faragut wrote. after a few second of confusion, the crew want to fire stations and began playing hoses on the burping ship. the quick thinking signal officer, the same man who had talked faragut down from the rigging, rolled three shells to the side of the deck, uncapped them and pushed them over the side into the blazing raft, blowing it into fragments. the hoses finally doused the fire on the hartford, the engineers applied all power to back the ship off the mud and she proceeded on up river. after treating some wounded men below, the hartford surgeon came back on deck again. where, as he wrote in his journal, i saw a big river steamboat come strauight for us. her decks were black with armed men who evidently hoped to board our ship. the forecast gun, manned by marines, immediately planted a shell in the advancing steamboat, he wrote. it must have gone straight to her boiler, the magazine, for there was a terrific explosion and the entire vessel with her swarming human freight disappeared. the mos