At three o’clock the order to charge was given, and we started for our long run of 1200 yards over the loose sand. The fleet kept up a hot fire until we approached within about 600 yards of the fort, and then ceased firing. The rebels seemed to understand our signals, and almost before the last gun was fired manned the parapet and opened up on us with twenty-six hundred muskets.
Such were the recollections of then-Ensign Robley Evans of his charge on Fort Fisher during the Civil War. He had come ashore as part of a naval brigade that had been sent from Union ships to attack the fort from one direction as the Union Army was assaulting it from another. However, the timing was off, and the Army had not yet begun its attack, leaving the Southern defenders of the fort to concentrate their fire on the sailors.
Already struck in the chest by a glancing round, Evans continued to lead his men into the shower of bullets.
I was aware that one particular sharpshooter was shooting at me, and when we were a hundred yards away, he hit me in the left leg, about three inches below the knee. The force of the blow was so great that I landed on my face in the sand.
Binding the wound with one of the half dozen silk handkerchiefs he had brought for the purpose, Evans resumed the charge until “my sharpshooter friend sent a bullet through my right knee.” Weakened by loss of blood and unable to stand, the young ensign struggled to slow the bleeding with another of his handkerchiefs while the sharpshooter, now only 35 yards away, “continued to shoot at me, at the same time addressing me in forcible but uncomplimentary language.”
Another shot took off one of Evans’ toes. “For some reason . . . this shot made me unreasonably angry, and . . . I addressed a few brief remarks to him . . . and I fired, aiming at his breast.” Evans’ revolver shot struck “the poor chap in the throat and passing out the back of his neck.”
After lying on the sand beneath the parapet of the fort for hours, Ensign Evans was eventually rescued. He was evacuated to the naval hospital in Norfolk, where he was told both legs had to be amputated. When the doctor came to take him into surgery, Evans reached beneath his pillow, pulling out his revolver, and said, “If you come one step nearer this bed, I will kill you!” Such was the beginning of the naval career of Robley Dunglison Evans—who became known as “Fighting Bob Evans.”
His armed threat to the Norfolk doctors had “brought matters to a crisis at once, and in a few minutes the surgeon in charge came in very angry and full of threats. But the result was that they left my legs on.” For the rest of his life, Evans walked with a limp and was known—behind his back—as “Old Gimpy.”
His subsequent career was a colorful one that included sea assignments in the western Pacific, the Mediterranean, and the North and South Atlantic. Evans commanded the steel-hulled, twin-screw gunboat Yorktown during the so-called Baltimore Crisis in 1891 that nearly led to war between Chile and the United States—a matter widely covered by the press, which gave Evans much positive coverage.
Seven years later, Evans again saw combat, this time during the Spanish-American War, when he commanded the battleship Iowa, which fired the first shot at the Battle of Santiago and assisted in the destruction of three of the four Spanish cruisers that were part of that engagement. Capturing the commander of the Spanish fleet, Evans magnanimously refused to accept the Spanish captain’s sword in surrender. Evans allowed him to share his quarters while the Spanish commander was recovering from his wounds. He did accept a sword from his crew, presented with the words, “It is an assurance from us that you are more than a hero to a nation—you are a hero to your men.” Evans valued that “beautiful sword above all my earthly possessions.”
There is a certain irony that today, with so much information available through radio, television, and the internet, few Americans are aware of their Navy, but in these earlier days—with none of those purveyors of information available—“Fighting Bob Evans” was practically a household name. His image appeared on souvenir buttons and on postal cache covers. Evans’ memoir, A Sailor’s Log, was read by many, and the American press sustained an image of swashbuckling pugnacity that was reinforced by his rugged good looks. Near the end of Evans’ service, journalist James Creelman interviewed him on board the battleship Iowa and wrote:
There was something of the human battleship in that grim, brown, square-jawed countenance, with its stern gray eyes and fighting chin. The very slant of the head and the set of the squat, strong figure connected itself with the massive guns thrust out from the ponderous steel turrets behind him, and the steady oak deck beneath him.
When Evans died in 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed, “Even the American Navy, fertile though it has been in gallant fighting men, has never had any man who more thoroughly and joyously welcomed a fight.”
