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  In June, 1861, Raphael Semmes’ Confederate cruiser Sumter makes a daring escape through the Federal Blockade of the Mississippi …

  So began the commader’s career as the Southern Seahawk. With a hand-picked crew of Southern officers and mercenary seamen, Semmes seized eight enemy ships in four days—a record never surpassed by any other captain of a warship. By the time the cruises of the Sumter and her successor the Alabama ended, Semmes had taken and burned more than eighty prizes. The most successful maritime predator in history, Semmes eluded a pack of pursuers for two and a half years, and almost single-handedly droves marine insurance rates so high in the North that many Yankee ships refused to sail until he was caught.

  Back in Washington, Semmes’ predations fueled feuds within the Lincoln cabinet and incited the spy games of historical figures like courtesans Rose Greenhow and Betty Duval, detective Allan Pinkerton and the commander’s lovely mistress.

  Southern Seahawk, the first novel in the Seahawk Trilogy, grows from the true story of Commander Raphael Semmes’ rise to infamy, becoming the Union’s “Public Enemy Number One.” Using intriguing historical fact melded with his unique and insightful literary style, Randall Peffer has breathed life into a legend of the seas, the Southern Seahawk, Raphael Semmes.

  Also by Randall Peffer

  Waterman

  Logs of the Dead Pirates Society

  Killing Neptune’s Daughter

  Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues

  Old School Bones

  RANDALL PEFFER

  southern

  SEA HAWK

  A Novel of the Civil War at Sea

  For

  Commander Chester R. Peffer,

  an officer and a gentleman

  … And

  Marian L. Smith

  His sun, his moon, the star he steered by.

  The angel on his shoulder. Fair winds.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  1 District of Columbia – JANUARY 12, 1861

