Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 2.djvu/57

 outside. But the mass of those aboard must have felt, for moments at least, natural diffidence at the thought of groping in darkness, as it were, into the deadly strife with the enemy.

The suspense did not last long. Six bells had just struck when a dull sound, like that of a sledge-hammer upon an anvil, was heard on the bow port side. It was the hostile greeting of Fort Sumter, now within 1200 yards of us. A second and a third, more violently than the first, shook the sides of the ship. Soon came the humming and whizzing of rifled and round shot and shell overhead. Still the successive discharges could be distinguished. The several reports had not yet been drowned, so to speak, in a continuous roar. But, hark! There is a reverberation as though of numerous, simultaneous thunder-claps; now a fierce, unceasing roar vibrating the air with a violence that causes even the solid mass of our ship to tremble. A look through the open port on the port side discloses the cause of the furious outburst. The first four monitors had reached the converging point of the fire of Cumming's Point battery, Forts Sumter and Moultrie, and Battery Bee. One after the other had steadily steamed, without firing a shot, to the verge of the concentrating ranges. The enemy evidently reserved their main fire for work at close quarters; but when the Weehawken had reached within six hundred yards of Fort Sumter, a long, broad, brilliant flame suddenly leaped from its side, with all but simultaneous intense glares from Cumming's Point and Moultrie, followed instantaneously by immense volumes of smoke and a rain of projectiles that fairly hid the turrets of our craft with countless spouts of water thrown up by striking shot and shell. Again and again this appalling scene was enacted in all its dire sublimity. As the forts and batteries, like so many vomiting craters of volcanoes, sent forth one torrent of destruction after another, my heart failed and panged with the fear of seeing the little monitors shivered into atoms. But when, in response to a signal from the flagship, they commenced replying to the enemy with the thunder of their huge batteries, and the combat was no longer one-sided, my confidence revived.

Meantime the Ironsides had vainly tried to keep up with the monitors ahead. At 3:37 we were startled by the command, “Stand by the starboard anchor!” followed soon by “Let go the starboard anchor!” The ship had again been disobeying the rudder and threatening to swing on the shoals on our port side. The enemy at once noticed our embarrassed position, and,