For the next hour it is all madness! The captain of one of my guns is struck full in the face by a solid shot and his head is severed from his body; as he falls the lockstring in his hand is pulled and his gun is discharged! “Hurry the body below and load again!”
I call my junior officer to take my place while I go to my forward gun, and as I turn a shell explodes and tears his right arm away!
A young master’s mate hurries past me bearing a message to the captain, who is on the topgallant forecastle; as he goes up the ladder and touches his cap to his commander a rifle ball from the fort, whose walls we are close abreast of, strikes him in the forehead, and the poor boy falls dead, his message not yet delivered!
Now we are so close to the fort that we can look in at the lighted portholes; a solid shot passes between two of my men and buries itself in the mainmast not six inches above my head! I am covered with splinters, but unharmed.
The early dawn is breaking, and by its dim light and the blaze of a fire-raft drifting down past us I see just abreast of us a light river-boat crowded with rebel troops. As I look at her the captain of my No. 5 gun loads with grape and cannister, and depresses his gun as he trains it point blank upon the crowd of trembling wretches.
I dash at him and catch the lockstring from his hand, just in time to save them from an awful fate! We are all savages now, burning with the passion to kill, and the man looks at me resentfully as I frustrate his plan for a wholesale battue!
The fire upon us slackens, then ceases; I glance through a porthole; we are past the forts; both of them are astern of us, and, thank God, the battle is won!
CHAPTER IV
ON TO NEW ORLEANS
When Flag Officer Farragut—soon to be made Rear Admiral for this night’s work—looked about him from the quarter deck of the Hartford that glorious morning of the 24th of April which had made his name immortal, he counted fifteen of the seventeen vessels in his three divisions that had started with him the night before to pass the forts.