The Magical Book of Wands

by Raven M. Williams

  By the winter of 1850, however, my father’s dreams of gold failed to, please forgive the pun, pan out. Mounting debt forced him to give up his dream and secure what employment he could as a dockworker for the Landry Shipping and Freight Company in Baton Rouge. Loading and unloading cargo of all kinds on steamer and barges traveling up and down the Mississippi put food on the table, but it also killed him. Though you might think my choice of words merely poetic, I assure you I am being tragically accurate.

  In early 1856, while loading cotton bales onto the deck of a steamer bound upriver for St. Louis, the ship’s boilers ruptured, killing my father, six others on the dock, and three crewmen. Whether the explosion was the result of operator error, or a defect in the boilers’ manufacture, was never determined. At any rate, that hardly mattered to mother and me. All we knew was that our situation had gone from bad to far worse.

  This was the first time that either coincidence or providence, take your pick, entered into my life when Mr. Edmund Landry, my father’s employer, and his wife Minerva offered to take both my mother and me under their protection. I was never entirely sure if this was due to simple Christian kindness, a misplaced sense of guilt for what had happened to my father, or just because the childless couple saw in us a chance to adopt a sort of ready-made family, but it was, in fact, our salvation. One week before my twelfth birthday, I left school to assume my father’s former occupation on the docks, while my mother began working as a domestic servant to the Landrys.

  Though small and weak, I persevered. After a month or so, and with much assistance from my father’s former co-workers, I came into my own as a young man. Owing to my size, I proved useful in worming my way into spaces that none of the older, bigger men or boys could fit. Word of my ability to clean out the smallest of furnaces, and even perform simple plumbing repairs in the cramped, shallow bottoms of the various riverboats eventually reached Mr. Landry’s ears.

  As learned a man as he was shrewd at business, he not only increased my wage but also allowed me access to his huge library of books on subjects as far-ranging as art and history, to business and engineering, so that I might continue my education. My workdays continued as long as ever, but I spent practically all my free time reading while my mother finished her work for the day. In that way, I discovered a love of design and engineering. By the time I came of age, I dreamed of attending an institution of higher learning and achieving my own dream of becoming an engineer.

  In 1861, when I was a mere seventeen years of age, the Centenary College of Louisiana in Jackson accepted my application for admission, due in no small part to Mr. Landry’s political influence. Unfortunately, that esteemed institution shut its doors a few months later when Louisiana joined the rest of the South in the War Between the States, which you no doubt know better as the Civil War. Mr. Landry’s patronage was not enough to prevent me from being drafted into the war effort, but his backing and my own learning were enough to convince important people in the Confederacy’s new capital in Richmond, Virginia that my skills were best suited to a position in the navy rather than the army. As it turned out, that was the second instance in which either providence or luck worked in my favor.

  While the South’s young men fought and died by the thousands on land, Confederate sailors fared somewhat better, owing to the fact that the Confederate Navy mostly avoided direct engagement with the far larger and generally superior Union Navy. In the spring of 1862 though, during the Union’s march down the Mississippi, the Confederate Navy did resist them. Against their dreaded ironclad gunboats and rams, we resorted to what we called “cottonclads,” which were paddleboat steamers armored with cotton bales sandwiched between timber and railroad iron. Their performance in combat was, not unexpectedly, abysmal.

  Following our February 1862 routs at both New Madrid and Island Number Ten in Missouri, the Confederate Navy again faced the Union’s Western Gunboat Flotilla at Fort Pillow, Tennessee that spring. Though we were once again defeated, our rams damaged the USS Cincinnati and USS Mound City badly enough that they partially sank after withdrawing to shallower water. Remembering an encyclopedia entry concerning contraptions called “diving bells” first used in antiquity, I suggested to my commanding officer that we attempt to strip whatever we could from those foundered vessels before the Union returned to refloat them.

  He approved the plan, no doubt hoping for any sort of morale-improving victory.

