The Eighteen-Twelver

by Farnham Bishop

 

The Eighteen-Twelver

by Farnham Bishop

Author of “Wood and Steel,” “The Red Witch.” etc.

“SHADES of the past!” exclaimed Captain Jefferson Hallett, U.S.N. “Here comes old Jonathan Gifford.” The group of officers gathered about the door of the commandant's office in the Washington Navy Yard turned with one accord toward the newcomer striding briskly toward them from the entrance of the yard.

“Back in uniform and walking with his regular quarter-deck stride,” commented a side-whiskered lieutenant-commander. “Has the Secretary given that old relic a ship?”

“Lord help the crew if he has,” replied Hallett. “I was a reefer on the Brandywine when Gifford commanded her in '34. He broke the Western Ocean passage for a ship-of-the-line, and mastheaded me eighteen times. Hardest-driving old devil in all the old Navy. Knows as much' about sail and cutlases as Nelson did, and as little about steam and iron-clads as——”

He paused for a simile, which was promptly supplied by the spruce young commander of the new double-turreted monitor Kiawosting—the last word in naval architecture in that Summer of 1862.

“As Mr. Secretary Welles! Old Gideon came aboard for a visit of inspection yesterday afternoon stamped his heel on the deck-plate and said—

“Why, the durned thing's holler!”

The laughter that greeted this historic remark died away at the nearer approach of Jonathan Gifford. Bearded captains, themselves beginning to turn gray, could not help but feel something of the awe his lean, clean-shaven Yankee face and ice-blue eyes had instilled in their souls when they were midshipmen under his command. To them he looked unreal in the straight-peaked cap, loose trousers and long frock coat of the sixties; Jonathan Gifford's proper garb was the white silk stockings and tight knee-breeches, the cocked hat and the spike-tailed coat with its bullion epaulets and its collar as high as the wearer's ears, of the three decades that centered in the War of 1812. Though he had long since retired from the service and was now resurrected as the junior of most of the officers present, all instinctively saluted the erect old veteran as he joined the group.

“Good afternoon, young gentlemen,” he creaked affably. “I've been following the course of the immortal John Paul Jones—the best thing for any American naval officer to do when he's in doubt and can't seem to make any headway. Do any of you happen to know how he came to get command of the Bon Homme Richard?”

There was a unanimous shaking of heads; the seamen of the Civil War were too busy making history to remember the minuter details of the past.

“He was stranded at Brest, writing letters to French Ministers of Marine and American committeemen in Paris, for month after month, and nothing to show for it but a bellyful of windy promises. Then he happened to clap his eyes on a line in Benjamin Franklin's almanac—

“'If you want anything done, go and do it yourself—otherwise, send.'

“Paul Jones took the hint and the first coach for Paris, where he soon got them to give him the old East Indiaman, the Duras. Out of gratitude to Franklin he changed her name to the Poor Richard—or the nearest he could come to it in French.

“For the past year and more I've been writing from my home in New Bedford, offering my services to the government. Last week it came to me to do what Paul Jones had done. Down I came by train and bore straight for the Secretary of the Navy. Before the young whippersnappers in his office could head me off I was alongside his desk.

“'What do you want?' he asked through more whiskers than I'd ever supposed could grow on one human face at the same time.

“'I want a fight;' I told him. 'I've been fifty years in the Navy, man and boy, and never been in action yet. They said I was too young to go to sea in 1812, and all I got in the Mexican War was yellow fever off Vera Cruz. Now I want a ship and a chance to do something with her. I'll take anything that can float and carry a gun.'

“'Very well, captain,' said the Secretary after he'd seen what manner of man I was. 'I'll give you a vessel and put you on the blockade. I guess an eighteen-twelver ought to know how to make prize-money out of the Britishers.'

“So here I am, gentlemen, with my commission and orders in my pocket.”

There was a chorus of congratulations.

“What ship did he give you, captain?” asked several voices.

“The gunboat Hoboken. Any of you youngsters acquainted with her? She's new since my time.”

“Why, yes, I've voyaged on her more than once,” said Hallett while the rest snorted more or less violently with suppressed emotion, “She's a very good craft indeed—for the legal blockade.”

