[Illustration: _Eads ironclads under construction at the Carondelet shipyards near St. Louis. The _Cairo_, although not built here, would have looked much the same at this stage._ National Archives] Some men and some ships seem fated for bad luck. It was the Union ironclad _Cairo’s_ fate to have as her second and last captain a man who, although a hard worker, was a repeated slave to misfortune. Three of the vessels on which he served, their names all beginning with the letter C, went to the bottom in the order named—the _Cumberland_, the _Cairo_, and the _Conestoga_—no matter if he was credited with gallantry and exonerated of blame by some of his superiors. Thomas O. Selfridge, Jr., son of the commandant of the Navy Yard at Mare Island, Calif., was a member of seafaring family. He was dedicated and ambitious, but, as fate would have it, he served mostly on doomed vessels and was unable to get along with his men. Perhaps his fellow seamen had reason to be displeased with him, for he seemed always to flirt with disaster, barely escaping further serious mishap early in the war while experimenting with the crude submarine _Alligator_ on a trial run from the Washington Navy Yard. So bad was his luck that the _Cairo’s_ career ended just 3 months to the day after Selfridge first stepped aboard her. The _Cairo_ was one of the weapons designed by the North to wrest the lower Mississippi River away from the South, a move decided on early in the war as part of a program of vigorous action needed to bring victory. One of those who expounded the strategy was James B. Eads of St. Louis, Mo., who had retired at 37 after making a fortune salvaging wrecked craft on the Western rivers. An engineer known to every riverman on the Mississippi, he had had long experience at the business of designing and building boats. Soon after the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861, Eads was called to Washington to present his recommendations at a Cabinet meeting. His strategy seemed simple: seize control of the lower Mississippi, the main channel through which flowed the South’s food supplies, and leave open as avenues of commerce in the Mississippi basin only the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and the railroads from Louisville to Nashville and Chattanooga—all of which could be easily controlled. The result, as he saw it, would be starvation for the Confederates in less than 6 months. To carry out his plan, he urged the North to build a fleet of river gunboats, an inland navy.