats lie in the stream below it. At times they steam up to the bend and then go back again,—wandering back and forth like rats in a cage. They cannot get past General Pope’s guns at New Madrid. On the north side of the island is a great floating-battery of eight guns, which has been towed up from New Orleans. General Mackall has sunk a steamboat in a narrow part of the channel on the north side of the island, so that if Commodore Foote attempts to run the blockade he will be compelled to pass along the south channel, exposed to the fire of all the guns in the four batteries upon the Tennessee shore, as well as those upon the island.

Two of the mortar-boats were brought into position two miles from the Rebel batteries. We waited in a fever of expectation while Captain Maynadier was making ready, for thirteen-inch mortars had never been used in war. The largest used by the French and English in the bombardment of Sebastopol were much smaller.

There came a roar like thunder. It was not a sharp, piercing report, but a deep, heavy boom, which rolled along the mighty river, echoing and re-echoing from shore to shore,—a prolonged reverberation, heard fifty miles away. A keg of powder was burned in the single explosion. The shell rose in a beautiful curve, exploded five hundred feet high, and fell in fragments around the distant encampment.