“Just what d'ye mean by that—the legal blockade?” demanded Jonathan Gifford, sensing a joke at his own expense and glaring fiercest.

Hallett, towering high above him, smiled benignly. He was having the time of his life, instructing and patronizing the master of his boyhood.

“It is like this, captain. The best way for us to capture the fast British blockade-runners that have been slipping into the Southern ports with munitions and out again with cotton is to intercept them on the open sea between our coast and Nassau. That has been the cruising-ground for our swiftest ships, like mine yonder.”

HALLETT pointed to the trim sloop-of-war Plattsburg, lying in the Potomac by with a red flag at her main, taking aboard her powder and shell from the lighter moored alongside. The fleetest cruiser in the whole United States Navy, she was worth commanding in those days when a richly laden blockade-runner brought a small fortune in prize-money to her captors. Hallett commanded her for two reasons: First, because he was a skilled and capable officer; and second, because his wife's uncle was a skilled and capable politician. Having a relationship by marriage with the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, the captain had become a wardroom and Navy Yard authority on diplomacy and international law.

“Johnny Bull's been protesting that his ships aren't lawful prizes and our blockade a real one unless we've got something like a continuous line of craft all up and down the rebel coast. It isn't enough to have a fleet off Charleston and another off Mobile, and so on—the law sharks say we've got to nail 'No Trespass' signs along the whole fence. Otherwise when I sight a poor innocent Britisher steaming westward out of Nassau, overhaul him and find both holds chock-a-block with blankets and percussion-caps and knapsacks ready-branded 'C. S. A.,' why then the presumption is that he wasn't doing anything so wicked as breaking a blockade, and the prize-court lets him go with a kiss for him and a reprimand for me.

“So, just to lend the judges and the State Department a hand and ease things all round, the government has been clapping some sort of a war-ship into every sound and inlet from here to Mexico. They'll do to pick up the small fry—keep the Johnny Rebs from eating too many fresh oysters and terrapin—and to make our deep-water captures lawful prizes. That's what I mean, Captain Gifford, by the legal blockade.”

“Oh, ye do, eh?” shrilled the indignant eighteen-twelver, his voice breaking into falsetto with age and wrath. “So you think you'll teach sea-law and sea-fighting to me, who taught you all you ever learned, and scandalous little it was! So you think I'm to be stationed in Okra Sound just to catch fishing-boats and oyster-sloops, and to lend a color of law to your gay and care-free privateering off Nassau! I'll bet my next six months' pay against yours that in that time the Hoboken makes more prize money than the Plattsburg.”

Hallett gasped, as did most of the bystanders.

“Why captain—you don't mean——”

“Young man, Captain Jonathan Gifford means what he says and says what he means, the same as when he used. to say, 'Masthead, sir!' back in the thirties. Cover that bet or back water.”

Hallett turned an angry red above his beard. He was an arrogant man, but not a mean one. He would not back down publicly but he could not bet on a certainty, especially with an old man who presumably had little in the world beside his pay.

“Wait till you've seen the Hoboken—” he began.

But the veteran cut in vehemently. The exhilaration of getting into active service after a half-century of waiting was as potent as Medford rum and as damaging to the judgment.

“I don't care what manner of craft she is,” he cried. “I don't care if she's the crankiest ten-gun brig in the fleet, or even one of these new-fangled iron sheer-hulks that carry both batteries in a tin tea-canister; I'll back her against the Plattsburg! I say so now, and I'll say so after I've seen her. Where is she now?”

“Moored alongside No. 2 Dock, just abaft that schooner,” said Hallett, pointing.

Jonathan Gifford looked, saw, and—in spite of the sub-tropical heat of a Washington Summer—turned cold. He had offered to take anything that could float and carry a gun, and Mr. Gideon Welles had given just that. The U.S.S. was a converted Hudson River ferry-boat!

HOLD her steady,” commanded Captain Gifford through the open window of the pilot-house.

To himself he added—

“Five minutes more and I'll be within range and in a fight at last!”

