An Unusual Ship Captain: William Barker Cushing
My biggest and most long standing hobby seems to be analyzing people with unique mindsets which are alien to my own. Maybe it is part “what I can’t do or be” intrigues me. I, for example, have never been a water person. I don’t feel comfortable in or on water. Not to the point where I won’t ever ride in a boat or go into the water to swim, but water activities of any sort are definitely not in my preferred inclination. I have no idea why I never feel comfortable in, or on, water. To the best of my recollection no one ever encouraged me to fear water, nor did I ever have any unpleasant dramatic happenings in water.
Thus a navy captain back in the Civil War intrigues the hell out of me. I guess it is similar to how Terrell Owens rose to the top of his profession via a willpower and self focus so intense that there was no room in his life for anything, outside becoming one of the best wide receivers ever. With little natural talent he spent from high school to almost age 40 with nothing else in his focus, and that included other people. But this is an old story, albeit one which intrigued me, while to many others his extreme willpower and self focus were reduced to annoying selfishness and one man band celebrations.
This navy captain was William Barker Cushing. He was expelled from the Naval academy because “he had a talent for buffoonery”. I guess I have that in common. He did get back into the navy, and soon was recognized as a daring navy captain. In 1864 he led his men on what was called a suicide mission. He decided to blow up a Confederate ironclad by sailing full speed into a log boom, set up by the Confederates to slow any enemy ship to a crawl, so they could sink any union ship trapped in the boom with cannon fire. Having somehow gotten through the log boom he sailed within a few feet of the rebel ironclad as their gunners struggled frantically to lower it’s cannons low enough to sink Cushing’s ship. Standing calmly on his ship he lowered a star torpedo into the water and had to wait for the torpedo to drift under the ironclad. The first cannon fire from the ironclad missed his boat, and this enabled him to buy enough time to detonate the torpedo once it was under the ironclad. The ironclad was sunk in a matter of minutes. Wow.
His extreme and reckless courage, in my mind, were as extraordinary as the extreme willpower and self focus of a T.O. I am pretty sure, if I were a member of Cushing’s crew, that my number would have been added to the many AWOL’s in the Civil War. I can just picture me listening to this cockeyed game plan to sink an ironclad, and feeling a need to check on the welfare of my family back in a distant home. This would be similar if someone had suggested I join the Lewis and Clark expedition. Since no one had even the vaguest idea what was in that vast territory there would be no inclination on my part to personally find out. I think most of my heroes were/are extremely unique in some admirable aspect. Lincoln once said, “God must like common people, he made so many of them”. Maybe I will change my new favorite sign-off to an email from “With imperfect love” to:
Commonly yours,
