Kitabı oku: «From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life», sayfa 12

Balch's other story which I recall was at the moment simply humorous, but has since seemed to me charged with homely wisdom of wide application. He had made a rather longish voyage in a merchant-steamer, and during it used to amuse himself doing navigation work in company with her master, or mate. On one occasion a discussion arose between them as to some result, and Balch in the course of the argument said, "Figures won't lie." "Yes, that's all right," rejoined the other, "figures won't lie, if you work them right; but you must work them right, Mr. Balch." I was too young then to have noted a somewhat similar remark about statistics; and I think now, after a pretty long observation of mankind, its records and its statements, that I should be inclined to extend that old seaman's comments to facts also. Facts won't lie, if you work them right; but if you work them wrong, a little disproportion in the emphasis, a slight exaggeration of color, a little more or less limelight on this or that part of the grouping, and the result is not truth, even though each individual fact be as unimpeachable as the multiplication table.

After the capture of Port Royal, and the establishment there of the naval base, and until the arrival of monitors a year later, operations of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, as it was styled, were confined to blockading. This took two principal forms. The fortifications of Charleston and Savannah being still in the hands of the enemy, and intact, these two chief seaports of that coast were unassailable by our fleet. Even after Fort Sumter had been battered to a shapeless heap of masonry, and Fort Pulaski had surrendered, neither city fell until Sherman's march took it in the rear. But the numerous inlets were substantially undefended against naval attack; and for them the blockade, that tremendously potent instrument of the national pressure, the work of which has been too little commemorated, was instituted almost universally within. Even Fort Pulaski, before its fall, though it sealed the highway to Savannah, could not prevent the Union vessels from occupying the inside anchorage off Tybee Island, completely closing the usual access from the sea to the town. During the ensuing ten months there were very few of these entrances, from Georgetown, the northernmost in South Carolina, down to Fernandina, in Florida, into which the Pocahontas did not penetrate, alone or in company. I do not know whether people in other parts of the country realize that these various inlets are connected by an inside navigation, behind the sea islands, as they are called, the whole making a system of sheltered intercommunication. The usefulness of this was reinforced by the numerous navigable rivers which afford water roads to the interior, and gave a vessel, once entered, refuge beyond the reach of the blockaders' arm, with ready means for distribution. Such a gift of nature to a community, however, has the defects of its qualities. Ease of access, and freedom of movement in all directions, now existed for foe as it had for friend, and the very facility which such surroundings bestow had prevented the timely creation of an alternative. Deprival consequently was doubly severe.

It thus came to pass that, by a gradual process of elimination, blockade in the usual sense of the word, blockade outside, became confined to Charleston and its approaches. It is true that much depended on the class of vessel. It was obviously inexpedient to expose sailing-ships where they might be attacked by steamers, in ground also too contracted for manœuvring; and two years later I found myself again blockading Georgetown, in a paddle steamer from the merchant service, the size and unwieldiness of which prevented her entering. Moreover, torpedoes had then begun to play a part in the war, though still in a very primitive stage of development. But in 1862 there was little outside work except at Charleston. The very reasons which determine the original selection of a port—facility for entrance, abundant anchorage, and ease of access to the interior for distribution and receipt of the articles of commerce—determine also the accumulation of defences, to the exclusion of other less favored localities. All these conditions, natural and artificial, combined with the Union occupancy of the other inlets to concentrate blockade-running upon Charleston. This in turn drew thither the blockaders, which had to be the more numerous because the harbor could be entered by two or more channels, widely separated. There was thus constituted a blockade society, which contrasted agreeably with the somewhat hermit-like existence of the smaller stations. The weather was usually pleasant enough—many Northerners now know the winter climate of South Carolina—so during the daytime the ships would lift their anchors and get more or less together; the officers, and to a less extent the crews, exchanging visits. Old acquaintanceships were renewed, former cruises discussed, "yarns" interchanged; and then there was always the war with its happenings. Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Shiloh, the Monitor and Merrimac fight, the capture of New Orleans by Farragut, all occurred during the stay of the Pocahontas upon the blockade in 1862. Our news was apt to be ten days old, but to us it was as good as new; indeed, somewhat better, for we heard of the first reverses at Shiloh, and by the hands of the Merrimac, by the same mail which brought word of the final decided victory. Thus we were spared the anxiety of suspense. Even the disasters about Richmond were not by us fairly appreciated until the ship returned North, when the mortification of defeat was somewhat solaced, and the tendency to despondency lessened, by the happiness of being again at home; in my case after a continuous absence of more than three years, in the Congress and Pocahontas.