The Hoboken was chugging valiantly up the deep, narrow ship-channel that zigzagged across the shoals and mud-flats of Okra Sound. Instead of Manhattan Island or the Jersey shore, she was headed for a neat brick pentagon pierced with the square openings of gun-case-mates and topped with a tall flagstaff flying the Stars and Bars. This was Fort Moseby, built twenty years before to defend the head of Okra Sound and the entrance to Port Caroline.

Jonathan Gifford's orders said nothing about attacking this enemy fortress, but they were equally silent about his leaving it alone. The department had taken it for granted that he would content himself with maintaining a regular blockade.

The old man had had his fill of that off Vera Cruz. He waited only until he had drilled his raw crew and volunteer officers into passable men-of-warsmen. Between drills he studied the fort through his long brass telescope.

“Those gun-ports are built for twenty-four pounders and nothing heavier,” he decided. “I'll move up within easy range for my big Dahlgren and batter that brickwork to bits.”

A ten-inch smooth-bore pivot-gun was mounted on what was officially the ex-ferry boat's forecastle, and four thirty-two pounders on either broadside. Hinged bulwarks, built across her open ends to enable her to go to sea, were now dropped to give a free field of fire. The pivot-gun was loaded, primed and trained. The gun-crew stood by in tense expectation as Captain Gifford came down from the topsides to the beautifully holystoned and carefully sanded deck. He opened his mouth to give the command—

“Fire!”

Then up from the bottom of Okra Sound sprang a mighty column of chocolate-colored water, directly in front of the Hoboken's bows and nine times as tall as the top of her funnel. Up it rose and down it came—souse—all over the holystoned, sanded deck, all over the shiny brass cutlas-hilts, the well-polished pivot-gun, the natty new uniforms and the astonished faces of the crew. The gun-captain instinctively pulled the lock-string, but the hammer fell on a soaked and dispirited paper cap.

Knocked down by the weight of the falling water and the upward heave of the bows, all those who had been standing on the forecastle were washed aft like straws in a gutter by the flood that swept through the broad gangway where the Jersey market-gardeners used to park their vegetable-wagons on the four a.m. trip. Mr. Budlong, the chief, who had been leaning out of the engine-room door to watch the bombardment, pulled in his head and slammed the door just as the prone and wrathful Jonathan Gifford slid past head foremost on the crest of a two-foot wave. The captain was using language which' the admiring but prudent Mr. Budlong chose to interpret as “full speed astern.”

As he reversed his engines the Hoboken pitched the other way barely in time to save her skipper from being swept overboard astern. Fetching up against the side of the gangway, Captain Gifford sat up and looked behind him. The ebbing flood had left the deck and everything upon it painted thick with evil-smelling slime; his own uniform, his hair, his very mouth and nostrils were full of the foul stuff. Framed in the far end of the gangway he saw a sunlit, rapidly receding vision of Fort Moseby with the Confederate flag flying more jauntily than ever. Neither side had fired a shot.

“This is the of —— a way to fight a war!” spluttered the eighteen-twelver.

WORDS similar to those used by Jonathan Gifford, more softly accented but equally harsh in tone, were being spoken at that same moment by Colonel Montague Ashley, C.S.A., the gallant commander of Fort Moseby, to his cousin and second-in-command, Captain Carter Vance, on the subject of mines, or as they were called in those days, torpedoes.

“Why in the name of common sense—and fo'teen other things—didn't you wait till that thus-and-so Yank was right on top of that demijohn of gunpowder befo' you touched it off? Then you'd have busted him wide open instead of baptizin' him and' scarin' him so he'll never come within toe-nail reach again. Fo' ——'s sake, Carter, what was ailin' you?”

“Buck-fever, colonel—just plain buck-fever. Like what a hunter gets when he starts to shoot his first deer. It was my first try at torpedoing a ship, and all of a sudden my hands took to shaking so powerful hard that befo' I knew it I'd brought the ends of both wiahs together and closed the circuit.

“Soon as I'd done it I was all right again and ready to catch that Yankee with the next torpedo when he started to turn around. 'Stead of which he went scootin' backwards like a water-bug on a pond. I've never seen any steamboat act thataway befo',” declared Captain Vance.

“Must be one of those new double-ender gun-boats they're building fo' river-work,” decided the twenty-year-old colonel.

