Two If Bythe Sea

During a small action in June 1862 (which is retroactively put in the timeline long after it has reached and passed June) we see the fate of Captain Bythesea, VC.

In reality Bythesea was an incisive and brave man who served both in combat and in critical roles ashore; in BROS, he dies an incredibly silly death.

Firstly, we are told that Bythesea is captain of the Meteor and patrolling off Long Island Sound. This is very odd as not only were his real orders to handle organizing the Canadian lakes navy (a job which seems to have been essentially left undone TTL) but the Meteor was considered uneconomical to repair.

‘Orders have been at length received at Portsmouth to break up and remove the ruins of the Meteor, floating battery, from no. 2 dock at that port. The Meteor was placed in this dock on the 19th of November, 1860. She had afterwards her armour plates removed from her sides, and was opened up for examination, when she was found to be in such a defective state throughout the whole of her frame that the cost of rebuilding her would greatly exceed any value she could represent when complete.’ (Hampshire Telegraph, 21 October 1861; cf Times 9 January 1862)

Given the timing, British small ironclads might be new build ones but this one is specified to be one of the older sort. Meteor is also a slow floating battery designed to attack fortified anchorages; she should not be patrolling anything.

Secondly, the Meteor rams itself onto a rock (Race Point Ledge). This is in an attempt to intercept the Vanderbilt which is charging through the sound (having somehow avoided being spotted as she approached on “a beautiful June morning” – for some reason Bythesea (in a slow coastal attack ironclad) attempts to intercept the Vanderbilt by sailing directly southeast within three hundred yards of the tip of Fisher Island, instead of sailing south or southwest on a vector which would better allow him to get in gun range. He also does not actually see the rock ledge below the waterline, despite how it is less than three feet below the water.

This grounding is based (as per TFSmith's notes) on the grounding of the Lord Clyde in 1872 – an ironclad of 28 feet draft, not 8'8”, and in new waters for her instead of waters where (as Meteor has been) she was operating for months. Bythesea also only grounded Lord Clyde because he was trying to salvage a grounded civilian ship, a motive that is entirely absent here.

Bythesea then transfers to a gunvessel, Lily, and efforts begin to salvage the Meteor – the salvage efforts involving essentially the entire blockade from Long Island to Nantucket. Why this takes so much effort is not clear – Meteor's maximum speed of five knots would not do a great deal of damage to the wooden hull of the ironclad, and the tidal sweep is two and a half feet so unless she ran aground at high tide it would be easy to get clear. (for comparison the tidal sweep at Pantalleria where Lord Clyde grounded is approx. four inches).

Meanwhile Farragut sallies out of New York. He achieves the very impressive feat of taking a fleet including Monitor (6 knots) the eighty nautical miles from New York to Fishers Island overnight in June (seven hours) and we are told that Monitor batters Meteor into submission with “constant, near-point-blank fire from Monitor”. While the effect of the guns is not stated clearly enough to be sure, the 11 inch gun was only able to penetrate an ironclad of Meteor's type under ideal conditions (conditions in which Meteor could effectively reply; indeed, as the Aetna class ironclads were pierced for all-around fire it may have more guns able to bear) and to describe Monitor's guns as “constant” requires an effort of confabulation – each of the two guns fired at Hampton Roads once every twelve minutes. (The guns of Meteor would be possible to serve once a minute at full speed; in a real action this would be more like one every two to three minutes, depending.)

However, this is where we come to the death of Bythesea;

Lily actually tried to come alongside Monitor to board; Bythesea, who had boasted he could take the ironclad by jamming her turret, died on her deck, killed by a shell from Cayuga.

Everything about this is wrong.

• As we have discussed, Bythesea should not be here.
• Lily has clearly successfully boarded Monitor here.
• Bythesea is described as leading the boarding party; he is the commanding officer. While this took place in Napoleonic times, Bythesea's statement was that a boarding party of two men could jam Monitor's turret. It seems odd for him to be one of the two men.
• Bythesea did not suggest he could jam the turret of Monitor.
• Bythesea suggested he could jam the turret of Miantonomoh, an opinion formed after spending weeks on board in the mid-1860s. Not 1861.
• This was a professional naval opinion delivered to an Admiralty panel on turrets based on both close-hand experience and the actual number of real Monitor turrets which jammed in the Civil War, not an idle boast.
• The actual commander of Monitor, Worden, believed before Hampton Roads that boarding would be suicide as he could sweep the deck with canister.
• After Hampton Roads (presumably where Worden discovered the aforementioned rate of fire issue), where the Virginia nearly managed to get boarders aboard Monitor but failed, Worden's view changed to being that… boarders could jam her turret. He was so convinced of this view that he took special pains to tell the President of the United States personally.
• And the Cayuga is shelling Monitor. This is an odd way to handle the situation to say the least, especially as Union shells were time fuzed and had a minimum range of several hundred yards. One would think canister was the better remedy.

This also adds to TFSmith's tally of killed British VC holders, i.e. Hewett (killed by a Yankee shot on his own quarterdeck during the Rinaldo affair) and Dunn (killed by a barrage of Union musketry and specifically by Calixia Lavallée with two shotgun blasts to the chest). It seems as though TFSmith has it in for them – there are six named men in the TL who enter it with the VC, and three of them die in rather horrible ways.

The matter of navigation is separate, and deserves an article to itself.