Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History (40 page)

On the other flank the British envelopment had run into Dahlgren’s swarm of gunboats, which were rapidly closing on the main fight. There HMS
Resistance
had picked out USS
Wabash
for its duel as the largest American ship after
New Ironsides
. The two were pounding away at only fifty yards, the side of each ship spitting tongues of fire.
Resistance
’s heavy nineteen-gun broadside battery had a target it was designed for, a traditional wooden warship. Her gun crews were rapid and accurate. Big chunks of
Wabash
’s side and deck were smashed, but her own broadside battery of seven XI-inch Dahlgrens and a 150-pounder Parrot gun were just as destructive to the armored hull of the enemy. So close were the ships that
Wabash
’s shot was breaking through the ruptured armor and followed by a shell to explode inside the gun deck.

In effect they had canceled each other out, but the fighting would go on until they had reduced each other to wrecks. Meanwhile, the American sloops
Pawnee
and
Housatonic
closely engaged
Resistance
’s other side. Her gun crews had been so winnowed that there were few to man the guns on that side as the sloops concentrated on holing her below the water line. Shot after shot had so dislodged and torn the armor plates and shattered the teak behind them that water began to fill compartment after compartment.

The center of the battle swirled around the two armored flagships as
Black Prince
finally came alongside
New Ironsides
again. Seymour had seen the shot bounce off
New Ironsides
and was determined to lay himself alongside, where his gunners could fire through the enemy’s gun ports.
Black Prince
’s Captain knew his business and was getting everything from his ship and crew that they had to give. It was bruising and bloody work, for the American captain also knew his job. Wainwright would have to earn this victory the hard way.

Nevertheless, Wainwright knew he had the advantage. As damaged as his flagship was she still had complete maneuverability while the
Ironsides
was dead in the water. Huge projectiles sailed back and forth between the two ships, smashing through plate and wooden backing as
Black Prince
steamed past slowly, so close as to sometimes grind its casemate against the American’s. At this distance,
New Ironsides
’s gun crews switched to shell, set at point-blank range with all three lead fuse settings torn off. They not only tore through the armor and backing but ignited the splintered wood as well. Here and there guns went silent as the crews rushed to fight the fires.
Black Prince
was answering slowly to the helm with her flooded bow acting as a dead weight. Turning about, Wainwright was engaged by the sloops
Canandaigua
and
Powhatan
but, he shook off their fire to reengage
New Ironsides
.

Admiral Seymour would have her. And in his single-mindedness, he tried to step into Wainwright’s shoes and forgot the rest of his squadron. He had wounded
New Ironsides
, and now he was in for the kill. His spirit would have soared if he knew how close he was. His 68-pounders had battered
New Ironsides
’s pilothouse so severely that a chunk of metal had detached from the inner wall and struck Dahlgren a great gash in the thigh, sending him crashing into the bulkhead in a spray of blood. Rowan was first at his side to staunch the bleeding. It was a nasty wound. The deck pooled with the old man’s bright blood. When at last it ebbed, Dahlgren lay ashen on the deck. Rowan ordered him carried below, but
the older man gasped as three seamen lifted him. His hand clutched at the captain’s coat. “Rowan, keep pounding. We can stand it longer than they can. Pound ’em. My guns won’t let you down.”
³⁹

On the spar deck Ulric Dahlgren was with the Marines manning one of those very guns—a 5.1-inch Dahlgren rifle. He had applauded the accuracy of the men with that piece and had been as admiring, albeit more ruefully, of the accuracy of the British Armstrong gunners on
Black Prince
’s own spar deck.
⁴⁰
Their guns stopped one by one, whether hit or not, and the Dahlgren muzzle-loading rifle continued firing. Ulric had unconsciously hobbled up to take the place of a crewman felled by a splinter. By then the men had no time to spare for the bizarre scene of a one-legged Army colonel feeding the guns just like a tar. The gold eagles on his shoulder straps were more than incongruous. They attracted the fire of Royal Marine riflemen. The deck splintered around him, and rounds pinged off the gun. Another man fell to writhe on the deck. All the Marines aboard, not manning guns, had been issued the Spencers Admiral Dahlgren had so presciently ordered. Their volume of fire quickly dropped the enemy’s Marines from the rigging and forced those on deck under cover.
⁴¹

By now Captain Wainwright had brought
Black Prince
alongside
New Ironsides
again. Young Dahlgren saw an officer through the smoke shout through a megaphone, “Do you strike?”

