Hero Tales from History — Davy Farragut, The Hero of Mobile Bay
The motto of West Point Military Academy is “Duty, Honor, Country.
” All through his life, in all that he did, Robert E. Lee showed that he respected Honor, loved his Country, and almost worshiped Duty.
He expressed this thought when he wrote, “Duty is the sublimest word in our language.
” DAVY FARRAGUT, THE HERO OF MOBILE BAY
After the War of Independence, there lived in a cabin among the mountains of Tennessee a Spaniard named Farragut, who had come to America to help the people in their fight for liberty.
He had married a brave little Scotch woman.
While her husband was away one day several skulking Indians hung around and watched for a chance to get into the cabin.
The mother had seen them and sent her two little boys up under the roof, while she stood inside the door for hours, with an ax in her small hands, to kill the first Indian who tried to enter.
After a long watch, the red men stole away, as much afraid of the fire in that little woman’s eye as of the ax in her hands.
One of the two boys who crouched in almost breathless silence up in the cabin loft was Davy Farragut.
When this lad was seven his father was appointed sailing master in the navy, and moved with his family to live by the large lake near New Orleans.
When off duty, Farragut took his boys sailing on the lake.
One day when he was out fishing he found an old man lying in the bottom of a rowboat, alone and unconscious.
Farragut took the sick man home for his wife to nurse.
In a few days the stranger died of yellow fever.
The good wife caught the dread disease and died, too.
The poor father was left to care for five motherless children under ten years of age.
It turned out that Captain David Porter, who was then in command of the naval station at New Orleans, was the dead man’s son.
In gratitude for the care of his dying father, Captain Porter offered to adopt one of the Farragut boys.
David was chosen, and the naval officer took the sturdy little lad to his home in New Orleans, and afterward to Washington, where he was sent to a good school.
In Washington the Secretary of the Navy saw what a bright, honest, pleasant-faced lad Davy Farragut was and, when he was ten years old, appointed him a midshipman on his adopted father’s ship.
This was early in the War of 1812. After Porter’s warship, the _Essex_, had captured a British ship, the _Alert_, Middy Davy, lying awake in his hammock, saw a sailor of the _Alert_ standing near, with a cocked pistol in his hand.
Davy pretended to be asleep and the man passed on.
The boy got up, crept into Captain Porter’s cabin, and whispered to him what he had just seen.
“Fire!
Fire!
” shouted the captain, and the sailors of the _Essex_ came scrambling up on deck.
Porter ordered them down to capture the imprisoned sailors of the _Alert_, who were preparing to kill the American crew and take the ship to England.
Before any damage was done, the astonished Britishers were all in irons, thanks to the wide-awake shrewdness of eleven-year-old Midshipman Farragut.
Captain Porter was ordered to sail around South America into the Pacific Ocean to warn American crews that there was a war going on between the United States and Great Britain.
He was also to capture British ships as prizes.
Over one of these ships he placed in command David Farragut--then a boy of twelve.
When Davy ordered the British sailors to “fill away the maintopsail,” the former captain of the ship was angry.
It was bad enough to be captured and have his ship taken into a South American port as a prize; but to have his crew ordered about by an American boy of twelve seemed too much for an English captain to bear.
Shouting that he would shoot any Englishman who dared to touch a rope without his orders, the former captain went below to get his pistols to carry out his threat.
Captain Farragut sent one of his men to follow the swearing captain down and tell him that if he came back on deck with a pistol in his hand he would himself be shot and pitched overboard.
The man decided not to come back.
Young David brought the British ship into port and reported to his proud foster-father what he had done.
The _Essex_ fought a great battle with two British warships, and Farragut himself has left a description of the sights in his first great sea fight: “I shall never forget the horrid impression made upon me at the sight of the first man I had ever seen killed.
It staggered me at first, but they soon began to fall so fast that it all appeared like a dream, and produced no effect on my nerves.
“Some gun-primers [for loading the cannon] were wanted and I was sent after them.
In going below, while I was on the ward-room ladder, the captain of the gun directly opposite the hatchway was struck full in the face by an eighteen-pound shot, and fell back on me.
We tumbled down the hatch together.
“I lay for some moments stunned by the blow, but soon recovered consciousness enough to rush up on deck.
The captain, seeing me covered with blood, asked if I were wounded; to which I replied, ‘I believe not, sir.
’ “‘Then,’ said he, ‘where are the primers?