  2 District of Columbia – FEBRUARY 13-14, 1861

  3 The Hudson River – MID-MARCH, 1861

  4 District of Columbia – MID-APRIL, 1861

  5 Montgomery – LATE APRIL, 1861

  6 District of Columbia – EARLY MAY, 1861

  7 New Orleans – MAY 27, 1861

  8 District of Columbia – LATE MAY, 1861

  9 District of Columbia – EARLY JUNE, 1861

  10 Mississippi Delta – JUNE 29-30, 1861

  11 USS Powhatan – JULY 1-2, 1861

  12 CSS Sumter – JULY 3, 1861

  13 USS Powhatan – JULY 3, 1861

  14 CSS Sumter – JULY 4-5, 1861

  15 District of Columbia – JULY 6, 1861

  16 CSS Sumter – JULY 6, 1861

  17 Executive Mansion – JULY 12, 1961

  18 District of Columbia – JULY 13, 1961

  19 CSS Sumter – JULY 13, 1861

  20 District of Columbia – JULY 17, 1861

  21 Curaçao – JULY 17-21, 1861

  22 New York – JULY 21, 1861

  23 USS Powhatan – LATE JULY

  24 CSS Sumter – JULY 27, 1861

  25 Santiago De Cuba – EARLY AUGUST, 1861

  26 USS Powhatan – AUGUST 13, 1861

  27 District of Columbia – AUGUST 5, 1861

  28 CSS Sumter – SEPTEMBER 6 & 7, 1861

  29 District of Columbia – MID-SEPTEMBER, 1861

  30 USS Powhatan – SEPTEMBER 21-22, 1861

  31 CSS Sumter – SEPTEMBER 27, 1861

  32 District of Columbia – SEPTEMBER 28, 1861

  33 The Horse Latitudes – SEPTEMBER 28-29, 1861

  34 The Executive Mansion – MID-OCTOBER, 1861

  35 CSS Sumter – OCTOBER 27, 1861

  36 District of Columbia – NOVEMBER 1-2, 1861

  37 District of Columbia – NOVEMBER 2, 1861

  38 Old Bahama Channel – NOVEMBER 8, 1861

  39 St. Thomas, Danish Virgin Islands – EARLY NOVEMBER, 1861

  40 Martinique – NOVEMBER 9, 1861

  41 District of Columbia – NOVEMBER 10, 1861

  42 St. Pierre, Martinique – NOVEMBER 14-15, 1861

  43 District of Columbia – NOVEMBER 15, 1861

  44 St. Pierre, Martinique – NOVEMBER 19, 1861

  45 District of Columbia – NOVEMBER 22, 1861

  46 Martinique – NOVEMBER 23,1861

  EPILOGUE Northern Virginia – DECEMBER 2, 1861

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  USS Brig Somers

  DECEMBER 8, 1846, MEXICAN WAR

  An instant before the norther strikes. The sultry air seems to freeze. The brig’s young captain senses what’s coming. And he sees how his life will be if he loses his ship today: Court-martial, humiliation, years of puny postings. Perhaps assignment to the reserve list. Or a mustering out of the service. The word “cursed” branding his name in the wardrooms of ships and the salons of Washington. Forever, really.

  He has harbored such delicate dreams of glory. He thinks he’s made to rise to flag rank. Can hardly believe that thirty-six years of living, decades in the navy, has led him to this moment. Blockade duty off Veracruz. A fight to the death with a faceless devil on a malignant sea. His first real command and already grappling with wind and water like few mariners ever face. He wants to howl at the face of his god, “Why?!” But he bites his tongue and seizes the main shrouds to larboard. Spreads his legs, tries to brace his body with bent knees. It’s all that a man can do. Bring it on!

  The ship stalls in a swell. The sails fall limp from the yards. Foredeck boys and officers gape to weather. A flock of seabirds screech, wheel across the surface of the water, vanish off to leeward. Then the storm shows its claws. It comes charging toward the ship out of blue sky, tearing over the Gulf of Mexico, a roiling wall of wind and water from the north. Thundering down on the Somers.

  “White squall!” screams the lookout from the main truck. He leaps for a backstay, with hopes of a fast slide down to the relative safety of the deck. But the norther catches him. Flings him off into the blue.

  “Bear off!” shouts Raphael Semmes to his quartermaster on the helm. “Run for it!”

  The screech of the wind carries his words away. A torrent of salt air lays the brig down on her side. The starboard rail awash. The tips of the lower yards already snagging in the waves. The mainsail dragging in the water. Filling like a pool. Jesus. Men tumbling into the sea, scrambling from below decks in their long johns. They hug the rigging, and anything else to anchor them, with both arms. A cannon breaks loose from its breaching ropes to windward, skates across the deck. Crashes through the lee rail. Is gone.

  “Bear off!”

  Semmes dives from his post at the shrouds to help at the helm. Tells himself that God is testing him for greatness. Buck up, man. If he could just help the quartermaster crank the wheel over, get the rudder to bite, the ship might yet turn her stern to the norther and right herself. Run off safely before the squall. But a sea sweeps over the Somers and slams the captain into the fife rail at the base of the mainmast. He feels something crack in his chest as the air goes out of his lungs.

  The wind is howling, cutting his face with blasts, sharp little nails of
spray, as he comes up into the air again.

  “She’s not answering the helm, sir!” The sailing master has joined the quartermaster at the great cherry wheel.

  Shouts and cries for help rise from men trapped below decks.

  “Beat to quarters. All hands on deck!”

  “She’s down flooding by the head. Sailing herself under!” A voice from midships.

  The foretop mast splits right down the middle with a crack that muffles the shrieking of the wind. A second later a topsail carries away to leeward, a winged thing on the loose. Sails shred to rags in the blink of an eye.

  “Cast off sheets and braces!” He grabs the ax from its sling by the companionway, scrambles back to the main sheet and hacks it in two. “She will rise. She must rise!”

  But she does not. Even cut loose from the wind and sails that have pinned her down, the Somers wallows on her side, larboard beam to the wind and seas. Hills of foam raking her. The starboard side of the ship feet below the surface. The deck a wall for scaling. One of the ship’s boats hangs high from her davits on the windward side. Unusable. A cruel joke. Another drifts off to leeward, ripped from its slings by boarding seas. Smashed and awash. Only the gig, dangling from the stern davits, might yet serve.

