Two passenger steamers, loaded down with ladies and non-combatants, had followed the Atlanta down from Savannah, to witness the capture of the Yankee monitors. These now made the best of their way back to that city.
The Atlanta had a crew of twenty-one officers and one hundred and twenty-four men. Landsmen often wonder why ships have so many officers in proportion to men, but it is necessary.
The officers of the Confederate vessel stated her speed to be ten knots, and they confidently expected to capture both the monitors, after which, as it appeared from the instruments captured on board of her, she expected to proceed to sea, and try conclusions with the Charleston fleet. Her engines were first-rate, and her hull of a good model, and there is no reason why she should not have gone up to Charleston and broken the blockade there, except the one fact that she turned out not to be equal to the monitors.
The action was so brief that the Nahant did not share in it, and of the five shots fired by the Weehawken, four struck the Atlanta, and caused her surrender. The first was a fifteen-inch shot, which, though it struck the casemate of the Atlanta at a very acute angle, smashed through both the iron armor and the wooden backing, strewed the deck with splinters, prostrated some forty officers and men by the concussion, and wounded several by the splinters and fragments of armor driven in. We can imagine the consternation of a crew which had come down confident of an easy victory. In fact, this one shot virtually settled the battle. The Weehawken fired an eleven-inch shot next, but this did little damage. The third shot was from the fifteen-inch gun, and knocked off the top of the pilot-house, which projected slightly above the casemate, wounded the pilots, and stunned the men at the wheel. The fourth shot carried away one of the port-stoppers. Sixteen of her crew were wounded.
The Atlanta was valued by the appraisers, for prize-money, at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, a sum, as Boynton remarks, easily won in fifteen minutes, with only five shots, and without a loss of a single man on the other side. More than this, it settled the value of that class of vessels, as compared with monitors.
“As the fight of the Merrimac with the Cumberland, Congress and Minnesota virtually set aside as worthless for war purposes the vast wooden navies of Europe,” so it showed that great changes and improvements were necessary in the broadside ironclads, if they were to be opposed to monitors armed with guns of great power. The result was a great increase in the thickness of armor, which went on, as the power of the guns increased, until now it is a question whether armor may not be abandoned, except for certain purposes.
KEARSARGE AND ALABAMA. JUNE 19TH, 1864.
During the summer of 1864, while Grant and his army were fighting the terrible battles which opened his way to the James, through Virginia; and the whole country was upon the very tenter-hooks of anxiety, a piece of news came across the water which gave more satisfaction to the country at large than many a hard-won battle has given, where a thousand times the numbers were engaged. It was the intelligence that the Alabama was at the bottom of the sea.
We may borrow the words of Boynton, in his “History of the Navy during the Rebellion,” to put the reader in possession of a part of the career of the notorious Alabama, previous to her meeting with the Kearsarge.