Talking of despondency, I had an odd experience of the ease with which people forget their frames of mind. While Burnside was engaged in the movements preceding Fredericksburg, I was in conversation with a veteran naval officer at his own house. Speaking of the probable outcome of the operations in progress, which then engrossed all thoughts, he said to me, "I think, Mr. Mahan, that if we fail this time, we may as well strike"; the naval phrase "strike the colors" being the equivalent of surrender—give up. I dissented heartily; not from any really reasoned appreciation of conditions, but on general principles, as understood by a man still very young. More than two years later, when the war had just drawn to its triumphant close, I again met the same gentleman. Amid our felicitations, he said to me, "There is one thing, Mr. Mahan, which I have never allowed myself to doubt—the ultimate success of our just cause."

After all, it was very natural. When you are cold, you're cold, and when you're hot, you're hot; and if you are indiscreet enough to say so to some one who feels differently, he remembers it against you. What business have you to feel other than he? If, with the thermometer at zero, I chance to say that I wish it were warmer, I am sure of some one, a lady usually, bursting in upon me when it is ninety-five, with the jeer, "Well! I hope, now, you are satisfied." I recall distinctly the long faces we pulled when we reached Philadelphia on our return, and realized, by the withdrawal of McClellan's army to Washington, the full extent of our disasters on the Peninsula; my old commodore might then have found some to say, Amen. But this did not keep our hats any lower when we chucked them aloft over Vicksburg and Gettysburg, and forgot that we had ever felt otherwise.

Vicksburg and Gettysburg, by the way, and their coincidence with the Fourth of July, have furnished me with a reminiscence quite otherwise agreeable. The ship in which I then was spent that Fourth at Spithead, England. We dressed ship with multicolored signals, red, white, and blue, at every yard-arm, big American ensigns at the three mast-heads and the peak, presenting a singularly gay and joyful aspect, which could profitably be viewed from as many points as Mr. Pecksniff looked at Salisbury Cathedral. At noon we fired a national salute, all the more severely punctilious and observant, because by the last mail things at home seemed to be looking particularly blue. The British ships of war, though I fear few of their officers then were other than pleased with our presumed discomfiture, dressed likewise, as by naval courtesy bound, and also fired a salute. The Times of the day arrived from London in due season, and had improved the occasion to moralize upon the sad condition to which the Republic of Bunker Hill and Yorktown was reduced: Grant held up at Vicksburg,¹⁰ Lee marching victoriously into Pennsylvania, no apparent probability of escaping disaster in either quarter. The conclusion was couched in that vein of Pecksniffian benevolence of which we hear so much in life. "Let us hope that so much adversity may be tempered to a nation, afflicted with evil as unprecedented as its former prosperity; and this will indeed be the case if America … is led on this day of festivity, now converted into a day of humiliation, to review past errors, and to consider that, if her present policy has led her so near ruin, in its reversal must lie the only path that can conduct her to safety." I wonder, if there had been a cable, would that editorial have been headed off. It was not.

 
"And there it stands unto this day,
To witness if I lie."
 

It was bitter then to my taste; but sweet were the chuckles which I later had, when the actual transactions of that anniversary came to hand.

