Pilot Light

From chapter 15, part 2:

He had then commissioned and fit out the Pacific Mail merchant steamer California as a commerce raider at Mare Island, and had taken her – now USS California, and known as one of the “three pirates,” along with her sisters Oregon and Panama – on a cruise across the North Pacific as far as Japan and back. Schenck had captured half-a-dozen British merchant ships before running into the Columbia with the sidewheel sloop HMS Leopard (18), Captain Charles Keckie, in hot pursuit. Keckie, absent a bar pilot and knowing nothing about the river, prudently remained off-shore, while Schenck took his cruiser upstream to the Willamette.

...wait. Did Schenk carry a bar pilot for the Columbia River with him all the way out to Japan and back? That's remarkably prescient, considering he set off from San Francisco. It's also very obliging of the pilot to come more than six hundred miles down the coast to join the ship and spend months sailing out to Japan on the off-chance that Schenck will need his services on returning to America.

If not, we're presumably intended to believe that HMS Leopard was in hot pursuit right up to the point where USS California dropped anchor off the Columbia bar and waited for the pilot to come out to meet them. That's certainly in keeping with TFSmith's belief that the British would make no preparations for war between December 1861 and April 1862, but it seems a little... unrealistic.

Perhaps the most likely explanation is that TFSmith thinks that Schenck, who had never served on the coast of the Pacific Northwest, had an innate ability to navigate the Columbia river bar because he happens to be an American. This is rather unfortunate, given that Captain Wilkes abandoned his exploration of Puget Sound when USS Penguin was wrecked on the Columbia bar in 1841. Oddly for someone with such a detailed knowledge of the US Navy in this era, TFSmith never mentions this incident when he discusses how 'littoral operations were hazardous in this era in peacetime', highlights 'the risks of littoral operations', or illustrates how 'peacetime operations in littoral warfare was [sic] not without risk'. The incident is, of course, within the 1841-1881 frame of reference which TFSmith set himself. However, in Burnished Rows of Steel, running aground remains a quintessentially British prerogative.

Incidentally, the rather timid Captain Charles 'Keckie' is in fact Captain Charles Leckie, who commanded the Leopard when she was commissioned in October 1862. It's a good job that TFSmith only uses the most reputable official sources to draw up his timeline, otherwise he might make stupid mistakes.