Clive Cussler; Craig Dirgo (11 page)

At his urging, I described my search for New Orleans in more detail, narrating our failure to find her.

He looked at me and smiled. “You didn’t look in the right place.”

I hesitated, wondering what he had in mind. “We had Clay’s Landing pegged to within a hundred yards,” I argued.

“Not the right direction.”

“Where would you have us look?”

He leaned back, sipped from his scotch and water, and peered over his glasses. “Certainly not up and down the bank.”

“Where else could it be?” I asked, my interest mushrooming.

“Out in the river. Since I was a boy, the west bank has receded anywhere from two to three hundred yards. Clay’s Landing must be way out in the river.”

I digested that for a few seconds as the revelation began to build and flood inside my mind. “Then it’s beyond the concrete mattresses.”

“Way beyond.”

Suddenly the siren’s call of
New Orleans
began to sound again. Thanks to this chance encounter with a stranger at a Telluride cocktail party, we’d been given a second chance at finding the first steamboat on the river.

IN AUGUST OF 1995, we tried again. Why do we always go south in August? After excavating a wreck off Galveston that we hoped would be the Republic of Texas Navy ship
Invincible
but were unable to positively identify, Ralph Wilbanks, Wes Hall, Craig Dirgo, my son Dirk Cussler, and I headed to Baton Rouge with Diversity and all the equipment in tow. After arriving and losing a small wad of hard-earned cash on a riverboat casino, we turned in for the night. High rollers that we are, our combined losses came to all of thirty dollars. It might have been more, but I think Ralph actually made a couple of bucks. Interestingly, under Louisiana law, the riverboat cannot dock along the shore but must move along rails attached to the keel in the water. I guess that by using that ploy, the esteemed state legislators can claim that the evils of gambling do not touch sacred Louisiana soil.

Before launching the search, Ralph and I interviewed several of West Baton Rouge parish’s senior citizens. They all agreed that during their lifetimes the river had eaten away the west bank, and the present shoreline was three hundred yards west. The next morning, we found a ramp beneath the bridge spanning the Mississippi River and launched Diversity.

We began mowing the lawn of the search grid, beginning almost in the center of the Mississippi and working toward the west bank. We ran very tight lines, using both the magnetometer and the sidescan sonar. The day went slowly. Thanks to Ralph and his big ice chest, Craig and I did not become dehydrated again.

Six hours later, we had covered the entire search grid three times. Except for a few minor hits, the mag had recorded nothing worth pursuing. The sonar had found a target at about the right distance from shore, but it was a good two hundred yards downriver from the southern boundary of what had been Clay’s property.

Because we were running out of time, and everyone had commitments back home, we decided to return and investigate the target another time. And since none of us was experienced at diving in a muddy river with a four-knot current, we thought it best to line up and work with local divers who were more knowledgeable about the local conditions.

We were in an optimistic mood now that we had a target in the general area. Sadly, we abruptly met with another disappointment.

As we were pulling in the mag and sonar sensors, we watched, stricken, as a huge Army Corps of Engineers dredge came down the river, its buckets digging deep into the mud of the river and depositing it into barges. Though it missed our target by a good hundred yards, we could not help but wonder if this had been the ultimate fate of New
Orleans.

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 channels, Commander Henry French, aboard the ten-gun Union sloop
Preble,
finished writing in his log and prepared to turn in for the night. After waiting for the ink to dry, he closed the logbook, capped his inkwell; and set his quill pen in the holder. Stretching in his chair, he rose to extinguish his whale-oil lamp, then changed his mind. Leaving the lamp burning, he walked through the passageway and up the ladder onto the deck. Saluting the deck sentry, he pulled a leather pouch from his jacket pocket and began to stuff tobacco into the bowl of his newest pipe.

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.

“Cap’n wants to see you,” the deckhand shouted over the din.

“Be right up,” Hardy said, wiping his hands on an already greasy piece of burlap.

Straightening his uniform, Hardy ran a wooden comb through his hair, then climbed up the ladder through the port. Walking forward, he saluted Warley.

“You wanted to see me, sir?” Hardy said.

“Yes,” Warley said. “How many inches of steam are we making?”

“About nine, sir,” Hardy noted.

Manassas
could make nearly thirty before her boilers would blow.

“Why so little?” Warley asked. “I’m having problems with control.”

“It’s the fuel we loaded,” Hardy noted. “We have some seasoned wood and a half-load of coal—but if I burn that, we won’t have them when we go into battle.”

“So we burn green wood?” Warley said, wiping his nose, which was dripping from the smoke.

“Unless you order me otherwise,” Hardy said easily.

Warley nodded. Hardy was a good man and as fine an officer as he had aboard
Manassas.
“You made the right choice, William,” he said. “Let’s just hope next time we go out, it will be with a full load of prime fuel.”

“Yes, sir,” Hardy said, “that would be a blessing. For now, however, you have about fifteen more minutes of green wood.”

“Then that’s the way it is,” Warley said, dismissing Hardy with a crisp salute.