’ This brought me to my senses, and I ran below again and brought up the primers.
” After being powder boy and doing all sorts of service on a man-of-war, the little middy was taken prisoner, but was released at the close of the war.
When Farragut was fifteen he went on a cruise in the _Washington_ to watch for pirates in the Mediterranean Sea.
While anchored off Naples he witnessed an eruption of the great volcano, Vesuvius.
A naval chaplain, then American consul at Tunis, begged to have the Farragut youth stay with him, and study French, Italian, literature, and mathematics.
While on a horseback journey to the Desert of Sahara, David suffered a sunstroke, which hurt his eyes so that he was unable to read much afterwards.
On his return home, Farragut passed the necessary examinations and at eighteen received the rank of lieutenant in the navy.
Then he went to New Orleans and found that his father was dead and that his own sister did not know him.
Here he was exposed to yellow fever and was very ill of it in a hospital after his return to Washington.
Lieutenant Farragut was married, soon after his recovery, and spent most of his time on shore until the breaking out of the Civil War.
At that time he was living in Norfolk, Virginia.
He did not, however, approve of the act of Virginia in withdrawing from the Union.
People told him, that if he thought that, it would not be safe for him to live in Virginia.
He replied coolly, “Well then, I can live somewhere else”; and he and his wife packed up and went to live on the Hudson River above New York City.
Though born and bred in the South, Farragut was a Union man and offered his services to his country.
He was appointed to take New Orleans.
It was the largest city in the South, and an important seaport.
Its capture would cut short the war by preventing the South from selling cotton.
Also, it would open the Mississippi, so that the western states could have that outlet to the sea.
It was a dangerous undertaking, but Farragut was glad of the chance to risk his life for his country.
He said as he started out, “If I die in the attempt, it will only be what every officer has to expect.
” Captain Farragut now commanded a fleet of forty-eight ships, carrying over two hundred guns.
In six days and nights his mortars threw nearly six thousand shells on the two forts barring his way, one on each side of the Mississippi.
The enemy sent five blazing rafts to set fire to his fleet, but Farragut’s men either dodged the burning craft or towed them out of the way.
One heroic deed was the cutting, under fire from the forts, of the great chain which had been stretched across the Mississippi to keep the ships from coming up to New Orleans.
This was one of the greatest naval battles in the war; for, with a few wooden ships, Farragut ran against the current and past the two forts, meeting fire-rafts and fighting with a large fleet above the forts.
Two of the enemy’s warships were ironclads.
He finally captured the city of New Orleans after great loss of life on both sides.
The next day the happy victor wrote home: “MY DEAREST WIFE AND BOY: “I am so agitated that I can scarcely write, and shall only tell you that it pleased Almighty God to preserve my life through a fire such as the world has scarcely known.
He has permitted me to make a name for my dear boy’s inheritance, as well as for my comfort and that of my family.
” “The Hero of New Orleans” was soon made Rear Admiral for this, splendid service to the country.
But there was to be still another test of the courage of David Glasgow Farragut.
It came two years later in Mobile Bay, which he entered with fourteen ships and four monitors, or small ironclad boats.
He saw his monitor, the _Tecumseh_, sinking with all on board.
[Illustration: FARRAGUT IN THE RIGGING AT THE BATTLE OF MOBILE BAY] “What’s the trouble?
” came through his speaking trumpet to the men on the monitor nearest the sinking craft.
“Torpedoes!
” was the reply.
What was to be done?
Should he risk the whole fleet in a harbor filled with lurking mines?
The good admiral sought help from above.
“O God,” he whispered, “direct me what to do.
” Farragut heard the answer in his heart.
Without an instant’s delay he shouted to the captain of his own ship, the _Hartford_, “Go ahead!
give her all the steam you’ve got.
” The _Hartford_ took the lead and became the chief target of forts and batteries on shore as well as of the Southern gunboats in the harbor.
As if that was not dangerous enough, the heroic admiral took his place in plain sight high above the deck, where he could better direct the battle; and so that he could still keep his commanding place if struck by a cannon-ball, his devoted men lashed him to the rigging.
That is one of the heroic pictures in the history of patriotism: Admiral Farragut tied up in the rigging of his flagship and borne amid the whizzing of cannon-balls and the bursting of shells, carrying the Stars-and-Stripes through the fire and smoke of battle to one of the grandest victories ever won in naval warfare.
