I have left my wife in the land of bondage; my little ones they say every night, where is my father? But when I die, . . . O Lord, I shall see my wife and little children once more.
Anonymous, 1st South Carolina Volunteers
BY THE TIME THE CREW FASTENED down the last tender and hauled up the anchor, they had lost more than two hours. Harriet guessed they wouldn’t have to wait for the flood tide now. Trailed by the small Harriet Weed, the John Adams picked its way even more slowly through the Beaufort River, past the shifting sandbars. Once they gained the wider Coosaw, they sped up. The steam engines throbbed so loudly that Harriet feared a boiler might burst and burn them to the waterline. She’d seen a ship on the Hudson explode once. Sparks flew so high they looked like stars. All but three passengers died.
The sound of their engines bounced off the mainland. The paddle wheels swooshed steadily. Silent and tense, the soldiers kept their heads low. The full moon gleamed on the barrels of their smoothbore muskets. A few infantry—the better shots—had the newer Springfield rifles.
Although pinned between two men, Harriet felt only Samuel’s leg and shoulder, acutely aware of his presence. He adjusted his position at one point to get more comfortable, and Harriet shifted in response to let him know she was awake. When the ship took a small wave against the starboard side and briefly wallowed, the warm solidity of his hip against hers made her heart swell. He wouldn’t leave her. If they didn’t die on the Combahee, they would be with one another always.
At last, a shift in the breeze alerted Harriet that they had entered the Sound. Soon they would approach the bar that blocked ships from the Combahee at low tide. The moon had passed the high point. It must be near three in the morning.
Harriet slid her hand over Samuel’s thigh, grateful for a last excuse to touch him. The fabric of his trousers was rough under her palm. She shook his sturdy leg. He nodded, and they rose together, stepped around the men propped against the saloon, and made their way up the ladder to the pilothouse.
Colonel Montgomery and Captain Vaught leaned over a map spread across the table, attended by a young ensign. The pilot was at the wheel. A candle in a hurricane glass lit the room. Montgomery straightened as they entered and looked at Harriet. He held a mug of coffee. “You say the first torpedo is in the channel on the blind side of the island, right?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “That’s where our informant said they laid the mine.”
“My brother,” Samuel offered.
Montgomery swallowed the dregs of his coffee and set down the cup. “One of you confirm that with your own eyes?”
“No,” Harriet answered. “We didn’t have time.”
The colonel frowned. “Wasn’t that why you went upriver?”
Harriet couldn’t tell him she’d been more anxious to find the mine near the ferry. There hadn’t been time to comb the mouth of the river as well, especially with pickets guarding it so closely. “We jest couldn’t do it all,” she said. “But the location makes sense. Secesh want to sink us or force us into the open.”
“Well, into the open we go,” Montgomery said grimly.
The flat, dark marshes on either side of the waterway made the river’s mouth appear much wider than it actually was. The pilot set the ship’s bow for a middle course as they approached the bar. Samuel dug in his pocket and pressed a piece of dried pork in Harriet’s hand. “Eat,” he murmured before he stepped outside to watch from the narrow deck surrounding the pilothouse.
Harriet chewed. The man never stopped thinking about food.
The ship sailed slowly in the moonlight. The engine sounded less burdened, though the captain appeared more strained as they approached the bar. The pipe clenched in his teeth had gone out. “Slow up,” Captain Vaught told the pilot, speaking around the stem. Without taking his hands off the wheel, the pilot pressed on a treadle near his right foot. The stopping bell rang out. Somewhere below in the engine room, a sailor closed the throttle, and the ship shuddered. The vessel slowed almost immediately.
Harriet made herself small against the wall of the pilothouse. The captain kept checking the chart on the table and talking with the pilot, whose hands remained on the wheel. Vaught ordered the young ensign to sound a bell located outside the pilothouse to signal leadsmen on the main deck. “Make sure we’re still at ten feet,” Vaught told the junior officer, who dashed out the door, rang the bell, and hustled down the ladder.
A few minutes later, the young man ran up the ladder and back into the pilothouse. His chest heaved. “Still ten!”
