betrayed by the Mexican of¤cers and ruthlessly slaughtered but that each
American soldier fought doggedly until death. Unmentioned in the poem
is the presence of American women and children at the base, for whom
General Santa Anna provided safe conduct.^50 The American contingent
was actually made up of 412 untrained young men, commanded by brevet-
Captain James W. Fannon Jr.—the heroic “colonel” of Whitman’s poem.
Fannon was, in fact, a Georgia adventurer who had run sea blockades to
smuggle slaves from Cuba and had traded slaves in Texas. The sequence
of misadventures leading up to the massacre, says Clarence Wharton, the
historian of the battle, would be altogether comic if it were not so tragic.^51
Whitman lingers over the deaths of the young white Americans at the
hands of a dark-skinned enemy, their bodies burned on a “First-day
morning”—a Quaker term that invests the American dead with an aura
of martyrdom. As he would do a decade later in some of the Drum-Taps
poems, he singles out a representative dying soldier—this one a seventeen-
year-old who has supposedly bloodied three of the foe in the general
slaughter—as a prototype of all the martyred soldiers who, by their sac-
ri¤ce, are said to have gained immortality.^52
Sections 35 and 36 are a breathtaking reconstruction—again based on
secondary sources—of the 1779 battle off Fishborough Head between the
British frigate Serapis and the smaller American frigate Bonhomme Richard.
Once again the poet concentrates not on the battle itself but on its ter-
rible aftermath.^53 His grandmother’s father, Captain John Williams, had,
in fact, served under Admiral John Paul Jones, the hero of the battle in
Whitman’s (generally accurate) account. Section 35 focuses lovingly on
“my little captain,” the intrepid Scottish naval genius John Paul Jones—
“no tougher or truer.” The persona assumes the role of an (unseen) ob-
server who watches the British warship Serapis close with the American
frigate Bonhomme Richard until the two ships touch side to side. The
Bonhomme Richard receives devastating artillery ¤re to its decks and its
artillery pieces, and many of its crew are killed. Whitman illuminates the
scene by the ®ames of the burning ships and the light of the full moon
and the “mournful stars,” the celestial luminaries seeming to sympathize
with the victims of the horrid slaughter taking place on the sea below
them. The contrast between the horrors of battle and the patriotic sacri-
¤ce for liberty is dramatized in olfactory terms as well, by juxtaposing the
stench of rotting bodies with the sweet fragrances wafted from the sea-
shore. Against this background, the passage focuses on the idealized
58 / “Triumphal Drums for the Dead”