Neither he nor his cousin had ever been a hundred miles from their native city, and the conventional type of ferry-boat, though invented fifty years before by that versatile New Yorker Robert Fulton, was still unknown at Port Caroline. But the young men of that town were anything but backward when it came to fighting.

“Carter,” continued the colonel in calmer tones, “I'm getting mighty tired of sitting here slapping mosquitoes and watchin' that no-account Yank parading up and down the Sound all day and lying there with a light burning all night as if he owned the place. Last week he captured that schooner-load of lumber we were counting on for barracks. I'm going to commandeer the Southern Belle and pay Mr. Yankee a visit some time in the dark of the moon.'

“That old shingle-work river-boat wasn't built fo' rough and careless usage,” cautioned his cousin. 'One solid shot would smash her into locofoco matches—and set 'em alight.”

“It's going to be a surprize visit, Carter, and in the dark, as I said.”

“Wouldn't you like a nice spar-torpedo to ring the door-bell with?” asked the captain solicitously. “I'm powerful short of detonators, but I reckon I can fix you up.”

“Thank you kindly, Carter, but I'm sort of prejudiced against these modern improvements right now. I'm going to take a hundred of our fightin'est men and give 'em a chance to use their bayonets and bowie-knives.”

DRIFTING silently with the ebb, the Southern Belle bore steadily down on the one bright spot in the otherwise unbroken darkness of an overclouded night—the riding-light of the Northern gunboat. The once white paint of the river-steamer's tall topsides was daubed over with the blackest mud; her forward deck was packed with gray-clad soldiery.

More than one young infantryman, nervously handling his bayoneted, unloaded musket—left unloaded by Colonel Ashley's orders—kept thinking of his last mid-Summer night's voyage on the Southern Belle. Moonlight on the upper river, scent of magnolias from the banks, her face beside his as they sat together, over there by the rail. Summer of 1860—two thousand years ago!

Nearer and nearer they drifted to the light and its long, wavering reflection in the water. Still there came no challenge, nor any other sound, from the anchored craft. Straining his eyes to catch the loom of the enemy's squat hull, each soldier began to visualize the imagined outlines of impossible naval monsters bristling with masts, funnels and enormous guns. Nearer and nearer—now they were close alongside. The imaginary war-ships vanished; but where was the real enemy?

“Colonel,” whispered the aged skipper of the Southern. Belle, “there hain't nothin hyar but a lantern stuck on a spar-buoy. We-all had better light out o' hyar right sudden, befo'——”

The rest of his words were drowned by the appalling crash of a broadside. A solid shot plunged into the water hard by the starboard paddle-box, another flew screaming across the open boiler-deck, a third made a total wreck of the cabin pantry, while a ten-inch charge of canister ripped and splintered and tore through the river-boat's flimsy stern-works from guards to texas.

Their own high courage saved the astounded but untouched soldiers, who had crowded forward in their impatience to be among the first to board the foe. There were no casualties aft because there was no one there to be hit.

A rocket curved up out of the dark to starboard and burst with a glare that lit the Sound like day. There lay the Hoboken, about five hundred yards from the Southern Belle, boarding-nets rigged fore and aft and her guns already run in and being recharged for a second salvo. Captain Jonathan Gifford always shifted his moorings a couple of cable-lengths as soon as it was good and dark, leaving the buoyed lantern as a decoy for cutting-out parties and holding himself ready to blaze away at anything that came between him and the light.

The rocket-flare died down as the Southern Belle, in her skipper's phrase, “lit out of thar right sudden.” She had a good head of steam bottled up in her boilers, and her big paddle-wheels shot her light, shallow hull ahead and around in a sweeping curve that carried her safely past her adversary's stern and over a broad shoal where the heavier Northern gunboat could not follow. More rockets and broadsides blazed from the Hoboken, but the only result was to shoot away the gilt trotting-horse that hung between the river-boat's spouting smoke-stacks.

Jonathan Gifford slipped his cable and started up the channel as fast as he could steam, hoping to intercept and cut off the fugitive before she reached the shelter of the fort's guns. But the Hoboken was no racer; sunrise found the Southern Belle safe above the mine-field and the fat ferry-boat waddling discontentedly back to her old cruising-ground.

