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Though Dewey was reluctant to desert his ship, his decision turned out to be a wise one. He and the acting master, Joseph Chase, had to use their revolvers to make the men row back. If Dewey hadn’t slipped aboard, none of the boats would have been available to rescue the rest of Mississippi’s remaining crew.
Upon returning to the main deck, Dewey approached Smith and hastily explained his temporary absence. He motioned to the two empty lifeboats alongside, indicating that they would not be there save for his initiative and fortitude.
“We must make sure none is left aboard alive,” Smith said evenly.
What began as a compelling search soon turned into a grim nightmare. Dewey quickly selected five men to accompany him throughout the disabled warship. Bodies had to be closely examined in the dark and smoke to see if any of the men were still alive. They were very careful to make certain no spark of life remained, or the poor man might lie there, powerless to move, as the flames crept closer and closer.
They moved belowdecks, shouting that there was little time left to abandon the ship. Luckily, they found a young cabin boy who was still breathing despite being buried under a pile of dead bodies that had been cut down by bursting shells. Satisfied that only the dead remained on board, Dewey was then ordered by Smith to make absolutely certain that old Mississippi would be totally destroyed before falling into Confederate hands.
Dewey ran to his stateroom, snatched off the mattress from his berth, and dragged it to the wardroom, where he sliced it open with a dress sword, piled chairs and tables on top of it, and then threw an old oil lantern into the debris, igniting a roaring fire almost immediately. Only then did he and the few men left on board join Captain Smith in the last lifeboat.
They pushed off from the hull aft of the paddle wheels and immediately were caught in the powerful current and swept downriver. As they looked back, a giant torrent of flame burst through the skylight of the wardroom that Dewey had set ablaze. The Confederate guns fired away at the lifeboat but fortunately failed to score a hit. At the sight of the flaming ship, the entire bluff above the river broke into a rebel yell. The victory was theirs.
Farragut’s fleet had come within an inch of total disaster.
Smith seated himself in the stern of the lifeboat, still puffing nonchalantly on a cigar while Dewey ma
“Why did you do that?” Dewey asked him.
“I’m not surrendering them to any rebel,” he said haughtily. It was a hasty decision Smith would come to regret.
A humorous episode occurred when the men of Mississippi boarded Richmond. While Dewey was setting the fire in the wardroom on board the doomed ship, Ensign Dean Batcheller snatched up a dress uniform coat hanging in the cabin he shared with Ensign Francis Shepard. The rest of the crew, including Smith and Dewey, escaped with only the clothes on their backs.
Proudly, Batcheller held up the coat. “At least I’ll have something to wear for the ladies in New Orleans.”
His cabin mate Ensign Shepard leaned over and eyed the coat. Then he looked up and gri
And so it was.
Dewey was greeted by a close friend from his Naval Academy days at A
Back at the battered Mississippi, the river flowed in through the engine water-delivery pipes that had been cut by the engine-room crew before they abandoned ship. Because the hull was grounded on an angle with the bow slightly raised, the incoming water flowed toward the stern. The added weight lifted the bow, and she slid free off the shoal. The current turned her around so that now she was moving with her bow pointed downstream. The port guns that had been loaded but not fired now faced the Confederates. As the flames reached their primers, they began firing a ragged broadside in a final act of defiance. Dewey solemnly described the sight as “a ship ma
Engulfed by a sheet of fire that raged through the pummeled ship, Mississippi was carried downriver by a four-knot current. The shriek of steam escaping from the ship’s safety valve cut through the pandemonium of gunfire. Flames burst from her rigging and erupted into the night sky, casting a flickering orange blaze of light that illuminated both shorelines as bright as day. Looking like a floating, flaming pyramid, Mississippi was a funeral pyre for the dead aboard. It was a sight never forgotten by both the Federals and rebels who watched her fiery passage in the night. Her death would later be described as a grand spectacle.
Several reports from both sides in the battle put the frigate sliding off the shoals at 3 A.M. and drifting down around Profit Island, her flaming hull reflecting in the sky until 5:30, when the fire reached the twenty tons of gunpowder in her magazine and she blew up in a tremendous explosion. The ensuing concussion shook the country for miles around and rocked the Union ships from stem to stern. Such was the end of the brave old paddle steamer.
It was somehow fitting that the river she was named for became her burial shroud.
Perhaps Dewey himself paid Mississippi her greatest tribute when he stood on the deck of Richmond, stony-faced and deeply saddened as he watched her die. He said, “She goes out magnificently.”
II
Nothing Stays the Same 1989
This is especially true of rivers and their shorelines. Unless it’s the Colorado flowing through the Grand Canyon on the same course for thousands of years, most rivers, particularly the Mississippi, change their course on a daily basis. The riverboat Sultana, chronicled in the first Sea Hunters book, burned and sank a few miles above Memphis in 1865 with a loss of two thousand lives. Our mag search put the remains two miles from the present course of the river, eighteen feet deep in a farmer’s soybean field in Arkansas.
The final resting place of the gallant old frigate Mississippi, where she has lain ignored and forgotten since that horrendous night in 1863, is not under the present river cha
Because I did not feel it was fitting or proper that “lost in obscurity” be Mississippi’s epitaph, I cleared my desk after finishing another Dirk Pitt adventure book and began the research in preparation for the hunt for Mississippi.
Relying on researcher Bob Fleming in Washington, who combed the archives, we amassed a mountain of material that we eventually sifted to a ten-inch pile. Then began the investigation to estimate a ballpark for Mississippi’s location. One of the first things we had to consider was the possibility that she had been salvaged. Fortunately, a probe through the naval archives revealed no such attempt. Part of the reason was a report that she had exploded in the middle of the cha
Since none of the contemporary reports gave a clue to the exact location where she had blasted herself to bits and gone down, and no distances were given to still-existing landmarks, I had to base the search on the time element. With the river ru