Whatever their sympathies, the British naval officers during that stay in British waters had no difficulty in paying us all the usual personal attentions; but a particular incident showed for our susceptibilities a nicety of consideration, which could not have been exacted and was very grateful at the time. We were at Plymouth, under the breakwater, but some distance from the inner anchorage, when a merchant-vessel lying inside hoisted a Confederate flag at her mizzen mast-head. We saw it, but of course could do nothing. It was a clear case of intended insult, for the ship had no claim to the flag, and could only mean to flaunt us. It flew for perhaps an hour, and then disappeared. The same day, and not long afterwards, a British lieutenant from a vessel in the harbor came on board, and told me that he had had it hauled down, acting in place of his captain, who was absent. The communication to me, also momentarily in command, was purely personal; indeed, there was nothing official in the whole transaction, nor do I know by what means or by what authority he could insist upon the removal of the flag. However managed, the thing was done, and with the purpose of stopping a rudeness which, it is true, reflected more upon the port than upon us, for I think the offending vessel was British. Very many years afterwards I had occasion to quote this, when, during the Boer War, on the visit of a British squadron to one of our seaside resorts, a resident there thought to show American breeding by hoisting the Four-Color. In the late winter of 1863–64 I again met this officer and his ship in New Orleans. In conversation then he told me he did not believe the Union cause could succeed; that he, with others, looked to see three or four nations formed. In the same month of 1863 this anticipation would not have surprised me; but in 1864 it did, although Grant had not yet begun his movement upon Richmond.

Blockading was desperately tedious work, make the best one could of it. The largest reservoir of anecdotes was sure to run dry; the deepest vein of original humor to be worked out. I remember hearing of two notorious tellers of stories being pitted against each other, for an evening's amusement, when one was driven as a last resource to recounting that "Mary had a little lamb." We were in about that case. Charleston, however, was a blooming garden of social refreshment compared with the wilderness of the Texas coast, to which I found myself exiled a year or so later; a veritable Siberia, cold only excepted. Charleston was not very far from the Chesapeake or Delaware, in distance or in time. Supply vessels, which came periodically, and at not very long intervals, arrived with papers not very late, and with fresh provisions not very long slaughtered; but by the time they reached Galveston or Sabine Pass, which was our station, their news was stale, and we got the bottom tier of fresh beef. The ship to which I there belonged was a small steam-corvette, which with two gunboats constituted all the social possibilities. Happily for myself, I did not join till midway in the corvette's stay off the port, which lasted in all nearly six months, before she was recalled in mercy to New Orleans. I have never seen a body of intelligent men reduced so nearly to imbecility as my shipmates then were.

One of my captains used to adduce, as his conception of the extreme of isolation, to be the keeper of a lightship off Cape Horn; a professional conceit rivalling the elder Mr. Weller's equally profound recognition of the connection between keeping a pike and misanthropy. We off Sabine Pass were banished about equally with the keeper of a turnpike or of a remote lightship. We ought, of course, to have improved the leisure which weighed so heavily on our hands; but the improvement of idle moments is an accomplishment of itself, as many a retired business man has found out too late. There is an impression, derived from the experience of passengers on board ocean steamers, that naval officers have an abundance of spare time. The ship, it seems assumed, runs itself; the officers have only to look on and enjoy. As a matter of fact, sea officers under normal conditions are as busy as the busiest house-keeper, with the care to boot of two, three, four, or five hundred children, to be kept continually doing as they should; the old woman who lived in the shoe had a good thing in comparison. Thus occupied, the leisure habit of self-improvement, other than in the practice of the calling, is not formed. At sea, on a voyage, the vicissitudes of successive days provide the desultory succession of incidents, which vary and fill out the tenor of occupations, keeping life full and interesting. In port, besides the regular and fairly engrossing routine, there are the resources of the shore to fill up the chinks. But the dead monotony of the blockade was neither sea nor port. It supplied nothing. The crew, once drilled, needed but a few moments each day to keep at the level of proficiency; and there was practically nothing to do, because nothing happened that required either a doing or an undoing.

