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By Root 6598 0

English volunteer George Henry Herbert learned that the “Zou-Zous”—as members of the 9th New York Infantry (Hawkins’s Zouaves) were affectionately called—were going to evacuate from Hatteras Inlet. Despite the monotony of drilling and digging at Camp Wool, Herbert had never felt so content with his life. “Since I wrote to you I have received my promotion. I am now 2nd Lieutenant,” he informed his mother. He promised to send a photograph of himself in his new officer’s uniform in his next letter in case it was his last. “Our boys here are in high glee, we are going to leave Hatteras in a day or two,” he explained. “We are part of an expedition under the command of General Burnside. It consists of somewhere about an hundred vessels of all sorts, containing a land force of as near as I can learn, about 10,000 men of all arms. Its destination is unknown. The rumour is New Orleans. I fervently hope so.”21

The rumors were unfounded. Thirteen thousand men were leaving Cape Hatteras, heading up the North Carolina sounds to the mysterious Roanoke Island, a forlorn stretch of grass and swamp between the mainland and the Outer Banks. Its first inhabitants, Sir Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated colonists, had survived in the New World for less than four years before they mysteriously disappeared. Three hundred years later the island seemed as untamed as ever. Its chief importance was strategic: whoever owned Roanoke held the key to Richmond’s back door.22

General Ambrose Burnside (whose name and prodigious whiskers inspired the word “sideburns”) had convinced General McClellan that he could lead a combined amphibious force in light-draft and flat-bottomed boats that would have no trouble navigating the shallow waters of Roanoke Sound. The Confederate garrison guarding Roanoke was small and unlikely to withstand a sustained assault. Burnside was so confident that he gave permission for journalists to accompany the expedition. William Howard Russell heard the news from his sickbed in a hotel in New York. The journalist had been worn down by the unrelenting campaign of abuse against him: “There is a sort of weakness and languor over me that I never experienced before,” he told Delane. Frank Vizetelly would go and report for both of them.23

Ill.15 USS Picket leading the ships of the Burnside expedition over the Hatteras Bar in North Carolina, by Frank Vizetelly.

Vizetelly, so deep in debt that even Russell would no longer lend him money, was overjoyed at the prospect of escaping Washington. He joined Burnside’s flotilla on January 10 with nothing else except a small bag containing a change of clothes and his pencils. “Woe is me!” he wrote after several days of crashing seas and hurricane winds. One night, a thunderous wave hit the boat with such force that he was catapulted from his bed against the cabin door, which burst open, depositing him with a thud in eight inches of briny water. He decided this would be his first and last amphibious expedition.24

The first phase of the attack was easily accomplished and the southern half of Roanoke Island was captured on February 7 without Herbert or his friends firing a shot. “Day broke cold, damp, and miserable,” Vizetelly wrote on the eighth. “After a drink of water and a biscuit for each man, the Federal force prepared to advance into the interior.”25 Cannon fire alerted Herbert that it would soon be his regiment’s turn to leave the makeshift camp. “Near the centre of the island it is very narrow and at the narrowest point a battery was erected,” he explained to his mother. “The road is in fact nothing but a cow path through fine woods and a thick growth of underbrush.”26 The men had to march along the track two by two in order to allow room for the stretcher bearers carrying the wounded back to the ships. “I remember after that,” commented a private in the regiment, “a sort of sickening sensation as if I was going to a slaughter-house to be butchered.”27

“At last we came in front of the battery,” wrote Herbert. The order came to charge and they plunged into the knee-deep swamp that surrounded