“Tide ain’t too rough here,” the Gullah pilot said over his shoulder to the captain. “De bar stay flat.”
Captain Vaught nodded, but fifteen minutes later, he ordered the ensign to ring the bell again to measure the channel’s depth. The ship crept along. Montgomery kept lifting his binoculars. After a tense half hour, the captain drew an audible breath.
“Dere we go, sah,” the pilot said at the same time. “We over de bar.” Shortly thereafter, a small island appeared in the broad river. The experienced pilot navigated to starboard to pass into the channel.
Montgomery left when the hump of Fields Point appeared in silhouette in the distance. His footsteps faded on the ladder. Two sharpshooters with Whitworth rifles came up after him and positioned themselves on the starboard side of the pilothouse, facing toward the Rebel post.
“Slow the engine,” Captain Vaught ordered the helmsman, who again pressed the treadle of the stopping bell. “And don’t take out that dock.”
The gunship began its slow glide toward the landing. The dawn air was crystalline. Objects seemed sharper than normal, although Harriet couldn’t tell if it was the light or her nerves. She studied the low dirt walls of the fort. No silhouette of cannons. But where was the shotgun that had winged Samuel? Where were the kepi caps and Confederate rifles?
She turned around to gauge the position of their sister ship. The Harriet Weed must have slowed its engine before they did, according to some plan of Montgomery’s, because she now hung well back in the river to allow the John Adams to make landfall. The horizon glowed dully with the approach of dawn. The moon had finally set, and the sky overhead was gray.
Harriet left the pilothouse to join Samuel on the narrow walkway. Three decks below them, two crewmen leaped from the bow onto a rude dock. One landed on his feet. The other stumbled and fell to one knee but instantly jumped up to catch a line thrown at his head. Harriet tensed for gunshots from the fort, but the crew cleated the gunship to a piling without incident.
Someone pushed out a gangplank. A white officer armed with a sword and musket ran down the plank, followed by a small detachment of colored soldiers, their boots thumping hollowly. Harriet counted nine men, all with rifles aimed at the earthworks. The next moment, the two deckhands untied the ship and jumped aboard again. The engine roared, and the smokestack belched a black cloud that drifted over the fort.
As the boat pulled away on its upstream course, Harriet gripped the railing, riveted to the drama on shore. The soldiers rushed the weedy hill on which the Rebel picket station sat. One man tripped and fell as a gun went off. Harriet gasped. The soldier sprawled on the ground. He must have been hit. Then he sprang to his feet, grabbed his smoking musket, and continued upward.
In a moment, their advance troops had overrun the earthworks and were inside. Captain Apthorp waved his hat over the wall. Strangely, no shots had been fired other than the soldier’s accidental discharge. The outpost must have been abandoned. Harriet wondered if the pickets had spotted the John Adams in the moonlight and gone for help.
“Right behind you, ma’am,” a youthful voice said.
Harriet turned. The ensign held the chair from the pilothouse. He set it down, facing upriver. “Captain Vaught sent this,” the young man said. “Colonel Montgomery informed him this was your plan, ma’am. Captain said you ought to have front row.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said. Touched at Vaught’s gallantry, Harriet sat down. But she kept to the edge of the chair, careful not to get too comfortable. She couldn’t afford to drop off.
The sharpshooters remained at their posts outside the pilothouse. Samuel scrutinized the murky river in the dim light. Below Harriet on the hurricane deck, two officers equipped with binoculars scanned the shore. The flood tide moved briskly now, and within half an hour, they had rounded the oxbow on the approach to the picket station at Tar Bluff. The fort appeared on the right, half a mile ahead.
Harriet got to her feet. “Samuel. You see the torpedo?” she called above the throb of the engine.
Without awaiting an answer, she stepped into the pilothouse. “Captain Vaught. You have the torpedo at Tar Bluff marked on your map?”
The bearded captain stood smoking his pipe over the chart table in the corner. He looked up, and then down again at the map. He gestured toward a coordinate with his corncob. “Montgomery says it’s right here. On the near side of the landing.”
Harriet studied the map that bore the same markings as the one she’d given Hunter. “Yes, sir.”
