The harbor of Mobile is shaped like a rude Innuit boot. At the top, Tensaw and Mobile Rivers, in their deltas, make, respectively, two and three looplike bands, like the straps. The toe is Bonsecour Bay, pointing east. The heel rests on Dauphin Island, while the main channel flows into the hollow of the foot between Fort Morgan and Dauphin Island. In the north-west angle, obscured by the foliage, lay the devoted city, suffering no less from artificial famine, made unnecessarily, than the ligatures that stopped the vital current of trade. Tons of meat were found putrefying while the citizens, and even the garrison, had been starving on scanty rations. Food could be purchased, but at exorbitant rates, and the medium of exchange, Confederate notes, all gone to water and waste paper. The true story of the Lost Cause has yet to be written. North of Mobile, in the Trans-Mississippi department, thousands whose every throb was devoted to the enterprise, welcomed the Northern invaders, not as destroyers of a hope already dead by the act of a few entrusted with its defence, but as something better than the anarchy that was not Southern independence or anything else human.
Such were the condition, period and place—the people crushed between the upper and nether millstones of two hostile and contending civilizations—when native thrift evoked a new element, that set in sharp contrast the heroism of life and the heroism of death, the courage that incurs danger to save against the courage that accepts danger to destroy. The work was the saving of the valuable arms—costing the government thirty thousand dollars per gun—and the machinery of the sunken Milwaukee.[5] By a curious circumstance this party of divers was composed partly, if not principally or entirely, of mechanics and engineers who were exempt from military service under the economic laws of the Confederacy, yet who in heart and soul sympathized with the rebellion. They had worked to save for the South: now they were to work and save for the North. It was a service of superadded danger. All the peril incurred from missile weapons was increased by the hidden danger of the secret under-sea and the presence of the terrible torpedoes. These floated everywhere, in all innocent, unsuspicious shapes. One monster, made of boiler iron, a huge cross, is popularly believed to be still hidden in the bay. The person possessing the chart wherein the masked battery's place was set down is said to have destroyed it and fled. Let us hope, however, that this is an error.
Keep in mind, in reading this account, the contrasted picture of peace in Nature and war in man—the calm blue sky; the soft hazy outlines of woods and bay-shore dropping their soft veils in the water; the cottages, suggesting industry and love; the distant city; the delicate and graceful spars of the Hartford; the busy despatch-steamers plying to and fro; the bursting forts and huge ugly monitors; the starry arches of flying shells by night and flying cloud by day; the soft lap of the water; the sensuous, sweet beauty of that latitude of eternal spring; and the soft dark violet of the outer sea, glassing itself in calm or broken into millioned frets of blue, red and starry fire; the danger above and the danger below; the dark mysterious caverns of the sea, rich with coral grots and grove and abounding marine life; the impenetrable gloom of the ship's hold, whose unimaginable darkness and labyrinthine intricacy of machinery set obstacles at every turn and move and step; the darkness; the fury; the hues and shape, all that art can make or Nature fashion, gild or color wrought into one grand tablature of splendor and magnificence. War and peaceful industry met there in novel rivalry, and each claimed its privileges. The captain of the Search said to the officers, while crowding his men behind the turret, with sly, dry humor, "Come, you are all paid to be shot at: my men are not."
More than once the accuracy of the enemy's fire drove the little party to shelter. Though the diver was shielded by the impenetrable fickle element that gave Achilles invulnerability, the air-pump above was exposed, and thus the diver might be slain by indirection. There lay Achilles' heel, the exposed vulnerable part that Mother Thetis's baptism neglected.
The work below was arduous: the hulk crowded with the entangling machinery of sixteen engines, cuddies, ports, spars, levers, hatches, stancheons, floating trunks, bibulous boxes heavy with drink, and the awful, mysterious gloom of the water, which is not night or darkness, but the absence of any ray to touch the sensitive optic nerve. The sense of touch the only reliance, and the life-line his guide.
But the peril incurred can be better understood through an illustrative example of a perilous adventure and a poor return. Officers and men of the unfortunate monitor asked for the rescue of their property, allowing a stipulated sum in lieu of salvage. Among these was a petty officer, anxious for the recovery of his chest. It involved peculiar hazards, since it carried the diver below the familiar turret-chamber, through the inextricabilis error of entangling machinery in the engine-room, groping among floating and sunken objects, into a remote state-room, the Acheron of the cavernous hold. He was to find by touch a seaman's chest; handle it in that thickening gloom; carry it, push it, move it through that labyrinthine obscurity to a point from which it could be raised. To add immeasurably to the intricacy of this undertaking, there was the need of carrying his life-line and air-hose through all that entanglement and obscurity. Three times in that horror of thick darkness like wool the line tangled in the web of machinery, and three times he had, by tedious endeavor, to follow it up, find the knot and release it. Then the door of the little state-room, the throat of exit, was shut to, and around and around the dense chamber he groped as if in a dream, and could find no vent. All was alike—a smooth, slimy wall, glutinous with that gelatinous liquid, the sea-water. The tangled line became a blind guide and fruitful source of error; the hours were ebbing away, drowning life and vital air in that horrible watery pit;
Aut hoc inclusi ligno occultantur Achivi,
or, a worse enemy than the subtle Greek's, death from the suspended air-current. Speed, nimbleness, strength and activity were worthless: with tedious fingers he must follow the life-line, find its entanglements and slowly loosen them, carefully taking up the slack, and so follow the straightened cord to the door. Then the chest: he must not forget that. Slowly he heaves and pushes, now at this, now at the life-line hitching on knob, handle, lever or projecting peg—on anything or nothing in that maze of machinery; by involution and evolution, like the unknown quantity in a cubic equation, through all the twists, turns, assumptions and substitutions, and always with that unmanageable, indivisible coefficient the box, until he reaches the upper air.
In Aesop's fable, when the crane claimed the reward of the wolf for using his long neck and bill as a forceps in extracting a bone from the latter's oesophagus, Lupus suggests that for the crane to have had his head down in the lupine throat and not get it snapped off was reward enough for any reasonable fowl. The petty officer was sufficiently learned in the Lyceum to administer a like return. The stipulated salvage was never paid or offered.[6]
The monitors had small square hatches or man-ports let into the deck, admitting one person conveniently.