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The port was only a few days distant, for they were far in the south seas and they began to pass islands, and sometimes caught sight of green patches of water. Those were the coral reefs, the terror of all navigators, for they grow and change from year to year. To a light-draught ship like the Mary Rogers these seas were comparatively safe, but not altogether.
At Sacramento, on the next morning after leaving San Francisco, we shifted our quarters to a smaller and light-draught boat which was to take us up the shallow river to its head of navigation. This arrangement was a great economy of time.
The latter is the great artery of the region west of the Mississippi, and also, by means of the Atchafalaya Bayou, offers direct communication for light-draught vessels with the Gulf of Mexico.
I had a smart, light-draught vessel, capable of "going anywhere where a duck can swim," as we say at sea; we were well armed, had plenty of ammunition, mustered a crew of twenty-six prime seamen, the pick of the Barracouta's crew men who would go anywhere, and face anything we carried an ample supply of blankets, beads, brass wire, old muskets, and tawdry finery of various descriptions, priceless in the eyes of savages, for the purpose of peaceable ransom, if such could be accomplished; but we lacked an interpreter, a man acquainted with the barbaric language of the up-river natives, through whom we should be able to communicate with them and carry on the necessary negotiations.
Neither of them spoke again, until, with a swishing sound and a soft grate of the light-draught boat, the keel clove its way into the offshore sand and the craft came to coughing halt twenty feet from land. Claire roused herself, from a gloomy reverie in which she had fallen. Subconsciously, she had accepted the man's suggestion that they take the short cut.
It seemed clear that von Hindenburg was preparing to cross the river at the very point where Washington made his historic crossing in 1776; and General Wood proceeded to attack the enemy's position with his artillery, being assisted by four light-draught gunboats from the Philadelphia navy-yard, which lay in the deepened channel at the head of tide-water and dropped shells inside the enemy's lines.
Suspecting this from evidence collected at Pocataligo, I determined to put Siber's brigade and a battery, all in light marching order, on the south side of the river, accompanied by a light-draught steamboat, which the rise in the river after the storm enabled us to use as far as Charleston.
Our own ship is a light-draught steamer of five hundred tons burden. A little steam-launch puts out from Ashdurada, bringing the mails and several naval officers bound for Krasnovodsk and Baku. The scenery of the Mazanderan coast is magnificent. The bold mountains seem to slope quite down to the shore, and from summit to surf-waves they present one dark-green mass of forest.
General Pope immediately sent to Cairo for four light-draught steamers, and tools, implements, and supplies needed to cut a navigable way. Colonel Bissell was at once ordered to set his entire command at work, and to call upon the land force on the fleet for aid if needed. For six miles Bissell had to cut through the forest a channel fifty feet wide and four and a half feet deep.
The Confederates had in Western Louisiana, near the mouth of the Teche, a small division of Taylor's troops, about 4,500 strong, with one gunboat. At first Banks thought to leave a brigade, with two or three light-draught gunboats, on Berwick Bay to observe Taylor's force, and then to disregard it as a factor in the subsequent movements.
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