Samuel put his head in the pilothouse. “Think we spotted it, Captain.”
They followed him on deck. The sharpshooters had their rifles to their shoulders now, aimed at the fort on the distant rise. Samuel pointed downward.
The two officers with binoculars waved up at them from the hurricane deck. “There!” one of them called and pointed to a spot some yards ahead. A faint, diagonal-shaped ripple appeared in the water, in the pattern of an arrowhead. It didn’t look any different from the trail made by a gator’s snout, but the ripple didn’t move in relation to the shore, Harriet observed, and it was in the right area.
Captain Vaught dashed back to the wheelhouse. “Torpedo ahead, starboard! Tack to port,” he ordered the colored pilot. “Signal the Weed,” he told the ensign, who took up a wigwag flag from a metal cylinder next to him and signaled the Harriet Weed from the open doorway.
The large ferryboat glided to the left, around the danger. Harriet leaned over the railing as they passed the snag, but the girth of the lower decks, built atop one another, obscured her view of the waterline. The ship then pulled toward the right again, aiming for the makeshift dock at the foot of Tar Bluff. The sharpshooters trained their sights, the boat crew leaped to the pilings, and a small company rushed the fort some thirty feet above their heads.
Again, it was over in moments. Here, too, Confederate defenses were down. No rifle fire, no artillery, no guards. A buzzard, startled from its perch on the wall, winged its way overhead. The dusky river and primitive shore were so quiet aside from the noise of their ship that it seemed there had never been a war.
Colonel Montgomery came up the ladder. He went straight into the pilothouse. Harriet followed. She kept her back to the wall. Captain Vaught removed the pipe between his teeth. It had gone out again, and he stowed it on a window ledge for safekeeping. “I thought those forts were manned.”
Montgomery lifted his hat and pushed back a hank of hair that had fallen across his forehead. “I’m sure glad they weren’t.”
“Might the Secesh be luring us upriver?” Vaught said. “Turning sidewheelers in a narrow channel is no easy trick.”
“I don’t think they knew we were coming,” Montgomery said. “My hunch is they saw us and lit out for reinforcements.”
Harriet thought of the Rebel army camped ten miles from the Combahee ferry. She prayed that Samuel’s horse trick had cemented the guards’ reputation for false alarms. If the Secesh got their field artillery down Stocks Road before the gunships escaped, their cannons would sink the wooden targets.
“Either that,” Montgomery said, “or they’ve concentrated their pickets at the ferry for some reason. Let’s hope we don’t find an army upriver.” The Kansas Jayhawker rubbed his hands together in an unsuitably eager fashion. Harriet pictured him on a raid with wild John Brown, caution tumbling behind them on the road.
“One problem at a time, though,” Montgomery continued. “First, we’ve got to locate the torpedo on the approach to Nichols.”
The captain nodded as if that at least conformed to his expectations.
“Then we’ll proceed on past while the Weed commences the operation,” the colonel said.
“Excuse me, sir,” Harriet interrupted. “This mean the John Adams gone handle the Lowndes Plantation?”
Montgomery looked at her as if not quite seeing her. “We’re aiming for the ferry,” he said. “The Adams’s objective is to destroy the bridge across the river and take down the Heyward and Middleton Plantations.” He turned to study the map on the table, talking to no one in particular. “But we still we need to get around the next mine.”
Harriet felt a flutter of alarm. “We got people at Lowndes Plantation, sir. The man that helped us find the torpedoes.”
The Kansas Jayhawker glanced up as if he had one second for Harriet and nothing more. “Lowndes was the Sentinel’s mission, and she’s sitting on a sandbar. We’ll stop on the way back if we make good time. If we have room for more contraband,” he said, and he turned back to the chart marked with various symbols.
Harriet’s hands rolled tight. She stepped outside into the fresh breeze that had risen with the sun. It couldn’t be much later than six o’clock in the morning. They should have plenty of time to reach the upper plantations and still raid the Lowndes estate, so long as they didn’t encounter a Confederate force lying in wait at the ferry crossing. And that was good because Harriet would not leave Jacob and Kizzy behind.