“Might as well try to catch a trotting-sulky with a stone-boat,” growled Gifford. “Young Hallett was right and I'm a blamed old fool. Durn it, I'll miss that six months' pay. This old turtle of mine can't overhaul anything except a sailing vessel in a flat calm.”

He glowered at his one poor little prize, lying waterlogged at her anchorage because she was not worth a prize-crew to take her North; a leaky, dirty coaster, laden with condemned tents and cheap pine lumber. He looked at the floating bits of wreckage, drifting in on the flood-tide, that his guns had chipped from the Southern Belle. A flash of color caught his eye and the long brass telescope came to bear.

“Stop her, Mr. Budlong,” Captain Gifford called down the engine-room voice-tube. “Mr. Humphrey, lower away the port cutter and pick up that stuff floating there. If it's what I take it for, I've got a notion how to use it.”

THE skipper of the blockade-runner Gray Fox shook his head as he looked at the cruiser following astern.

She can't overhaul us or work up within range, but we can't shake her off. We haven't gained or lost the half of a knot between us since she sighted us at dawn. I thought we had the legs of anything in the Yankee Navy.”

“It's their crack war-steamer, the Plattsburg, and no error,” said the mate, standing beside the captain on the railed top of the port paddle-box. “If we can keep ahead of her we haven't much to fear from the rest of them.”

“But we can't go barging into the Charleston. squadron tonight with the Plattsburg letting off rockets and signal-guns a bare two miles astern. And it's no use running out to sea again. She can stick this pace until something carries away, and we can't. Coal, you know.”

The mate nodded; it was the custom of the runners to carry barely enough Welsh for the open sea and anthracite for the inshore work to make the round trip between Charleston and Nassau. The rest of the bunker-space was filled with Enfield rifles, quinin or flannel shirts that cost three shillings and sold for ten dollars gold apiece. The sea-chests forward, the staterooms aft, were packed tight with private ventures. One lucky voyage out and back would more than pay the entire cost of ship and cargo, with a handsome profit besides. Small wonder that the Clyde and Tyneside yards were busy turning out fast new ships for such a trade.

Fastest and newest of them all was the Gray Fox, and her cargo was the richest ever carried out of Nassau. She was worth, as she floated then, at least two million dollars, and the Plattsburg's crew were already spending the prize-money. But the British skipper was a veteran at the game.

“We'll put about and nip into Port Caroline,” he decided.

“Can we cross the bar with our draft?” asked the mate.

“Just about—at the crest of the flood; and we'd reach it then if my tables are correct. I've heard there's a Yankee gunboat stationed there now; if so we can see her in time to sheer off and try Charleston after dark.”

Swerving westward, the Gray Fox and her pursuer sped toward the wide entrance of Okra Sound. As the English craft drew within sight of Fort Mosely the mate gave vent to a bitter oath,

“Charleston it is, sir! Here comes your Yankee gunboat, slap in the fairway!”

“Yankee your grandmother's cat!” yelled the skipper, dancing joyously up and down on the paddle-box. “It's a Confederate ironclad of the Merrimac type. See her ensign. See the shape of her.”

Square and sloping amidships, with a half-submerged ram and flying the Confederate battle-flag, the black-painted hulk moved slowly down the channel. Her engines seemed barely able to make headway against the incoming tide. She moved like a waterlogged hulk and looked exactly like a wood-cut in Harper's Weekly or the Illustrated London News. As the runner drew near, the ironclad turned clumsily about until the length of her blocked two-thirds of the channel.

“Ship ahoy! What ship is that?” hailed a voice from within her built-up pilot-house.

“The Gray Fox, from Nassau to Port Caroline. What ship is that?”

“The United States gunboat Hoboken!” whooped the exultant Jonathan Gifford as the captured Confederate ensign was hauled down and the Stars and Stripes run up. “Heave to and stop your engines.”

“Thanks, no,” answered the plucky Britisher, and rang four bells for “full speed ahead.”

The great feathering floats of the blockade-runner's wheels tore the water to foam; her sharp iron prow bore straight down on the gunboat's broadside. Unprepared for such an attack, the startled gunners made poor practise; the holes they punched through the Gray Fox's thin plating did nothing to check her speed.