Under such conditions even a gale of wind was a not unwelcome change. Although little activity was required to meet it, it at least presented new surroundings—something different from the daily outlook. After a very brief period, it became the rule to ride out the storms at anchor; and I remember one of our volunteer officers, who had commanded a merchant-ship for some years, saying that he would have been spared a good deal of trouble, on occasions, had he had our experience of holding on with an anchor instead of keeping under way. It was, however, an old if forgotten expedient, where anchorage ground was good—bottom sticky and water not too deep. In the ancient days of the French wars, the British fleets off Brest and Toulon had to keep under way, but that blockading Cadiz, in 1797–98, used to hold its position at anchor, and under harder conditions than ours; for there the worst gales blew on shore, whereas ours swept chiefly along the coast. A standing dispute in the British navy, in those days of hemp cables, used to be whether it was safer to ride with three anchors down, or with one only, having to it three cables, bent together, so as to form one of thrice the usual length. The balance of opinion leaned to the latter; the dead weight of so much hemp held the ship without transmitting the strain to the anchor itself. She "rode to the bight," as the expression was; that is, to the cable, curved by its own weight and length, lying even in part on the bottom, which prevented its tightening and pulling at the anchor. What was true of hemp was yet more true of iron chains. The Pocahontas used to veer to a hundred fathoms, and there lie like a duck in fifty or sixty feet of water. I remember on one occasion, however, that when we next weighed the anchor, it came up with parts polished bright, as in my childhood we used sometimes to burnish a copper cent. This seemed to show that it had been scoured hard along a sandy bottom. We had had no suspicion of the ship's dragging during the gale, and I have since supposed that it may have started from its bed as we began to heave, and so been scrubbed along towards us.

The problem of maintaining the health of ships' companies condemned to long months of salt provisions, and to equally depressing short allowance of social salt for the intellect, which reasonable beings crave, has to be ever present to those charged with administration. Nelson's "cattle and onions" sums up in homely phrase the first requirement; while, for the others, his policy during a weary two years, in which he himself never left the flag-ship, was to keep the vessels in constant movement, changing scene, and thereby maintaining expectation of something exciting turning up. "Our men's minds," he said, "are always kept up with the daily hopes of meeting the enemy." As the Confederacy had practically no navy, this particular distraction was debarred our blockaders; but in the matter of food, we in the early sixties had not got beyond his prescription for the opening years of the century. The primitive methods then still in vogue, for preserving meats and vegetables fresh, accomplished chiefly the making them perfectly tasteless, and to the eye uninviting; the palate, accustomed to the constant stimulant of salt, turned from "bully" (bouilli) beef and "desecrated" (dessicated) potatoes, jaded before exercise. Like liquor, salt, long used in large measures, at last becomes a craving. I have heard old seamen more than once say, "I must have my salt;" and I have even known one to express his utter weariness of the fresh butter France sends up with its morning coffee and rolls. So we on the blockade depended more upon the good offices of salt than upon those of tin cans, for giving us acceptable food; the consequence being, with us as with our British forebears, a keen physical demand for "cattle and onions." In one principal respect our supplies differed from theirs—in the profusion of ice afforded by our country. Our beef, therefore, came to us already butchered, while theirs was received on the hoof. Many of my readers doubtless will recall the adventures of Mr. Midshipman Easy, when in charge of the transport from Tetuan with bullocks for the fleet off Toulon. Onions—blessings on their heads, if they have any—came to both us and our predecessors as easily as they were welcome. I have sometimes heard the plea, that Nature is the best guide in matters of appetite, advanced for indulgences which, so construed, seemed to reflect upon her parental character; but there can be no such doubt concerning onions to a system well saturated with salt. When you see them you know what you want; and a half-dozen raw, with a simple salad dressing, were little more than a whetter on the blockade. Would it be possible now to manage a single one?

