CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination… in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy.

—Karl von Clausewitz, The Art of War, Book III

Decisive Battle of the South China Sea

Northwest of the Luzon Strait, South China Sea, and northeast of the coast of Taiwan on board the Far East Transporter, November 30, 1879

The excitement and tension aboard the naval and combat ready commercial ships was palpable and fixated the attention of every hand on the ship from the captain to the cook’s dish scrubber. With the enemy within plain sight, Capt. MacTavish ordered the marine drummer to sound “Battle Stations!” and every member of the crew rushed to his or—in the case of Alexandra, her—assigned places. To the inexperienced eye, it would have appeared to be chaos; but, in fact, it was an organized rush of disciplined activity. The ships’ usually noncombatant hands swiftly moved every item on the decks not needed for battle belowdecks, put out the galley fire; furniture in the captain’s cabins was moved belowdecks to make as much room as possible for the gun crews; and a detail of men climbed to all the ship’s fighting tops to make emergency repairs to battle-damaged rigging as the occasion might arise. Below decks, the surgeon and his mates laid out their bandages and instruments and made ready to care for the wounded. In a controlled frenzy, sand was scattered along the decks for better footing; tubs were filled with water for drinking and firefighting; and the big guns were given a rapid final inspection.

On the spar deck and gun deck, the gunners and marines set themselves to getting her armament ready for immediate use. Each of the gun-deck long-barreled cast iron 24-pounders had its own crew. Eighteen immense short-barreled 32-pounder carronades were behind broadside ports, and three bow-chaser guns were carried on the forecastle—all manned by highly disciplined and experienced crews thoroughly familiar with their particular gun. The spar-deck battery included chase guns as well as the32-pounders.

Different types of ammunition having selective purposes were available in the gunnery batteries: the guns had flint firing locks with a double-headed cock holding two flints and could be quickly reversed if one flint became worn or lost. The 24-pounder deck cannons were nine and one-half feet long from breech to muzzle, weighed three tons along with its carriage, and had a hefty 5.8 inch bore. The barrel was the finest made in the world–a black-powder smoothbore firing only round iron shot.

The gun carriage was controlled by an arrangement of lines and tackle. Ammunition was mounted on an iron rack, a hold over from the old Royal Navy ships of the line. The rack was called a brass monkey. Brass was preferred to iron because iron tended to shrink in the cold and all the cannon balls to come loose and to scatter onto the deck. Sailors’ definition of very severe cold was “cold enough to freeze the balls of a brass monkey”.

Other types of ammunition were assigned to other cannons: Dismantling shot–several different types of special shot used to tear up an opponent’s sails and rigging, including bar shot—two ball halves connected by an iron bar, chain shot, an iron ring to which several lengths of chain were fastened, star shot in which the sections of chain opened up, star-fashion, in flight, scatter shot which consisted of two round shot connected by a short chain; grape and canister scatter shot–large and small–to be used at close range against an enemy’s crew.

The near frantic hurry was nonetheless orderly. Each gun had its crew and its stores of necessary artillery gear to be able to fire and to keep firing: barrel, carriage, rammer, breech, quoin, sponge, muzzle, truck, linstock with slowmatch, vent, train, train tackle, side tackle, water bucket, trunnion, powder box, cascabel knob, breeching, and handspike.

Gun crews checked the loads in their massive weapons and waited in silence for the action to begin.

The ships’ captains gave the order: “Attention on deck. Ready the guns.”

The gun crews unfastened the lashings holding their guns secure at sea. Gun carriages were not fixed to the deck; if one should break loose in a seaway, the consequences could be dangerous to the ship and fatal to the men who had to bring the massive rolling weight under control. Almost nothing was worse on a ship than a loose cannon, and eventually the term came to be applied to a person who was erratic, unprepared, and unable to think before acting.

Each man in a gun division had a specific task. Upon the captain’s orders, the crew removed the covers that kept dampness out of the bore and took their various necessary implements from their racks. Firing locks were opened and lengths of slow match-cord soaked in an inflammable solution were ignited starting a slow burn; match-cords were put in safe places along the gun deck for use in case a lock should fail. Below the frigate’s waterline, the gunner and his assistants opened the forward and after magazines and rushed to break out sausage-shaped flannel powder cartridges for the guns and carronades. Other men took their assigned stations along the lower decks to pass cartridges up to the gun crews.

Many US and Royal Navy captains drilled their men in firing at longer ranges and taught accuracy and coordination of fire. Capt. MacTavish took the opposite view. He ordered close quarters firing and relied on short-range rapid fire, believing it to be the principal test of a well-trained gun crew. The captain’s order to commence firing was passed by megaphone to the division officers, who then directed their guns. The captains’ order, given when his ship moved broadside and close enough to attack the long hull of the enemy ship, was, “Fire as she bears!”

The fully ready team moved into quick action. The gun was already in its recoil position for loading; and the man to the left kept a strain on the train tackle to hold the ponderous weapon in place while the man at the muzzle rammed the load home. The man at the breech pierced the powder cartridge with a priming wire before inserting the priming tube–in his left hand he held a linstock, a wooden staff holding a piece of burning slowmatch. The gunnery team nodded that the gun was ready to fire then the two side tackles were used to run it out. In rapid succession, the gun powder bag was dropped down the barrel; the priming wire pierced the powder bag to make sure that the flame of the primer would ignite the powder charge; and the lighted match-cord touched to the powder. The gun captain pulled the lanyard to trip the firing lock.

