Infernal Machine
LIKE THE MISTS THAT ROSE AT DAWN, the rumors began drifting down the Roanoke River in the summer of 1863, alarming the Yankees occupying the dingy river port of Plymouth, N.C. Somewhere upstream, hidden by the juniper and cypress bogs that surrounded this valuable Union supply depot at the entrance to Albemarle Sound, the Confederates were apparently building something dangerous—something that could challenge the Union flotilla anchored in the Roanoke as well as threaten the 3,000 bluecoats defending Plymouth. What the rumors didn’t specify was that a 19-year-old engineer-inventor, the unknown Gilbert Elliott, was the one constructing this infernal machine—to be christened CSS Albemarle—in a makeshift shipyard in the middle of a fallow cornfield on Peter Smith’s Edwards Ferry plantation.
Even though the sea was, to
