roportion to its actual strength, the Tecumseh alone was silent. After
the first two shots fired by her, which were rather the signal of
warning than the opening of the battle, she had loaded her two guns with
steel shot, backed by the heaviest charge of powder allowed, and, thus
prepared, reserved her fire for the Tennessee alone. "I believe," wrote
Farragut in a private letter, "that the Tecumseh would have gone up and
grappled with and captured the Tennessee. Craven's heart was bent upon
it."

The two columns, of ironclads and of wooden vessels lashed together in
pairs, were now approaching the line of torpedoes and the narrow
entrance through which lay the path of safety; and the broadsides of the
heavy sloops which led--the Brooklyn, the Hartford, the
Richmond--supported by the less numerous but still powerful batteries
following, and by the guns of the turreted ironclads, overbore the fire
of the works. All promised fairly, provided the leaders of the two
columns pushed rapidly and unhesitatingly in the direction assigned
them. But almost at the same moment doubt seized them both, and led to a
double disaster. As Craven, leading the monitor column, and then about
three hundred yards in advance of the Brooklyn, drew up to the buoy, to
the eastward of which he had been directed to go, he saw it so nearly in
line with the point beyond that he could not believe it possible to
pass. "It is impossible that the admiral means us to go inside that
buoy," he said to the pilot; "I can not turn my ship." Just then the
Tennessee moved a little ahead, to the westward; and Craven, under the
double impulse of his doubt and of his fear lest the hostile ironclad
should escape him, changed his course to the left and pushed straight
for her, the Tecumseh heading to pass the buoy on the wrong side.

The movement thus indicated, if followed by the succeeding monitors,
would throw that column across the path of the wooden ships if the
latter endeavored to obey their orders to pass east of the buoy. At the
same moment there were seen from the Brooklyn, in the water ahead,
certain objects which were taken to be buoys for torpedoes. The ship was
at once stopped and backed, coming down upon the Hartford, her next
astern, which also stopped, but did not reverse her engines. The
Richmond followed the Hartford's movements, and the two ships drifted up
with the young flood tide, but with their heads still pointed in the
right direction, toward