Turning the helm over to First Officer Charles Austin, Warley made his way to the bow, where the
Manassas’s
single nine-inch gun sat pointed downriver. He stared out at the blackness as he drew in breaths of clean air.

The Yankees were out there, and, seasoned wood or not, it was time for the rebels to visit.

The fog was growing thicker around the anchored Union fleet as Manassas steamed downriver. The flotilla was well armed. Richmond was armed with a total of twenty-six guns. The sailing sloop
Preble
carried seven 32-pound cannon, two 8-inch rifled guns, and a single 12-pounder. Less heavily armed was the steamer Water Witch, which mounted only four small guns. More heavily armed was the sloop
Vincennes,
which carried a complement of fourteen 32-pounders, twin 9-inch Dahlgren smoothbores, and four 8-inch rifled guns. Because of the late hour, the decks of the Union fleet were quiet.

Engineer Hardy popped his head through the hatch into the pilothouse. “We’re into the good wood. You should feel an improvement.”

Charles Austin at the helm shouted. “I felt the speed pick up a few minutes ago.”

“Good,” Hardy said. “Fear not—when we attack, I have a little trick up my sleeve.”

“I’ll let you know,” Austin shouted after the retreating Hardy.

Manassas was the lead ship of a small Confederate force.

Just behind and off her port side trailed the small Confederate tug Ivy, which had come downriver a few days before.
Ivy
mounted a new British-made Whitworth rifled gun. The Whitworth was a rare and expensive extravagance for the Confederate navy, effective and well built. The last few days,
Ivy
had stayed upriver, harassing the Union blockaders by shelling the Union fleet from a distance of nearly four miles.

Calhoun, Jackson,
and
Tuscarora
also left Fort Jackson to travel downriver for the attack.
Calhoun
was an aging vessel equipped with walking beam engines. Her orders called for her to stay away from action and fire her guns from a distance. Jackson was a newer high-pressure paddle wheeler, but the Confederates were concerned that the noise from her engines and paddle wheels would alert the Union forces, and she was coming downriver last.
Tuscarora
was a small tug tasked with towing a fire raft the Confederates hoped to use to set the Union fleet ablaze.

Manassas
was close to the Union ships. Austin strained to see through the fog.

Frolic, a southern schooner the Union had captured when she tried to run through the blockade with a load of cotton bound for London, was manned by a skeleton crew. She was due to travel north for conversion to a Union vessel in a few more weeks, and only a few men tasked with maintenance were aboard.

The master of
Frolic,
a laconic New Yorker named Sean Riley, was having trouble sleeping. The monotony was wearing on Riley, and after tossing and turning in his berth, he finally decided to try the main deck to see if the fresh air would bring sleep. Carrying a thin wool blanket, he headed for the stem to make himself comfortable.

A sound of tapping reached his ears. Maybe it was a woodpecker, Riley thought. No, not a woodpecker—the tapping had a distinctly metallic tone. Must be from Richmond, which was anchored nearby. Riley climbed into the riggings to investigate.

“I SAW A dim outline ahead,” Warley said to Austin, after returning from the gun port. “I have no idea if it’s a Federal vessel, but she’s slightly to port.”

Austin adjusted the wheel, then peered from the tiny port into the gloom.

“WHAT IN GOD’S name,” Riley blurted aloud.

A blackened leviathan from the depths was quickly approaching. If not for the round smokestack and noise, the unknown object might have been a whale that had lost its bearings and traveled from the Gulf of Mexico upriver. Like a hunter stalking prey, the black object was advancing on Richmond.

The time was 3:40 A.M.

Sliding down a line, Riley began ringing Frolic’s bell. Then he shouted across the water. “Ahoy,
Richmond,
there’s a boat coming down the river.”

Over the sound of the bunkers being loaded, no one on
Richmond
heard his pleas.

Riley ran into the pilothouse to find an aerial flare.

“ENEMY DEAD AHEAD,” Austin shouted down the hatch to Hardy.

“Now’s the time, boys,” Hardy yelled to his engine-room crew.

Opening the door to the firebox, the black gang took turns tossing kegs of tar, turpentine, tallow, and sulfur into the flames. Almost immediately, the steam gauge began creeping higher. At the helm, Austin felt Manassas surge forward.

ON
PREBLE,
A midshipman saw
Manassas
advancing. He ran to warn Commander French. A few moments later, French appeared on deck in his long underwear. The Confederate ram was only twenty yards from
Richmond
—there was no time to give warning.

The explosive fuel tossed into
Manassas’s
firebox gave the vessel speed but also raised the temperature inside the vessel. The crew of the ram was covered in sweat, and their heads were swimming from the heat. One crewman began to sing “Dixie.” The rest of the sailors quickly followed suit.

Inside
Manassas,
it became chaos. The sailors were singing at the top of their lungs, the Union ships were sounding their warnings, and the vibration of the propeller shaft through the deck was making Austin’s feet numb. He peered through the tiny port at the vessel looming above.