Ulric hobbled to the side, his cap blown off and his blond hair streaked with powder. He cupped his hands and replied as the son of an admiral, “The Navy never strikes!” His Marines cheered. He looked back at them and winked, then turned to shout across the water again, “And neither does the U.S. Army!” Amazingly, the Marines cheered again, delighted with his pluck, Army or no Army. The gunner fired to punctuate their approval.
⁴²

Aboard
Black Prince
, the officer was blown off his feet, his clothes shredded and his megaphone sailing over the other side of the ship. He got up and staggered to report back to Seymour in his armored conning tower. The admiral looked at the man’s glassy eyes and singed and torn uniform, and asked, “Well?”

“They said the U.S. Army refuses to strike, sir.”

Seymour blinked and said, “What did you say?”

“They said the U.S. Army refuses to strike, sir.” Then he fell over.
⁴³

Before Seymour could try to make sense of this, his flag captain, Arthur Cochrane, interrupted with the damage report from
Black Prince
’s
captain.
⁴⁴
It drained away much of his confidence. More than half his guns were silenced. The armored casemate was torn and rent the entire length of the ship. The men were fighting fires in a half dozen places. The upper decks had been swept with exploding shells until it was a shambles. The American sloops were steaming back forth, pounding the exposed side of the ship and forcing it to fight in two directions.

For Seymour, the whole battle had telescoped into the struggle between these two ships. Whoever triumphed would win the entire battle. It all rested on that. “Put her alongside, muzzle to muzzle, and we shall fight it out, Captain. Be prepared to board,” he told Wainwright. The cry went out to assemble boarding parties. Seymour did not flinch as the two ships lurched into each other with a grinding squeal of metal on metal that would have frightened hell. The gun crews had been so worked up to the fighting that they barely took note of the eerie noise that echoed through the gun decks.

The only thing that kept the guns in action was
New Ironsides
’s seventeen-degree outward slant of her hull. Otherwise, the opposing hull would have shut the gun ports and the guns would have been unable to be run out. Locked in death’s embrace, the two ships fired and fired—the British gunners now had open gun ports, small as they were, to sight through only yards away—gutting each other and smashing the opposing gun decks until only a handful of guns functioned on either side. For the British boarding parties waiting expectantly for the impact, the noise went straight through them, their hearts pounding in the few still seconds before the order to board was given. “Board!” They raced to the side and threw their grapples to snag the enemy. A few made it over the yawning gap made by the American hull’s slant, but the boarding parties were stopped at the sides, unable to leap across so wide a space. Massed on the side they made too good a target for the U.S. Marine sharpshooters. Concentrated fire into the tight groups of sailors and Marines dropped a score and drove the rest under cover.
⁴⁵

Inadvertently
New Ironsides
’s gunners solved the stalemate by shooting through
Black Prince
’s mizzenmast. It screamed as it splintered, then with a groan fell over the side and onto the Americans’ deck. Ulric instantly saw it as a bridge. He scrambled to the mast, pulled himself up by the strength of his arms and good leg, then forced his leg under him to rise to a standing position. He did not dash over the mast; rather, he hobbled almost crablike, dragging and swinging his cork leg after him. Yet the young man who had danced across the dance floors of
Washington with such grace summoned every last bit of that coordination and control to pick his way across that rounded, splintered, and rope-twisted mast. If he had been able to pay attention he would not have been able to tell which group of men was more incredulous at the sight—the British manning the stern Armstrong pivot gun or his own Marine gun crew. Finally reaching the enemy’s side, he let himself down onto his good leg and sagged from the impact. He was on the deck of
Black Prince
. He barely had time to look up and see the gleam of a bayonet with a red coat behind it rushing toward him.

