d the fleet
to carry on this impossible campaign.

Farragut did his best. Within a month of passing the forts he had
not only captured New Orleans and repaired the many serious damages
suffered by his fleet but had captured Baton Rouge, and taken even
his biggest ships to Vicksburg, five hundred miles from the Gulf,
against a continuous current, and right through the heart of a
hostile land. Finding that there were thirty thousand Confederates
in, near, or within a day of Vicksburg he and General Thomas Williams
agreed that nothing could be done with the fifteen hundred troops
which formed the only landing party. Sickness and casualties had
reduced the ships' companies; so there were not even a few seamen
to spare as reinforcements for these fifteen hundred soldiers, whom
Butler had sent, under Williams, with the fleet. Then Farragut
turned back, his stores running dangerously short owing to the
enormous difficulties of keeping open his long, precarious line of
communications. "I arrived in New Orleans with five or six days'
provisions and one anchor, and am now trying to procure others....
Fighting is nothing to the evils of the river--getting on shore,
running foul of one another, losing anchors, etc." In a confidential
letter home he is still more outspoken. "They will keep us in this
river till the vessels break down and all the little reputation
we have made has evaporated. The Government appears to think that
we can do anything. They expect me to navigate the Mississippi
nine hundred miles in the face of batteries, ironclad rams, etc.;
and yet with all the ironclad vessels they have North they could
not get to Norfolk or Richmond."

Back from Washington came still more urgent orders to join the
Mississippi flotilla which was coming down to Vicksburg from the
north under Flag Officer Charles H. Davis. So once more the fleet
worked its laboriously wasteful way up to Vicksburg, where it passed
the forts with the help of Porter's flotilla of mortar-boats on
the twenty-eighth of June and joined Davis on the first of July.
There, in useless danger, the joint forces lay till the fifteenth,
the day on which Grant's own "most anxious period of the war" began
on the Memphis-Corinth line, four hundred miles above.

Farragut, getting very anxious about the shoaling of the water,
was then preparing to run down when he heard firing in the Yazoo,
a tributary that joined the Mississippi four miles higher up. This
came from a