previous next

[170] the best achievement of the Arkansas. That we were under the batteries of Vicksburg did not amount to anything. I do not believe that either vessel was injured by an army gun that day. We were left to our fate, and if we had been lost it would have been no unusual or unexpected thing. The Essex used, in one of her guns that day, projectiles that were probably never used before, to-wit: Marbles that boys used for playing. We picked up a hundred unbroken ones on our forecastle. There were ‘white-allies,’ ‘chinas,’ and some glass marbles. I wish the naval reader to understand that the Essex did not return the fire as she lay alongside us, did not attempt to board, although he had a picked crew for that purpose, and fired but three guns in the fight, and thereafter kept her ports closed. Brown, no longer able to play the lion, assumed the role of the fox with consummate skill.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
J. C. Brown (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: