Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/74

64 pass the vessels of Admiral Farragut and Flag-Officer Davis, and the rams of Colonel Ellet These vessels were at anchor in the Mississippi, three miles below the mouth of the Yazoo, and among them were six iron- clads, seven rams and ten large ships of war. On the morning of July 15, 1862, Captain Brown started in the Arkansas for Vicksburg. About six miles from the mouth of the Yazoo river he was met by the United States ironclad Carondelet, Captain Walker ; the gunboat Tyler, Lieutenant Commanding Gwinn, and the ram Queen of the West. All three of these vessels turned, and a running fight ensued. The ram made a straight wake, but the other two fought well. The Tyler was too weak to encounter the Arkansas, though her commander, Gwinn, did all that could be expected of him. The Arkansas bestowed most of her attention to the ironclad Carondelet, killing and wounding many of her men, and finally driving her into shoal water. Captain Brown asserted that she lowered her colors; this Captain Walker denied, but there is no doubt that the Arkansas would have made a prize of her could she have spared the time to stop, which she could not. In the encounter with the Carondelet, Captain Brown was badly wounded and two of his pilots were killed. One was the Yazoo river pilot who, as they were carrying him below, had the courage and devotion to exclaim with his dying breath, "Keep in the middle of the river! " The Arkansas' smokestack was so riddled that she could hardly make more than one knot per hour when she entered the Mississippi; but this, with the current of the river, enabled her to run the gauntlet of Farragut's fleet.

Capt. A. T. Mahan says:

The ram [Arkansas] now followed the Tyler, which had kept up her fire and remained within range, losing many of her people, killed and wounded. The enemy was seen to be pumping a heavy stream of water both in the Yazoo and the Mississippi, and her smokestack had been so pierced by shot as to reduce her speed to a little over a