VIII
INCIDENTS OF WAR AND BLOCKADE SERVICE—CONTINUED

1863–1865

The Pocahontas came North for repairs in the late summer of 1862, and after a brief leave I was ordered to the Naval Academy. Under the stress of the war, this had been broken out from its regular seat at Annapolis and transferred for the moment to Newport. All the arrangements were temporary and extemporized. The principal establishment, housing the three older classes, was in a building in the town formerly known as the Atlantic Hotel; while the new entries, who were very numerous, were quartered on two sailing-frigates, moored head and stern in the inner harbor, off Goat Island. This duplex arrangement necessitated a double set of officers, not easy to be had with war going on; the more so that the original corps had been depleted by the resignations of Southern men. The embarrassment arising from the immediate scantness of officers led naturally, if perhaps somewhat irreflectively, to a great number of admissions to the Naval Academy, disregardful of past experience with the '41 Date, and of the future, when room at the top would be lacking to take in all these youngsters as captains and admirals. Thus was constituted the "hump," as it came to be called, which, like a tumor on the body, engaged at a later day the attention of many professional practitioners. As it would not absorb, and as the rough-and-ready methods by which civil life and the survival of the fittest deal with such conditions could not be applied, it had to be dissipated; a process ultimately carried out with indifferent success. While it lasted it caused many a heartache from postponement. As one of the sufferers said, when hearing the matter discussed, "I don't know about this or that. All I know is that I have been a lieutenant for twenty years." Owing to the slimness of the service in the lower grades they became lieutenants young; but there they stuck. Every boom is followed by such reaction, and for a military service war is a boom. Expansion sets in; and when contraction follows somebody is squeezed. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars there were over eight hundred post-captains in the British navy. What could peace do for them?

Eight pleasant months I spent on shore at the Academy, and then was again whisked off to sea, there to remain for substantially all the rest of the war. Although already prominent as a fashionable watering-place, Newport then was very far from its present development; but in winter it had a settled and pleasant, if small, society. At this time I met the widow of Captain Lawrence of the Chesapeake, who survived until two years later. She was already failing, and not prematurely; for it was then, 1862–63, the fiftieth year since her husband fell. She lived with a sister, also the widow of an officer, and was frequently visited by her granddaughter, the child of Lawrence's daughter, a singularly beautiful girl. I remember her pointing to me a picture of the defeat of the Peacock, by the Hornet, under her grandfather's command; on which, she laughingly said, she had been brought up. This meeting had for me not only the usual interest which a link with the distant past supplies, but a certain special association; for my grandmother, then recently dead, had known several of Lawrence's contemporaries in the navy, and my recollection is that she told me she had seen him leaving his wife at their doorstep, when departing to take command of the Chesapeake.

When the summer of 1863 drew nigh, the question of the usual practice cruise came up. I have before stated the two opinions: one favoring a regular ocean voyage, with its customary routine and accidents of weather; the other more disposed to contracted cruising in our own waters, anchoring at night, and by day following a formulated programme of varied practical exercises. For this year both plans were adopted. There were two practice-ships, one of which was to remain between Narragansett and Gardiner's Bay, in Long Island. I was ordered as first lieutenant of the other, which was to go to Europe. The advisability of this step for a sailing-ship was on this occasion doubly questioned, for the Alabama had already begun her career. In fact, one of the officers then stationed at the school had been recently captured by her, when making a passage to Panama in a mail-steamer. I remember his telling me, with glee, that when the Alabama fired a shot in the direction of the packet, called, I think, the Ariel, a number of the passengers took refuge behind the bulkheads of the upper-deck saloons, which, being of light pine, afforded as much protection as the air, with the additional risk of splinters. He hoped to escape observation, but the Confederate boarding-officer had been a classmate of his, and spotted him at once. Being paroled, he was for the time shut off from war service, and was sent to the Academy. He was a singular man, by name Tecumseh Steece, and looked with a certain disdain upon the navy as a profession. In his opinion, it was for him only a stepping-stone to some great future, rather undefined. At bottom a very honest fellow, with a sense of duty which while a midshipman had led him to persist defiantly in a very unpopular—though very proper—course of action, he yet seemed to see no impropriety in utterly neglecting professional acquirement, rather boasting of his ignorance. The result was that, having been detailed for the European cruise, he was subsequently detached; I think from doubt of his fitness for the deck of a sailing-vessel. While at the Academy at this time, he took a first step in his proposed career by writing a pamphlet, the title and scope of which I now forget; but unluckily, by a slip of the pen, he wrote on the first page, "We judge the known by the unknown." This, being speedily detected, raised a laugh, and I fear prevented most from further exploration of a somewhat misty thesis. He was rather chummy with me, and tried mildly to persuade me that I also should stand poised on the navy for a flight into the empyrean; but, if fain to soar, which I do not think I was, like Raleigh, I feared a fall. For himself, poor fellow, weighted by his aspirations, he said to me, "I don't fear death, I fear life;" and death caught him early, in 1864, in the shape of yellow-fever. One of his idiosyncrasies was a faith in coffee as a panacea; and I heard that while sickening he deluged himself with that beverage, to what profit let physicians say.

