Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Documents and Narratives, Volume 7.
Frank Moore, Ed.

[72] the same man had delivered, upon that same deck, to the same crew, but an hour previous, when he promised them, in a grandiloquent oration, that, “Before breakfast we will have in tow the Yankee monitors.”

One cannot imagine a more villainous looking set of men than this same Atlanta crew. They are all Georgia “crackers,” the poorest “white trash” of Georgia, without education, or any thing, in fact, which would entitle them to be called men, except that they have the human form. Not one man among them is a sailor, but they are all soldiers. The officers, being perfect gentlemen, compared strangely with this gang of cut-throats. The men, however, were grievously disappointed, and loudly declaimed against their ill-luck.

Fourteen officers and fifty men, including those wounded, were transferred to the steamer Island City, and the remainder of the officers and crew were placed on board of the Oleander. They were all brought up to this place yesterday morning, and again transferred to the United States steamship Vermont, and the wounded properly cared for. This afternoon they were all put aboard the United States gunboat James Adger, which will carry them to New-York. The entire crew, officers and men, number one hundred and sixty-five, and a more dejected looking set of naval heroes never trod the deck of our gunboat before.

Upon examining our prize, Captain Rodgers found that she had an immense stock of provisions and stores. These, at the least calculation, were amply sufficient for a two months cruise, and of the best quality. The clothing found on her was of a superior make and texture, and sufficient to keep the crew well clothed for a year. Her chronometers and sextants, of which she had a large number, were very choice and valuable. The officers' quarters were fitted up very luxuriously, and revealed a well-selected stock of liquors, segars, tobacco, etc. Every thing about her, in fact, indicated not only that she was a pet of the rebels, but that her unfortunate voyagers had started upon a long cruise.

The Atlanta is armed with six guns, one seven-inch pivot gun fore and aft, and two six-inch guns on each broadside. These guns are all the Brooks guns, which, you will recollect, made such good execution against our iron-clads, in the late attack on Charleston. They are, also, all rifled, and throw that long steel-pointed missile of English manufacture. The Atlanta has two magazines, one fore and one aft, well protected, and, upon opening one of them, five hundred rounds of ammunition were found in it. The other magazine is supposed to contain the same amount, and, indeed, her officers say that she has on board one thousand rounds. When you consider that one hundred rounds is a ship's regular armament, you cannot but conclude that the Atlanta's cruise intended some damage. She had also, in addition, a plentiful supply of torpedoes, cutlasses, boarding-pikes, guns, revolvers, etc. Her armament is truly gigantic.

She has inside three decks; first, the gun-deck, two hundred feet long by forty wide; immediately below this is a deck two hundred and eighty feet long, which is subdivided into the captain's cabin, aft, the ward-room, the petty officers' quarters, and forward the men's quarters. Below this deck is the third, the orlop deck, in which are stored all the stores, provisions, etc. Immediately fore and aft of this deck are the magazines. The engines and their necessary complements, of course, occupy the centre of the vessel. These engines are the same which were in her when she ran the blockade as the old Fingal. They were built on the Clyde, and are models for their beauty and action.

First and on the outside were wrought-iron bars, six inches wide by two inches thick, running perpendicularly with her sides, and properly secured, both above and below, by rivets and bolts. Across these bars, horizontally, and on the inside, ran bars of like-material and pattern, fastened to the outside layer by the strongest rivets. Within this layer, and fastened to it, were two thicknesses of live oak, two-inch plank also, running perpendicularly and horizontally, and again within these were two more similar thicknesses of Georgia pine plank, forming the last series of her armor. You will thus see that her armor is twelve inches thick, and presenting all the solidity which could be given it by four inches of wrought-iron, four inches of live oak, and four inches of Georgia pine.

Her port-holes, however, were made especially strong. Extra layers of iron and plank, so that the embrasure measures from the inside to the outside forty inches. These port-holes were a foot and a half long by one foot in width, and were protected by wrought-iron shutters, formed by two transverse layers of iron bars, of the same dimensions as those which compose her armor. These shutters hung upon a pivot, firmly adjusted over the port-hole, and were raised or lowered by a small chain which, being attached to the side of each shutter, ran through a small aperture into the gun-deck.

Forward of the smoke-stack was an elevation on the top-deck, to all appearances like as a cone; upon this cone was a small square look-out, just large enough on the inside to allow a man's head to turn with freedom. On each side of this lookout were two small apertures, in the shape of parallelograms, slanting toward the interior, and presenting to the pilot's optics in the look-out two look-outs, an inch and a half long by an inch wide. This look-out was of wrought-iron four inches thick, and the cone upon which it stood was the same thickness, with this additional strength, however, that the interior of the pilothouse being square, the interstices between the sides of the upper part of the pilot-house and the concave surface of the cone were filled with eight-inch, square, live-oak blocks. From the top of the look-out to the base of the cone was but two feet and a half, so that the pilot exposed only about one third of his person, the rest of the pilot-house being within the body of the ship and