  Pressed with following through, I resorted to the use of a large whiskey cask salvaged from a nearby distillery in Vicksburg, leather hoses, a jury-rigged bilge pump, and sacks filled with grape shot for ballast, to construct what I hoped would prove to be a workable diving bell. As none that I approached possessed the nerve even to enter into the thing, I operated the bell myself.

  In the early morning hours of May 12th, before the Union had quite grasped that the entire Mississippi was largely theirs to operate on as they pleased, we carried out my daring—though some called it crackpot—plan. I, and a very few other men, paddled the CSS Belvedere, really no more than a barge, up to Cincinnati’s submerged stern. There, we lowered my contraption into the shallow water.

  I retrieved her single twelve-pounder howitzer and ripped up much of her deck planking there, while others ransacked what they could above the surface. Amazingly, we accomplished all that under the very noses of the Union troops just on the river’s far bank. I surmise they assumed we were part of their own navy, rather than the “rebels” that we were, and can only imagine their consternation on seeing us sailing south rather than north upon completing our operation.

  That small victory, vehemently denied by the North and now completely forgotten in the South, was followed by crushing defeat at Vicksburg, Memphis, and New Orleans. By the end of 1862, the Confederate States west of the Mississippi were largely cut off from those on the east. As for the rest of the war, everyone knows how that transpired. Out of it though, came the source of my later livelihood and the fortune with which I supported the family I started in the war’s wake.

  All that, however, is merely the precursor to the actual story I wish to tell you. My family is all gone now, and I am the last of my line, so I choose to rely on fate to select the one to whom I tell my fantastic tale. For now though, I must rest. At my age, despite my remarkably good health, I find that I am often tired—tired of it all, I suppose. By the time I awake, we should be near to my destination in Newport News. If there is time, I shall finish it then.

  MAY 29, 1972

  Recovering from the war was hard all around, but hardest for those of us who lost it. My late twenties sometimes tended toward bitterness, but as a certain Mr. Dylan sang so recently and nasally, times certainly do change. That seems to be a particularly modern conceit at the present, but I am here to tell you that the times have always changed. One merely needs to live as long as I have to see it so clearly. As for my perception of that long-ago time of my youth, I never saw myself as a villain, or even a bad man. Be you black or white, man, woman, or child, I leave that for you to decide.

  For now...the rest of my story.

  Throughout my younger days, and certainly during the war, I thought myself a Southerner, hiding the shame of my Northern birth. In 1866 though, barely a year after our defeat, I married a lovely young Southern woman by the name of Lavinia Ilyana Petrescu, whom I had met two years before at a military ball. ‘Vinia was five years my junior and the loveliest girl on whom I had, or have ever, laid eyes. Were it not for the war’s uncertainty, I am sure that I might not have been able to wait the full two years of our courtship before marrying. Once we were man and wife, however, nothing was more important to me than providing for her.

  It was with my new family in mind that I began to lean upon the previously inconvenient fact of my Northern birth to provide for opportunities now denied those native to the South. Seeking contracts with Northern firms resulted in many of my former compatriots branding me a carpetbagger, but it put food on the table for me and my new bride
. Such circumstances gave me an entirely new appreciation for the sacrifices my father made so many years before in abandoning his dreams of gold.

  My previous experiences as a dockworker and sailor made it clear to me that there was a great need for maritime and riverine salvage in the war-ravaged South. With that in mind, I improved upon my previous diving bell. Slightly more than a year later, I had a design I believed would allow me to dive to no less than one hundred feet beneath the surface. Chief among my ideas was to construct the new bell of cast iron rather than wood, relieving the need of quite so much added weight to counter the natural buoyancy of the air inside it. To maintain simplicity, as well as lower the cost, I maintained the “wet,” or open-bottomed, design I had used before.

