Not-so-Great Yarmouth

Given USS Vanderbilt's remarkable ability to circumvent the British blockade while causing the ships of the Royal Navy to run aground, her blockade running career could theoretically have lasted forever. Though TFSmith decides to end this career prematurely, he does so at the cost of one of the Royal Navy's most powerful frigates - a typical instance of a concession to reality being used to spite the British.


The section in Chapter 11, part 2 is worth quoting in full. If you pick out any other issues that we don't highlight, bring them up in the comments section:

Mersey caught the runner offshore in the eastern Sound, adjacent to the North East Rips, and had fired across her bow; Vanderbilt, at her best speed, was only two knots faster than the big frigate, and the liner had been worked hard in the past months. Luce had little choice but to heave to, and Caldwell’s ship circled around her before coming alongside.

At that point, without a shot being fired, the runner’s crew abandoned ship over the unengaged side, dropping into the boats and pulling for Montauk Island. Luce stood on her deck and raised the signal flags – BHQ – for ship afire; within moments, even as Mersey started to sheer off, the big liner, loaded with second-hand and presumably unstable powder scraped up from the arsenals of a half-dozen European minor states, disintegrated in a blast that partly engulfed the British warship, leaving her rigging ablaze and her hull wracked by the blast.

Mersey was struck with burning debris up to six feet long, which significantly damaged her sails and rigging as well as killing five and wounding 12 of her crew; the frigate’s crew managed to extinguish the flames, and she steamed toward Martha's Vineyard, occupied by the British in July. The blast had damaged Mersey’s hull, however, and by the time she was off Nomans Land Island, to the southwest of the Vineyard, her decks were nearly awash. Caldwell ordered her abandoned, and the gunboat Osprey helped rescue her crew as Mersey sank, yet another casualty.

The truth of what had happened is unclear; whether Vanderbilt’s cargo actually was already afire when she was intercepted, as her crew stated, or whether Luce had intentionally destroyed his ship, is unknown. The British lodged a protest with the Americans through the French, and threatened to bombard one or more of the towns on Long Island Sound in retaliation, but calmer heads prevailed: the parallels with, for example, the Randolph vs.Yarmouth incident were obvious, and the reality that Luce had signaled Mersey before the explosion was undeniable.

The first, and perhaps most obvious issue, is the mention of 'unstable powder'. TFSmith and his audience may not be aware of it, but all those involved in the war would know the basic fact that black powder does not deteriorate, certainly not to the extent of becoming unstable. We have observed before that TFSmith does not understand the nature of nineteenth-century warfare: now, he has gunpowder acting like cordite.

The suggestion that this gunpowder was 'scraped up from the arsenals of a half-dozen European minor states' raises further problems. The mention of 'arsenals' instead of 'warehouses' suggests that this gunpowder is being sold by governments themselves, which in turn means that TFSmith believes there are half a dozen 'European minor states' prepared to commit a flagrant breach of neutrality in support of the Union. This is in flagrant contradiction of the British Orders in Council issued as a result of the Trent, which prevented the export of saltpetre to any foreign power. Instead of selling off surplus powder to the Union, European states should be starting to worry about preserving their own gunpowder stocks through the Trent War, in case of any post-war crisis. This is yet another indication of how TFSmith hand-waves away serious problems to the Union.

TFSmith presumably believes that he has made Luce a genius in hoisting 'BHQ' at the last minute, thereby enabling him to claim that he warned the Mersey before the explosion. Unfortunately for TFSmith, the International Code of Signals translates the warning 'I am on fire' as 'NM'- 'BHQ' means 'a fire', 'on fire,' or 'fires' in the context of longer discussions with other ships. This is more likely to be TFSmith's shoddy research than a deliberate plot point, but ironically means that the 'undeniable reality' that 'Luce had signalled Mersey' is rather more deniable than TFSmith intended. The British may well have accused him of hoisting unclear signals in a deliberate attempt to draw their men aboard to help fight the fire before blowing them up. Given that Luce could have hoisted 'NM BJR' to indicate that he was on fire and loaded with combustibles, they would not do so without some justice.

Perhaps the clearest case in the passage of what we might term 'deniable unreality', however, is the decision to have Vanderbilt damage Mersey to the point of subsequently sinking. TFSmith seems to think that Mersey would lay right alongside Vanderbilt, yet this would happen only if Mersey was planning to board with her whole crew in the middle of a hard-fought action. Here, Vanderbilt has already struck: Mersey would therefore stand some distance off and send a boarding party over in boats, just as USS San Jacinto did with the Trent.

The mention of boats, of course, should bring to mind the fact that the crew of Vanderbilt took to the boats only moments before the explosion. How fortunate for them that the explosion only affected the side of Vanderbilt that Mersey was on! Or perhaps we're expected to believe that the crew of Vanderbilt were American supermen, capable of rowing away faster than Mersey could bring her engines into service. The speed with which Mersey was able to put her boiler fires out is remarkable, given she was circling around Vanderbilt mere moments before: what a shame the British are not as adept at starting fires as they are at stopping them.

The Vanderbilt explosion is also remarkable for the effect it had on the Mersey. At the Battle of the Nile, l'Orient exploded without doing damage to either side. When HMS Amphion blew up Nuesta Senora de las Mercedes on 5 October 1804 with a single cannonball, she was not sunk despite laying directly alongside. Furthermore, when the earlier HMS Amphion blew up in 1796, the ships moored on either side were not sunk either. In fact, it is patently obvious from the many illustrations of magazine explosions that the force of the explosion almost invariably vents upwards through the deck and not laterally through the sidewalls. This is born out by the actual result of the Randolph-Yarmouth fight, TFSmith's own example. In this fight, the damage was to the Yarmouth's rigging and topmasts and not to her hull: enough to hamper her pursuit, but not enough to sink her. The blast of Vanderbilt's explosion, therefore, seems highly unlikely to have actually 'partly engulfed the British ship, leaving... her hull racked'.


The only real set of circumstances in which the destruction of Mersey makes sense is if Vanderbilt were turned into a floating bomb and used deliberately to destroy a British warship. In practice, however, this does not fit the internal logic of the story. Vanderbilt is clearly returning from a blockade run, not on a special mission. Using one of the Union's few valuable merchant ships - so valuable that TFSmith has used her as both a commerce raider and a blockade runner in the course of the story - as a one-use suicide weapon offers no realistic prospect of a return worthy of the investment. Not only is the ship itself too valuable, but the Union's straitened gunpowder situation strongly suggests that they would be better putting their limited supply in cartridges for their cannons and muskets than using tons of it to blow up a single British ship. Indeed, the Union has successfully developed spar torpedoes and submersibles, which offer the same capability as the Vanderkaze at much lower cost.

There is a final flaw in the description above: why Caldwell is trying to make it to Martha's Vineyard is almost impossible to understand. There is no dry dock there, certainly not one capable of repairing a ship the size of Mersey. Indeed, due to length and draft, Mersey would probably have struggled to enter Edgartown harbour even if she wasn't wallowing and half-sunk. Caldwell's more obvious and far more preferable option would be to anchor in the lee of Block Island and unloading stores and guns to lighten the load on Mersey's hull. From the safety of shallow water, he could try to make jury-repairs sufficient to bring Mersey to a facility capable of taking her. However, this might have meant treating a Royal Navy officer as a competent professional, and that would never do. Far better to have his ship sink under him in a quixotic effort to reach an arbitrarily-selected port, with the added bonus that he drags the gunboat Osprey along with him in doing so.

Once again, then, we see the unreality of BROS: a story written in flagrant disregard of both history and logic, and targeted at an audience too jingoistic to see its flaws.