The decision that one of the practice-ships should go to Europe had, I think, been determined by the officer who was to have commanded the Macedonian, the vessel chosen for that purpose. She was not the one of that name captured in 1812 by the United States,—the only one of our frigate captures brought into port,—but a successor to the title. Before she went into commission, the first commander was detached to service at the front; but no change was made in her destination, even if any misgivings were felt. One of my fellow-officers at the Academy, who was not going, remarked to me pleasantly that, if we fell in with the Alabama, she would work round us like a cooper round a cask; an encouraging simile to one who has looked upon that cheerful and much one-sided performance. We were all too young—I, the senior lieutenant, was but twenty-two—and too light-hearted to be troubled with forebodings; and, indeed, there was in reason no adequate inducement for the Confederate cruiser to alter her existing plans in order to take the Macedonian. Had we come fairly in her way, to gobble a large percentage of the Naval Academy might have been a fairly humorous practical joke; but it could have been no more. I remember Mr. Schuyler Colfax, afterwards Vice-President, then I think a member of the House, being on board, and mentioning the subject to me. "After all," he said, "I suppose it would scarcely do for one of our vessels to be deterred from a cruise by regard for a Confederate cruiser." Considering the disparity of advantage, due to steam, I should say this would scarcely be a working theory, in naval life or in private. Our military insignificance was our sufficient protection. During my cruise in the Congress, a ship much heavier every way than the Macedonian, the commander of one of our corvettes, substantially of the Alabama class, said to our captain, "I suppose, if I fell in with you as an enemy, I ought to attack you." "Well," replied the other, "if you didn't, you should pray not to have me on your court-martial."

The officer originally designated to command the Macedonian had been very greatly concerned about the midshipmen's provisions: the quality of which they should be, and the room to be kept for their stowage. I wonder would his soul have been greatly vexed had he accompanied me the first evening out, as I inspected the steerage while they were at supper? "What!" shouted one of them to a servant, as I passed. "What! No milk?" The mingled consternation, bereavement, and indignation which struggled for full expression in the words beggar description. I can see his face and hear his tones to this day. Laughable to comedy; yet to a philosophizing turn of mind what an epitome of life! Do we not at every corner of experience meet the princess who felt the three hard peas under the fifty feather-beds? Sydney Smith's friend, who had everything else life could give, but realized only the disappointing view out of one of his windows? We might dispense with Hague Conferences. War is going to cease because people adequately civilized will not endure hardness. Whether in the end we shall have cause to rejoice in the double event remains to be seen. The Asiatic can endure.

Among the Macedonian's lieutenants was the late Admiral Sampson. We had also for deck officers two who had but just graduated; one of them a young Frenchman belonging to the royal house of Orléans, who had been permitted to take the course at our naval school, I presume with a view on his part to possible contingencies recalling the monarchy to France. Under Louis Philippe, a member of the family had been prominent in the French navy, as the Prince de Joinville; and had commanded the squadron which brought back the body of Napoleon from St. Helena. The representative with us was a very good-tempered, amiable, unpresuming man, too young as yet to be formed in character. As messmates we were, of course, all on terms of cordial equality, and one of our number used frequently to greet him with effusion as "You old King." He spoke English easily, though scarcely fluently, and with occasional eccentricity of idiom. At the Academy, before graduation, he took his turn with others of his class as officer of the day, one of whose duties was to keep a journal of happenings. I chanced once to inspect this book, and found over his signature an entry which began, "The weather was a dirty one."