  Come autumn of 1868, I found myself diving to the wreck of the CSS Florida at the bottom of Hampton Roads Harbor in southeastern Virginia. As my father had before me, I had staked practically all our money on a dream that I hoped would provide a profitable future for my wife and newborn son, who we named Howard Cornelius Banning. Though the North continued to deny what had happened concerning the USS Cincinnati in May of 1862, I am convinced that it was the key to their taking a chance on my vastly improved diving bell. While Florida lay roughly sixty feet down, as opposed to Cincinnati’s paltry ten, I set out to fulfill the contract by salvaging the wreck’s dozen deck guns, and a safe believed to remain inside the captain’s cabin.

  How Florida came to be in its present state was a subject of some great concern at the time, but has since been largely forgotten. Given my peculiar status as the last living veteran of either side of that war, I beg that you bear with me for a brief excursion into history.

  Until relatively late in the war, the Union’s navy vastly outclassed that of the Confederacy. One of a very few exceptions was the Confederate sloop CSS Florida, which conducted a brilliant series of raids throughout the West Indies and Caribbean, capturing several Union ships and costing our hated enemy dearly in both men and materiel. It was not until the night of October 7, 1864 that Florida’s heroic campaign finally ended. While its captain, Lieutenant Charles Manigault Morris, and much of her crew were ashore at Bahia, Brazil, Commander Napoleon Collins of the USS Wachusett captured Florida, towed her back to sea, and then sent her on to the United States Naval port in Newport News, Virginia as a war prize.

  Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil complained formally of the breach of their sovereignty to President Lincoln. In order to maintain relations with other foreign governments who also disapproved of the way in which Florida had been captured, Lincoln agreed to return her to Brazil. Before Florida could be returned, however, the Union troop ferry USAT Alliance struck Florida in Hampton Roads Harbor during a storm on the night of November 28, 1864, sinking both vessels. While no one, Confederate or Brazilian, could call the chain of events anything but suspicious, neither could anyone do anything to alter them.

  Returning to my own part in this largely forgotten story, I had already spent three days operating from the deck of the bark USS Elizabeth Loud, which was anchored over the combined wrecks of Alliance and Florida. The waters of Hampton Roads Harbor were as murky as ever, but the currents were mercifully mild between high and low tides. In order to conserve on my own expenditure, the federal government’s pay being contingent on the final delivery of the cannons and the captain’s safe, I chose to operate the bell myself again, tying off the guns one-by-one to be hoisted up to the surface. On that fourth day, all that remained was to exit the bell and dive into the wreck, provided with a fresh flow of air by hoses leading up to the deck of the “Screamin’ Betsy,” as the crew referred to Elizabeth Loud. Once inside the wreck, I intended to find the safe, haul it up in the same manner as the guns before it, and then turn it all over to the authorities and await the payment I needed so badly.

  First though, I actually had to get inside the wreck.

  On the way down, my legs dangled in the water as I peered into the weedy murk through the heavily condensation-coated porthole, suppressing the voice in the back of my head that nagged at me about committing an act of disloyalty to my beloved South. After all, the war was over, and the states were again united. Peace and prosperity for my family, I told myself, was important enough to endure the occasional taunts of being just another carpetbagger. Certainly, I insisted inwardly, it was worth the risk I was about to undertake.

  When I saw the twin funnels, and then the jagged, shadowy stump of Florida’s mizzenmast rise up from a thick patch of weeds, I gave a quick tug of the rope going out the bottom and then up to the Screamin’ Betsy, signaling my safe arrival. With well-practiced timing, the bell’s rate of descent slowed and then stopped barely a moment after my weighted boots thumped against Florida’s rotting deck. Another tug of the line confirmed for the crew that I was secure.

  I wasted no time, as there was much to do and scant light available that far down in such murky water. I had already been wearing my waterproofed canvas diving suit and bronze corselet, so I hefted my helmet off its rack on the bell’s bulkhead and then wrestled it into place. Once I was sure the seal was tight and the helmet locked securely onto the corselet, I pulled the rope again as a signal for the crew to begin pumping air down to me independent of the bell itself. Hearing the rhythmic whoosh of the pump, and feeling the stirring of air over my face, I deposited my tools upon Florida’s deck and then tugged twice on the rope, sending the bell rising a few feet higher as I stood still, the water level rising over my head with it.

