His first care was to sever the chain barrier across the river. To that end he sent a force up the stream which gallantly boarded one of the hulks, cut the chain, and rendered that defense useless.
On the morning of April 24, at 3.30 o'clock, the fighting part of the fleet advanced in full force, engaging the enemy to the right and left, but meanwhile pushing its way up the river without waiting for results at the point of obstruction.
The forts were quickly passed and then ensued one of the most picturesque water battles ever fought. The Confederates knew their business and they did it with a skill and determination which excited Farragut's admiration, as he was afterwards accustomed to testify in glowing words of recognition.
Captain Theodorus Bailey, with eight vessels, was the first to pass the forts. He immediately became involved in a desperate encounter with the Confederate fleet. His flagship, the Cayuga, was engaged at once by three Confederate vessels, each determinedly trying to board and capture her; for this was a battle of giants in which every officer and every man on either side was ready for any conceivable deed of "derring-do," and in which personal courage of the most dauntless sort was the one military equipment which both sides possessed in absolutely limitless supply.
Bailey destroyed one of his assailants with an eleven-inch shell. Has the reader any conception of what it means to have an eleven-inch shell penetrate the side of a vessel and explode within its wooden walls? In every eleven-inch shell there is a charge of gunpowder of positively earthquake-producing proportions, and when it explodes it wrecks everything within hundreds of feet of it. Exploding within a vessel it dismounts guns, kills men, rips up bulwarks and bulkheads, and renders the ship a helpless wreck, with fire everywhere to complete the destruction.
That is what happened to one of the ships that assailed Captain Bailey. Another was driven off, and before the third could accomplish its purpose the Oneida and the Varuna came to the rescue. The Oneida rammed one of the Confederate vessels, cutting it in two. The Varuna had worse fortune. She was successfully rammed by the Confederates, and running ashore, sank helplessly.
The Pensacola sustained a loss of thirty-seven men in passing the forts, a fact that eloquently testified to the vigor that abode in those works after Porter's six days' hail of great shells into their precincts.
The Mississippi, of Farragut's fleet, was rammed and disabled by the Confederate iron-clad Manassas. But, by way of revenge, the Mississippi's guns riddled the ram and destroyed it.
In the meanwhile the Confederates were sending down fire-rafts in great numbers, and in an attempt to avoid contact with two of these Farragut's flagship, the Hartford, ran aground upon a mud bank and for a time lay helpless in an exceedingly perilous position.
If the reader would fully understand the terror of this "river fight" he should remember that at the point where it occurred the Mississippi is only about half a mile wide. Everything done at all in such a stream must be done at close quarters, and it was at the very closest of quarters that the Northern and Southern Americans who contested that fight met each other on that terrible morning of April 24, 1862. The men who fought there in the river on the one side or upon the other, are mostly dead now; only a few of them survive in soldiers' homes or sailors' snug harbors. Surely we can do no better in this new century than pay all possible honor to the valor with which, on the one side and upon the other, they fought for their respective causes on that soft spring morning in the early sixties. They were heroes all, and right heroically did they acquit themselves in the brutal and bloody work they were set to do.