The Hoboken backed water barely in time to escape being cut open and sunk. The Britisher's stern struck and tore away the whole elaborate structure of wood and canvas with which Jonathan Gifford had disguised his bows. It melted and sank beneath the whirling blows of the churning paddles as the tall gray hull flashed past and up the channel.

Around swung the baffled gunboat and pounded after in hot pursuit. The painted canvas curtains that had hidden the overhang of her hull and the paddle-wheels beneath now flapped grotesquely with the vehemence of her quivering engines. She looked like a fat apple-woman chasing a predatory small boy, and with about as much chance of success. The Gray Fox was already half a mile ahead and drawing close to the shelter of the mine-field before the Hoboken's crew could clear away the rest of the wreckage and bring the pivot-gun to bear.

“Stand aside, boy,” commanded Captain Gifford. “I'll lay this gun myself.”

The ferry-boat was bobbing up and down in the steamer's wake, and the big smooth-bore was an awkward piece to aim. But the eighteen-twelver had learned his trade on far less stable decks, with far more primitive guns. Lockstring in hand, he sighted for the base of the fugitive's funnel as she swung around an angle of the channel, and let drive.

Even as he did.so the Plattsburg, coming up astern, fired her Parrott rifle; the brief delay and the bends of the channel had brought her within range. Both bow-chasers spoke together; both blinded the men behind them with a stinging white cloud of black-powder smoke, till the vessel drove through and clear. At the sight before them the crews of both Union war-ships gave an exultant cheer. One of the shells had burst impotently in the air, but the other had struck squarely against the blockade-runner's port paddle-box and burst inside, shattering the wheel to bits. Whirling about, the stricken Gray Fox ran far up on the shoal and grounded on the soft mud.

Up raced the Plattsburg, Soon overtaking the laboring Hoboken, which, greatly to Captain Hallett's surprize, drew aside and let him pass.

Around the long curve of the channel the cruiser swung with ever diminishing speed, till she stopped almost abreast of the stranded steamer. Down dropped her boats and away they pulled to take possession of the waiting prize.

But when the Hoboken had swung aside she kept on, out of the channel and straight across the shoal. Jonathan Gifford knew the bottom of Okra Sound as well as he did the surface. Though the Hoboken was of deeper draft than the Southern Belle she was a skimming-dish as compared with either of the two ocean steamers; the tide was at flood and a short-cut perfectly feasible. Placidly she waddled across the bows of the Plattsburg's cutters and docked herself alongside the motionless Gray Fox. An armed boarding-party, assembled on the cabin-roof, had a short leap and an easy scramble over the Britisher's rail. They had run up an ensign and were passing a tow-line before the Plattsburg's swearing boat-crews had returned to their own ship.

Dropping astern of her prize, the Hoboken tugged at the tow-rope with all the strength of her powerful engines. The Gray Fox, not yet settled 'into the mud, stirred, slid off, and was towed away stern foremost.

As they drew abreast of the Plattsburg Captain Hallett spoke through a speaking-trumpet to his old commander:

“That vessel is my prize, sir, not yours. I sighted her at sea, chased her in here, and stopped her after you had failed to do so.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” answered Jonathan Gifford. “Who shot away her port-paddle-wheel, I'd like to know?”

“I did, sir,” claimed Hallett. “Your shell went wild; my foretopmen saw it leave your bows and burst in the air about half a mile dead ahead of you and nowhere near the target. They will testify so in the prize-court, sir.”

And so will the captain of the Gray Fox, and I guess he's an equally competent and less biased witness, sir,” retorted Gifford. “He swears that he saw both shells leave my bows one after the other, sir.”

“What!” cried the astounded Hallett. “Then where did mine go?”

“Right through my ship from stern to stem, sir. Blew all our caps with the wind of it, and nigh deafened us with the scream. You fired at the chase and raked your consort—raked her fore and aft. And at that you didn't hit anything, sir!

“The Hoboken doesn't mind a little thing like that; she's a fine ship, sir, a —— sight finer than your gunnery. Go back to your station, sir, and don't try to teach seamanship and straight shooting to an eighteen-twelver!”