Benjamin Franklin Isherwood, Naval Engineer. Edward William Sloan III
Jacinto’s assistant surgeon, R. P. Daniel, who stuffed the engineer with stiff doses of lead and opium, supplemented with opium suppositories and a diet of rice gruel. Never one to obey a doctor’s admonitions, Isherwood would consent to this regimen only when seriously ill; once improved, he would immediately go on a gastronomic spree and then suffer the inevitable relapse, while the doctor noted in exasperation that it “appears impossible to curb his appetite within the bounds of a proper diet, either in quantity or quality.”18
Failing to recover his health after a visit to the relatively bracing climate at Macao, Isherwood was put ashore at Hong Kong to rest from the middle of November, 1856 to the following January. He rejoined his ship just in time to avoid being poisoned by a group of xenophobic Chinese who had determined to erase the foreign population by mixing arsenic in the fresh bread. The San Jacinto fortunately patronized a bakery other than the one “through which the mischief was done,” but hundreds of Europeans were not so lucky, and although only one person died, the digestive apparatus of many was never again quite the same.19
To the utter mystification of the ship’s doctor, Isherwood still catered to his “huge appetite, which he appears to gratify with impunity,” and by the spring of 1857 he was sufficiently recovered to return to duty. Despite occasional relapses, he continued “in good flesh,” and once the San Jacinto finally left the miasma of the Chinese mainland, he was free from the disease.
That Isherwood had been rash in the cavalier treatment accorded his stomach was all too evident to Dr. Daniel. Dysentery in the 1850’s was a formidable disease in the American Navy. Unless controlled within the first five or six weeks, the doctor observed, “it almost invariably terminated either in death, or in a chronic condition which baffled our every effort to produce a permanent cure”—and Isherwood’s case took two years to bring under control.20
Returning to the United States in August, 1858, Isherwood entered a new phase of his naval career. Throughout his cruise in the San Jacinto he had filled his leisure time, and had avoided the lethargy induced by climate and food by a ceaseless pursuit of scientific knowledge, which he equated with the remorseless collection of every available scrap of engineering data. Aware of his preoccupation, his superiors placed him on many experimental boards during 1859 and 1860 so that the Navy might utilize the encyclopedic knowledge that Isherwood had at his command.
In September and October, 1860, he took part in a department survey of all the sailing vessels in the Navy which intended to determine how many might be converted to steamers. Isherwood and his associates concluded that the smaller warships—brigs, sloops, and frigates—should retain their full sail power; but ships of the line were now useless and should be razeed and converted into first-class, screw-steam frigates.
In November, 1860, Isherwood received an assignment which proved to have the greatest significance for his career both as an engineer and as a naval officer. At Erie, Pennsylvania, the old paddle-wheel steamer Michigan became destined for engineering fame—or notoriety—as a board of engineers under Isherwood’s direction spent the winter months experimenting with her engines. Their assignment was to ascertain the most economical method of using steam in the reciprocating steam engine of that period. They were aware that the savings in fuel costs in steam generation by allowing expanding steam to do much of the work within a cylinder were theoretically great. Isherwood’s board, including Chief Engineers Theodore Zeller, Robert Long, and Alban Stimers, labored to determine just how economical the use of expanding steam really would be, by balancing the savings in the cost of coal burned in generating the lesser amount of steam against the loss of steam pressure through expansion and the consequent loss of engine power.
The report of the board on February 18, 1861, by challenging the normal practice as an excessive use of expanding steam, fanned an issue already smoldering in engineering circles. By his prior work in this area and his championing the controversial conclusions in the Erie report, Benjamin Isherwood boldly thrust himself and his theories of steam engineering in the face of doctrines accepted by the great majority of steam engineers, both here and abroad. As a result of his experiments, he became the best known and most controversial engineer in the Navy, if not in the United States.
It was also at Erie where Isherwood made a friend of Theodore Zeller who would be his devoted associate and intimate companion for the next forty years. Polished in his manners, scholarly and refined in his address, and quietly exuding the breeding of generations of New York city aristocracy, Theodore Zeller made an interesting contrast to the brusque, energetic Isherwood. The two shared a love of music and art and a devotion to their profession. Here the similarities ceased. Zeller was ever agreeable, with a placid disposition which covered his personality as a blanket. With his “singularly even” temper and charitable instincts, which undoubtedly proved at times to be his undoing, Zeller amiably accompanied his dynamic and impatient friend through the years of naval and engineering life. Isherwood always led; Zeller never failed as the loyal follower, whose unquestioned acceptance of his friend’s superior energy and ability kept the two bound by a symbiotic relationship severed only by Zeller’s death.
Detached from his work on the Michigan, Isherwood went to Washington in the middle of February, 1861, to be on a board investigating the cause of oxidation in the boilers of the USS Dacotah. Within the month, Engineer in Chief Samuel Archbold suddenly resigned both his position and his commission as a naval engineer and left the service, for reasons which were apparently personal rather than concerned with the political unrest which already threatened the solidarity of the Navy.
If Isherwood solicited the position vacated by Archbold, there is no evidence of such an effort. Undeniably, he had friends in the right places, especially John Lenthall, the chief of the Bureau of Construction, Equipment, and Repairs. Lenthall, a civilian and considerably older than Isherwood, had worked closely with the young engineer while on duty in Washington, and the congenial relationship between the two was to ripen over the years into a close friendship—one of the very few Isherwood permitted himself.
It would be logical for Gideon Welles, secretary of the Navy for only a few days, to have depended heavily on Lenthall’s judgment. In any case, at this crucial period the Navy needed a man of proven energy and ability who would be able to handle the staggering amount of work which might suddenly be thrust upon him if the Union were to commence naval operations against the South. Gideon Welles found that man in Benjamin Isherwood.
Within only a few weeks, Secretary Welles had ample opportunity to judge the merits of his new Engineer in Chief, and then it was at a moment of national crisis. As Virginia teetered on the brink of secession, the Gosport Navy Yard at Norfolk assumed a critical role in political and military affairs. Unwilling to antagonize the residents of the surrounding countryside and precipitate secession by forcing overt southern resistance, President Lincoln and his Secretary of the Navy grudgingly maintained the status quo in the Norfolk yard, neither building up its defenses nor removing any of the significant portion of the American Navy which was anchored within the yard.
In command of the Norfolk yard was the venerable Commodore Charles E. McCauley, who had earned this comfortable billet by serving fifty-two years in the Navy. With a career stretching back to the days of Isaac Hull and Stephen Decatur, McCauley had long outlived his usefulness as an active seagoing officer. Now, in his declining years, little more than a symbol of naval tradition, he found himself suddenly enveloped in an “atmosphere of treason,” surrounded by younger officers who were largely secessionists and shaken by a series of anonymous threats which made violence appear imminent. McCauley, far more than Gideon Welles, felt the heed for caution—even to the point of inaction.
By early April, Secretary Welles believed he could wait no longer. Although building land defenses against the citizens of Norfolk would be open provocation, the careful removal of a warship might not unduly disturb the existing situation. Consequently, he decided to save the Merrimack, a vessel far more valuable than any other in the yard and a vital part of the small Union Navy.
The Merrimack, a forty-gun, screw-steam frigate, had been designed by John Lenthall and completed in 1854. A wooden-hulled vessel, primarily intended for cruising under sail, her relatively small and inefficient engines were at the moment dismantled and were being repaired