Oblivious to the drama on the surface, the admiral’s two small submersibles had waited for just this moment for
Black Prince
to close. Their torpedoes bulged at the end of long spars. Finding the ship through the glass ports in the light filtering down from the cloudless sky, they made gentle contact with the iron hull with the strong magnet on the end of the torpedo. Once the torpedoes were locked onto the hull they backed off, unraveling the electric wires that connected with batteries inside the boats. Before the wires went completely taut, the circuits were closed.

Ulric had barely drawn himself up. The Royal Marine’s bayonet was plunging toward his chest when the deck heaved, throwing him onto one of the Armstrongs. The gun crew had been thrown off their feet as well and were just getting up when the deck heaved again. An awful groaning came from deep within the ship.

Installed low in
Black Prince
, her engines had survived the hard pounding as her gang stoked the forty furnaces feeding the ten boilers that generated the steam for its 5,210-horsepower engines. But the torpedoes had struck where the Dahlgrens could not reach, bending the shaft and rupturing some of the furnaces. Burning coal, white-hot ash, and clinker spewed out among the stokers, who screamed out their last moments in hell. Water rushed in through the torn hull, flooding the engine rooms as the guns above continued to fight. When the seawater reached the boilers, they began to explode.
⁴⁶

The ship’s death agony was not yet apparent to the men on deck getting to their feet. The tars were game and came for Ulric again. He had drawn his Navy Colt and dropped the first two men. A third struck him a numbing blow on the shoulder with a rammer; the pistol fell from his hand. The tar drew back to brain him, but he went down under the rush of men in blue coats. Ulric’s own Marines had followed him over the mast armed with cutlasses and pikes from the ready racks. He was pulled to his feet by strong arms.

On the bridge, Captain Wainwright was desperately trying to reach the engine room through the metal voice pipes and the mechanical telegraph connected to it. The shrieks at the end of the voice pipe told him the worst. Everyone in the conning tower had been frozen listening to the death below. The shudders that pulsed up through the deck from the exploding boilers jarred everyone back to life. Wainwright knew his ship was lost. He found Seymour had slumped into his chair. “Admiral,
Black Prince
is mortally wounded. She can do no more. I must save the men who are left.” Seymour’s jaw set in a vise as the ship groaned in its death throes; he could only nod.

Wainwright left the conning tower to personally haul down the colors, an act he would not delegate to a man of lower rank. He made his way through the shambles on the spar deck. He could feel the ship beginning to settle under him as it listed to larboard. The smoke from the guns and a dozen fires on the deck hid the stern in its wispy black arms. He made out a group on the stern around the pivot gun and was about to order them to abandon ship, when the breeze quickened to part the smoke. They were not his men.

The officer among them was a young, fair man, leaning against the gun. A man raised a pistol to shoot, but the officer knocked it up to discharge in the air. The officer straightened up and touched the muzzle of his own pistol to his forehead in salute. “Colonel Dahlgren, United States Army, sir.”

Wainwright was a hard man to fluster, and even this scene could not break through the iron presence of a naval officer. He touched the brim of his cap, “Captain Wainwright, commanding Her Majesty’s Ship
Black Prince
, sir.”

As the deck began to cant even more, Dahlgren coolly asked, “Do you strike, sir?”

“Damnation, sir. I do.”

For more than two hours the crowds massed along the battery and the Charleston docks had been barely able to control their excitement. They could not actually see the battle six miles away beyond Fort Sumter and Morris Island, but they could hear the continuous rumble of the guns and see the pall of smoke. It was more than just gunpowder smoke. The funeral pyres of great wooden ships go straight up into the heavens. Signals from Fort Sumter added little.

That changed as the signal officer at Beauregard’s side read the waving flags from his telescope. His voice shaking he said, “Sumter reports a huge British warship is sailing into the harbor.” That could only mean that the British had won the naval battle. The arrival of the ship was the act in international law that would declare the hated blockade broken. Those on the crowded balcony spontaneously shouted in triumph. Word was shouted down to the street and spread with electric speed. The crowds erupted in near hysterical cheering, with rebel yells keening over the water. Beauregard announced that he would personally welcome the ship at the Ager Dock, and he bounded down the stairs, his staff running after. He shouted an order to have the Army Band meet him there.