  He claws his way forward along the windward rail, hoping for a miracle, willing the bows buried in the black water to rise and shake off the seas. Yells to his men to heave the leeward guns overboard. Move aft, move to windward. Redistribute the weight.

  “To the axes, boys! Cut away her rig!”

  They are the best of crews. And so they bend to the order. Swinging their axes in a fury. Parting the windward shrouds. The luff and his gang are hacking away great chips from the foremast when a sea comes crashing down on them. When it passes nothing remains but a sailor’s blue kerchief dangling from a foot rope to leeward. The air stinks of fish.

  The fat cook named Seymour is swimming over the spot where the cook shack has recently been.

  “Here, man.” He throws the cook a line and pulls him back to the windward deck. “Hang on, I’ve got …”

  An explosion like the roar of a cannon drowns his words. A geyser shoots into the air from midships, spewing broken hogs heads of salted beef, sacks of corn, sweet potatoes. Rats.

  He knows instantly that the main hatch has blown. Driven down by wind and waves, the ship has finally yielded to the building air pressure in her hold and exploded. Now, her hold, the great source of her buoyancy, is flooding. He can already feel her sinking under his feet, knows that he has lost her.

  He grabs midshipman Clark. Tells him to lower the gig. Fill her with his best oarsmen, row for the fleet anchored just a few miles away. Bring help. Then he gives the order to abandon ship.

  “Over the side, men! Try to stick together … until the rescue boats get here.”

  The order is unnecessary. The better part of the crew of seventy-five men is already in the water, trying to cling to anything in the wreckage that will keep them afloat.

  The air fills with the shouting of swimmers, calling the names of their shipmates for comfort. Begging their god for mercy. Or cursing the navy and the captain as whoreson floggers. The ship a cold-hearted sea bitch. Goddamn the ship. Goddamn this blockade duty, this fool’s errand that has sent them off chasing after a strange sail on the horizon. Goddamn this ridiculous war with the Mexicans. Goddamn the Somers.

  He feels the sting of prophecy come true. Knows that there are those who have quit the navy rather than take orders to sail in this ship. But he has rejected such superstition. Until now. His ears wither from the screams and curses of his crew. His mind racing back to 1842 when the Somers was the site of an ugly hanging. A young officer on board, Philip Spencer, along with two other conspirators, charged with plotting a mutiny and executed from the yard. An extraordinary punishment in a service where crews’ insubordination was commonplace. Especially rare since neither the ship nor the United States was at war at the time, the Somers merely on a sail-training cruise with cadets. Especially harsh since Philip Spencer was the son of the Secretary of War.

  She is a doomed ship, said the scuttlebutt. A lightning rod for death, terror and injustice. It is just a matter of time until fate strikes her again.

  And now it most surely has.

  His stomach knots as he kicks off his shoes, flings away his coat, dives into the water. He’s a strong swimmer. Soon he finds an upper half-port on which to float. The water washing over him feels like ice. He presses his face to the wood, listens to the fading cries of his men. Wonders how many will die from the cold and sharks before Clark comes back with help from the fleet. If he comes back.

  1

  District of Columbia

  JANUARY 12, 1861

  He leaps off the little sofa bed, shivering. Drags the sweat-stained sheet around his shoulders. He’s wet, freezing. In the sheet, his compact body seems to glide across the floor. Thick, shaggy graying hair falls over his ears. Here is a face made to play Shakespeare’s rakes—heavy brows, gray eyes almost always set on a distant horizon, sharp nose, broad mustache and a tuft of whiskers above a pointy chin. Commander Raphael Semmes, USN.

