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I once suffered the same discouragement when we arrived hours too late to save the remains of the famous Union ironclad Carondelet. A great dredge had gone over the site and ripped it to shreds the day before we launched our search — a hundred and ten years after she had sunk in the Ohio River.
Chances are that the famous old New Orleans is gone. But she left a fabulous legacy, and who knows, maybe there is a tiny chance our one-and-only target might just be it. The odds are against us, but hope springs eternal, and someday we’ll return and check it out.
PART THREE
The Ironclads Manassas and Louisiana
I
Civil War Turtle 1861–1862
“Curse this boat,” Lieutenant Alexander Warley said loudly. “I feel like a horse wearing blinders.”
His command, the Confederate ironclad Manassas, was less than fifty yards downriver of Fort Jackson, some seventy-five miles south of New Orleans. Warley peered through the single bow port into the misty night. The clattering of the machinery, combined with the hissing of the steam boilers, was magnifying the tension Warley already felt. The Confederate ironclad was untested and only weeks from completion. And although the night of October 11, 1861, was unseasonably cool, Warley was sweating.
Fourteen feet of Manassas was underwater, with only the top six feet of the convex hull and the twin smokestacks rising into the air. Because of an Indian summer, the temperature of the Mississippi River had remained warm longer than usual. With the shroud of warm water around her hull, combined with the heat from the boilers, Manassas was being warmed from without and within. Slipping downstream with the current, Warley wondered how he and his crew had found themselves here.
Farther south, at the Head of the Passes, the area of the Mississippi River Delta where the river forked into three separate cha
Striking a wooden match, he waited until the strong sulfur smell was carried away by the wind, then touched the match to the bowl and puffed the pipe to life. Then he stared across the water. The night was black, with no moon, and a mist hung low over the water. The scant illumination came from lanterns on the deck of the twenty-two-gun flagship Richmond, and the few on the deck of the Union sloop Joseph H. Toone that was tied alongside. The sloop was off-loading coal for Richmond’s boilers, and French wished the loading operation was finished.
No captain enjoys having the maneuverability of his vessel compromised, and French’s feelings were heightened by the fact that he was at the mouth of an inland waterway and not far out to sea, as he preferred. Rivers were for flatboats and barges, not warships, French thought to himself. He drew in a mouthful of smoke.
“Sights or sounds?” he said to the sentry, after he exhaled.
“No sights, sir,” the seaman noted. “With the bunkers being reloaded, it’s hard to hear anything from upriver. Nothing indicates it won’t be a quiet night, though, sir.”
French puffed on his pipe while he smoothed his beard with his hand. “Where are you from, sailor?”
“Maine, sir,” the young man answered. “Rockport.”
“I imagine you’ve spent some time on the water, then,” French noted.
“Yep,” the seaman answered, “family of fishermen and lobstermen.”
French finished and tapped the dottle over the side into the water.
“I’m going belowdecks. You keep a sharp eye,” he said.
“Aye, sir,” the sailor answered.
Just then a small series of waves from far out in the gulf rocked Richmond and pressed her and Toone together. The sound of the hulls slapping washed across the water like distant thunder.
French climbed back down the ladder and entered his cabin on the Preble. Licking his fingertips, he pressed them against the wick of the lamp and climbed into his berth. Making himself comfortable, he settled in to sleep.
Lieutenant Warley coughed, then rubbed his watering eyes. The pair of smokestacks were failing to vent the smoke from the boilers. This was just one more problem to add to the many Warley had noticed with Manassas, the first armored warship in North America that would see battle. To begin with, the vessel was proving underpowered, and that was no wonder. The Confederate navy was underbudgeted, and the ironclad’s twin engines — one high-pressure, the other low-pressure — were worn out when they were installed. This was a common problem. The Confederates lacked the funds and the foundries to produce new engines themselves. Nor did the Confederates possess the large and modem shipyards of the Union.
The hull of Manassas came from a New England icebreaker formerly named Enoch Train that had last seen life as a river towboat. A group of enterprising Louisiana businessmen bought Enoch Train, then paid to have her razed at a crude shipyard across the river from New Orleans in Algiers. The ship’s masts and superstructure were cut off, the hull was lengthened and widened, and her bow was extended and rebuilt with solid wood. Then the worn engines and hardware were installed. Next, a convex iron shield backed by wood was built as the upper deck. In the bow, a rounded shuttered port that flipped up was cut and the hole for the smokestack punched through the top. Last but not least, the shipwrights bolted a cast-iron ram to the bow just below the waterline.
They named her Manassas after the site of a recent Confederate army victory.
Then the businessmen applied for a letter of marque and reprisal, a document from the Confederate government giving them the right to sink Union vessels and take their cargoes as prizes.
Their dreams of grandeur above patriotism did not last. Commander George Hollins was in charge of building a fleet of warships to fight the expected fleet of Admiral David Farragut. Needing every vessel he could arm, Hollins sent Warley with a crew from the C.S.S. McRae to seize Manassas for the Confederacy.
The longshoremen aboard the ironclad defied the navy and shouted that they would kill the first man who attempted to board her. Warley, wielding a revolver, called their bluff. Cowed, the longshoremen abandoned the boat, along with one of the owners, who had tears in his eyes when escorted ashore. It was later reported that the Confederate government paid the businessmen $100,000 as compensation for the ship.
At this instant, Warley was ruing the day he had been assigned her command. To add insult to injury, he was having a great deal of trouble controlling Manassas’s direction. To have steering control, Warley needed to exceed the speed of the current by at least a few miles per hour. Right now Warley was barely creeping downriver.
“Get the engineer,” Warley shouted to a deckhand standing nearby.
The man scampered down a hatch into the engine room. Warley was well known as a stern disciplinarian, and by the sound of his voice he was none too happy. Crouching down to avoid hitting his head, the deckhand crab-walked to the stern, where William Hardy, the ship’s engineer, was applying grease to the shaft leading to the propeller.