Suddenly, hell broke loose with acrid smoke, the tang of gun powder, and an explosion at close range that deafened the gunners even though they tried to cover their ears. The moistened sponge extinguished sparks in the bore after firing. The worm cleaned unburned fragments of cloth powder bags from the bore. The handspike helped to move the gun carriage and to raise the gun breech; so, the wedge-shaped quoin could be moved to adjust the gun’s elevation. The tompion kept the bore dry while the gun was not in use.

The tremendous concussive force required to send a cannon shot on its way at many hundreds of feet-per-second made the gun jump back on its carriage with great force in accordance to the scientific dictum that for every action there is a reaction. In the crowded space of the deck of the ship, this reaction had to be controlled. The gun’s recoil was partially absorbed by combinations of strong springs, hydraulic cylinders, and powerful men holding ropes to bring it safely to a stop. One sailor died when the safety equipment failed, and the multi-ton gun shot back across into the man standing by the opposite side railing.

As the firing commenced, each captain took his station on the quarterdeck, from which he could direct the helmsman and order the handling of guns and sails. The marine detachment took their positions with loaded muskets, some on deck and others in the fighting tops. It was their time to wait until the din and smoke of the cannonade cleared enough to assess the situation. Other than the man killed by the loose cannon, there were no casualties on the US flotilla. The pirate ships which received the brunt of the US attack suffered battering, penetrating and splintering of their hulls and decks; shattering and dismounting their cannons; mangling and destroying the rigging; cutting to pieces and blowing the masts into the disturbed ocean; piercing and tearing the sails rendering them useless; and severely wounding and killing the majority of the ship’s companies. Six of the pirates’ ships were out of commission, and two sank unceremoniously into the fathomless deep.

Thus severely wounded, the Red Flag Fleet fell into disarray with every ship and every man for himself. The US ships pulled to within boarding distance of those vessels still afloat and fired guns loaded with grapeshot and canister sweeping the enemy’s decks like a giant shotgun with devastating effects on the already shell-shocked survivors. To finish, every ship which could manage a direct hit fired “hot shot”–iron round shot, heated bright red in the US ship’s galley stove for use against any flammable target. The sizzling balls found their marks and embedded themselves into the wood of a bulwark, a ship’s cabin or storage unit, or a ship’s hull, igniting fires which could not be extinguished for lack of water, buckets, or men to do the work. Several junks blew into smithereens when the ignition occurred in powder storage holds.

Capt. MacTavish and Capt. Alexandra Yusupov had not come to score a gentleman’s victory nor to cause a battle defeat which would discourage future incursions into public sea lanes. They had come to kill, to destroy the Red Flag Fleet and every pirate they could find thereby preventing any chance of retaliation.

The thundering guns of eleven ships pulverized all six pirate junks and sunk four more in less than two minutes from the order to “Fire as she bears!” Two minutes after that, American marines and enraged local Alaskan fishermen attached grappling hooks to the remaining junks in the second rank of boats, dropped boarding planks from deck to deck, and began a slaughter of the outmanned and outgunned pirates. The decision was made to take no prisoners, and the pirates who survived the initial mano-a-mano attack saw no salvation but to leap into the sea. Most them were sucked under as they swam into close proximity to their junks, and the junks were purposefully sunk by the US naval officers and gunners.

Zheng Shi ordered a full and scattered retreat of the remaining junks, but no one except the men next to her heard the order. She escaped in a life boat and was rowed to a rear echelon ship. She commanded the captain to relinquish his authority. She ordered the remaining pirates to hoist all sails and to leave for the fortified villages on the southern coast of Mindanao and Basilan and on the islands of Balangingi and Tunkil in the southern Philippines under the protection of her fellow pirates–the Balangingi and Iranum Samal–and the Sultan of Sulu. The Sulu/Celebes Seas were historically the most dangerous backwaters in the world, and November, 1879 was no exception.

Capt. MacTavish and his officers, and Alexandra and her armed commercial fleet were all well aware of the dangers of these pirate infested waters and the massive marine army still viable among the islands. It might have been prudent to retreat to the safety of Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Tokyo; however, the US navy captain also knew that as soon as the pirate commander reached her safe haven, an armada of nearly 1800 pirate junks loaded with upwards of 50,000 or even more fanatical and drug crazed fighters would come to punish and destroy his small fighting force. He gave a quick set of orders:

“Three of our ships stay behind to destroy the rest of the junks and to kill all of the pirates here. The rest of us will pursue the fleeing junks and take them out. It is possible that we will be able to hit the harbors of those fortified islands before the full armada can get underway. We are going to try, because this may be the only chance to destroy this nest of vipers we will ever have. Stand to your guns. You are the US Navy; and you will prevail!”

No marine or sailor who ever heard that command, “Stand to your guns” took it lightly or thought of it as a chance to take part in glory. Nothing required more courage that to walk a plank from his safe ship or swing on a rope to a ship wallowing in the roiling sea and then meeting face-to-face at arm’s reach with man after man intent on taking his life or grievously wounding him and leaving him to the tender mercies of the amputation-happy ship’s surgeons. Even the bravest and most hardened of men cringed at the thought having the ammunition of his flintlock pistol run out and of being slashed or stabbed by a dirty saber, cutlass—the vicious back–slashing sword, scimitar, or pike, or having to find himself where it was kill-or-be-killed with bare hands and feet. There would be no prisoners; no quarter asked, and none given. Many men became deeply religious that evening.