  “Goddamn. Goddamn these wretched nightmares!” To think that after more than thirty years in the Federals’ navy, his career has come to this. Hallucinations of death, a sweaty toga, a dark, cold cell in Mudville on the Potomac and an obscure post as Secretary of the Lighthouse Bureau. He has not been to sea for eleven years, and now he thinks and dreams of little else. But when the salt spray washes through his sleep, it rarely sweeps him back to his pink-cheeked years as a middie aboard the Lexington, nor to his West Indies cruises as sailing master on the Constellation during her victories over French frigates. More often his night voyages land him on the Somers. He sees the sails ripped to rags, masts buried in the sea, men washed overboard or leaping into the foam. Gone. Many men. Good men. More than half his crew. Then, like tonight, he dreams of punishment and vengeance. Until he wakes awash in regrets and impossible hopes. His whole body shakes as he moves toward the moonlit window to check the time on the church tower. He’s glad that he sleeps in the study so that his wife cannot see him so reduced by terror. Anne, his nearly loyal spouse. She’s still his stately, handsome girl. After fourteen years he can forgive—but not forget—her betrayal, the bastard child named Anna who she conceived while he was away in the Mexican war. Anna, who has long been cloaked from his sight, ensconced at Eden Hall boarding school in Philadelphia. Anna, the cool, dark space between his wife and him. Anna, whose very existence has given him permission to hold back his heart at home, tender it elsewhere. It has been years since he nuzzled his wife’s breasts with the wings of a mustache that she used to call the “bird of paradise.”

  Two thirty by the church clock. The moon freezes Capitol Hill in harsh, silver light. It is a light such as seamen sometimes see during a winter’s midwatch offshore. A night when the shadows of sails and masts vibrate and sway across the deck, looking like valkyries ready to come crashing down on your head with the next roll of the ship. So seems the distant shadow of the unfinished Washington Monument wrapped in scaffolding.

  Suddenly, he drops to his knees before the window, crosses himself, clutches his hands to his forehead in prayer.

  “Mea culpa. Gracious and merciful Father, I have become the miserable pawn of Pharaoh’s rule. Forgive me my trespasses. Let Satan lead me not into temptation. Grant me the strength to deliver myself, my family and my country from evil, greed, torpor and cowardice.”

  He shivers, catches his breath with a sharp gasp, squeezes his hands together with tightening, interlaced fingers. The shape of prayer. Now, on his knees and draped in his sheet, he looks like one of those monks he saw during the Mexican War, the monks who slept in their coffins.

  His mind turns to the poet Tennyson for words, and he mumbles aloud the lament of Ulysses, idle king, the landlocked gray man of the sea matched with an aged wife.

  “Oh Lord my God, how dull it is … to r
ust unburnished, not to shine in use.” He spits into his hands. “Fifty-one is a pathetic age. I am become a name.”

  Below in the street a hansom carriage clatters up the cobblestones. Beneath its hood a woman shrieks in delight at secret fondling. A man laughs.

  “Maude.” The name rushes from his lips.

  It’s not Maude below in the hansom, but he hears her youth and her joy in the woman’s voice. He pictures her round, lightly freckled face, sparkling candle light in her emerald eyes, her hive of copper hair. His nose sniffs at the air as if he might catch a scent from the lavender on her neck.

  “Sweet child.”

  The hands that have been praying against his lips suddenly draw back together from the kneeling figure, then swiftly reverse their course. He slams his clasped fists against his forehead as if driving a knife into his skull.

  “Curse me, but love be damned. It’s now or never, sir. There may yet be time for some act of greatness. Rise up!”

  The voice sounds guttural and raw. A thing from his nightmares.

  Still dizzy from the blow, he staggers to his feet, lurches across the room, knocking over a globe stand before finding his desk. The officer who so many know these days as the gold-braided dandy of Washington cotillions seems a man of sticks and rags as he rummages through his desktop for a match.

  When the candle’s lit, he settles into his chair. His left hand begins unconsciously to twirl the tip of his broad mustache, while his other puts pen to paper.

  January 12, 1861

  The Honorable Senator Clement C. Clay

  Esteemed Delegate from the State of Alabama

  Sir:

  I have had news this passing night that the legislature of our great state has voted to join South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida and Georgia in secession from the Federal union of states. In this regard I request the honor and privilege of visiting with you to speak on the matter at your earliest convenience.