  I ducked to clear the bell’s bottom, and then stood free and clear on the deck of CSS Florida—the first person to do so since she had sunk four years before. If anything, my surroundings seemed quite clear to me, more so than had been the dim interior of the bell. Through my helmet’s top port, I saw a clearly brighter patch some forty feet over my head. Rays of light speared down through the weeds and drifting silt to reveal that I stood no more than six feet or so from the ship’s wheel, which retained all its handles. Directly beneath my feet lay the goal of this last dive.

  My weighted boots made walking difficult under even the best of circumstances, but the deck’s angle made it harder. Even so, I managed to locate my first tool without too much fumbling about and soon had it wedged in between two of the deck’s planks. With a suitable amount of prying first one way, and then the other, I wedged them far enough apart to fit my next tool. That one resembled a fireman’s hook, which I used to pry up one of the planks and then wrest it from the frame by hand. By that time, I had worked up not only a fine sheen of sweat from my exertions but had also misted all my ports to the point I could not see worth a damn.

  Holding the hook in one hand, so as not to have to fumble for it again, I used the other to open a petcock at the base of my helmet. After sucking up some seawater, I closed the valve and spat the foul stuff over the insides of all but my top port, clearing the fog so I could see. Several more boards quickly followed the first, allowing me just enough room to peer into what should have been the former captain’s cabin. That, however, had to wait for another mouthful or two of the harbor water to clear my ports again. That time, I also managed to clear the top port. Through it, I saw the sun had moved almost directly opposite the Screamin’ Betsy’s hull above me. Its light made an impressive display of shifting rays as it silhouetted the bark like an eclipse. As beautiful as the sight was, it was also a warning that the low tide was not far off, bringing with it far worse visibility.

  It was little matter, I told myself, having done the bulk of the work already. Of course I had yet to locate the damned safe—assuming it was even there—and secure it to the recovery rope anchored about my waist, but I was determined. My wife and boy deserved no less than all I could muster, so I dropped slowly and awkwardly to my knees.

  What man does not feel a thrill run through him to look into the unknown? I know I did as I peered into the derelict’s hull. I daresay a shiver ran up my spine that had nothing to do with the temperature, which was quite chilly in fact. I
felt the most irrational sensation that I was not alone down there, but shunted that aside as I pushed my head in through the opening.

  I confess I screamed just a little when something thumped up against my back. In fact, I very nearly tumbled down through that opening and into the darkness, but I managed to halt my plunge by grabbing onto the hole’s edge. Then I spotted through one of my side ports the bulk of a steamer gliding past on the surface, her wake causing Elizabeth Loud to roll just enough to send my diving bell swaying about at the end of its cable. In my eagerness to get the job done, I had made the novice’s mistake of neglecting to secure the bell while I worked on Florida’s deck.

  After my heart rate returned to something resembling normal, I secured the bell with a pair of ropes to the ship’s port and starboard rails, and then ripped two more planks from the deck. Signaling on my own rope for the crew to let out some slack, I stepped into the opening and allowed my heavy boots to pull me down. I thumped onto another deck a moment or two later, unable to see for the dark.

  My eyes slowly adjusted to the minimal light shafting in from the opening. When they did, I caught sight of the unbroken glass of the ship’s stern windows, confirming that I was, in fact, standing inside the captain’s cabin. No light penetrated those windows, however, as they were completely obscured by the weeds growing up all about the wreck. At the low end of the slanted deck, flipped up against a bulkhead, rested the wooden frame of the captain’s bed. After lying on the harbor’s bottom for four years, only shreds remained of the mattress and bedding.

  I turned slowly in place, looking around the comparatively large room. All the other furniture was in a similar state as the bed—overturned and half-rotted away. A veritable storm of fish and tiny bits of detritus swirled about me. I also noticed a few small crabs scuttling about, disturbed by the entrance of the blundering colossus that had quite literally dropped into their domain.