At twenty minutes past seven we had come within range of the enemy’s gunboats which opened their fire upon the _Hartford_, and as the Admiral afterward told me made her their special target. First they struck our foremast and then lodged a shot of 120 pounds in our mainmast. By degrees they got better elevation; and I have saved a splinter from the hammock netting to show how they felt their way lower. Splinters after that came by cords, and in size sometimes were like logs of wood. No longer came the cheering cry “Nobody hurt yet.” The _Hartford_ by some unavoidable chance fought the enemy’s fleet and fort together for twenty minutes by herself, timbers crashing and wounded pouring down,--cries never to be forgotten.
By half past seven the iron-clad _Tecumseh_ was well up with the fort and drawing slowly by, when suddenly she reeled to port and went down straightway with almost every soul on board. She had struck a mine. For a time this appalling disaster spread confusion in the fleet.
“What’s the matter?” was shouted from the flag-ship to the _Brooklyn_ just ahead.
“Damn the torpedoes,” said Farragut, “go ahead.”
Go ahead the fleet did and at length had passed Fort Morgan and was in the sheltering waters of the bay. The cost of this operation in the Union fleet was 335 men. Of the 130 men in the _Tecumseh_ when she was struck only 17 were saved.
Fort Gaines, the works on the western side of the channel, now surrendered. But Fort Morgan kept on fighting. The Union vessels were in Mobile Bay, but they had not yet forced the indomitable fort on Mobile Point to its knees. Admiral Farragut wrote to a friend:
We are now tightening the cords around Fort Morgan. Page is as surly as a bull-dog and says that he will die in his ditch....
How little people know the risks of life. Drayton made his clerk stay below because he was a young married man. All my staff,--Watson, McKinley and Brownell,--were in an exposed position on the poop deck but escaped unhurt while poor Heginbotham was killed.
For seventeen days Fort Morgan held out, though bombarded continuously. Then at length she surrendered, her citadel destroyed and her walls nearly blown to pieces. It is this pathetic shell that now greets the visitor’s eye on Mobile Point.