The next step taken by the President was to declare all the Southern ports in a state of blockade, in order that the seceding States might be starved out. The coast-line was some 3,000 miles in length, and the whole fleet of the United States did not reach 150 ships, of which many were unseaworthy. But the energy of the North increased this fleet to nearly 700 vessels. Thus any attempt to run in through the blockading squadron was very dangerous.
A royal proclamation in England admonished all loyal subjects to respect the Federal blockade; but the high profits to be made tempted many Liverpool firms to adventure their argosies. A ship taken while running the blockade is treated as an enemy, and if she resists she is treated as a pirate.
During the first year of the war many captures were made, and stories came to England of hairbreadth escapes which set many young men longing to join in the exciting game.
I remember a man coming to Oxford when I was an undergraduate with a letter of introduction from a friend. He was running into Charleston, and had brought from that port a store of watches and jewellery, which he persuaded us to take in exchange for a quantity of discarded clothing. The lady’s gold watch which I got is, I hear, still going strong, and belies the suspicion with which I took it. At this time there were no mills, and almost no manufactories in the Southern States, so that they soon began to feel the want of clothes, buttons, boots, socks, medicines, and chemicals. Nassau, a little island in the Bahamas, was the chief base for the steamers that were running the blockade. It is about 560 miles from Charleston and 640 from Wilmington.
The Bahama group afforded neutral water to within fifty miles of the American coast, but it required a very fast vessel to succeed in evading the chain of cruisers which soon patrolled the coast. These fast vessels were being built in England and elsewhere. Let us follow the fortunes of one of them—the Banshee.
She arrived safely across the Atlantic and put into Nassau. There she was stripped for the work that lay before her. Everything aloft was taken down, and nothing was left standing but the two lower masts, with cross-trees for a look-out man. The ship was painted a dull white, and the crew wore a grey uniform. As the success of a blockade-runner depends much on her speed, the qualities of the engineer are important.
The Banshee possessed a model chief engineer in Mr. Erskine, a man cool in danger and full of resource. In her pilot, Tom Burroughs, she had a man who knew the waters thoroughly, and was a genius in smelling out a blockader on the darkest night. A good pilot received about £800 for the trip there and back, for there was some risk in the service, and if they were captured they went to prison. The pay of the seamen was from £50 to £60 for the trip. So the Banshee stole out of Nassau Harbour on a dark night, laden with arms, gunpowder, boots, and clothing, on her way to Wilmington.
Wilmington lies to the north of Charleston, some sixteen miles up the Cape Fear River. Off the mouth of this river lies Smith’s Island, which divides the approach to the port into two widely different channels.
Fort Fisher, placed at the northern point, obliged the blockaders to lie far out, beyond the range of the guns. Further out still was a cordon of cruisers, and outside these were gunboats always on the move; so that it required speed and a good look-out to elude the three lines of blockaders. They crept as noiselessly as possible along the shores of the Bahamas, and ran on safely for the first two days out, though as often as they saw a sail on the horizon they had to turn the Banshee’s stern to it till it vanished. The look-out man had a dollar for every sail he sighted, and was fined five dollars if it were seen first from the deck. On the third day they found they had only just time to run under cover of Fort Fisher before dawn, and they tried to do it.
“Now the real excitement began,” says Mr. Taylor, who was in charge of the cargo, “and nothing I have ever experienced can compare with it. Hunting, pig-sticking, big-game shooting, polo—all have their thrilling moments, but none can approach ‘running a blockade.’ Consider the dangers to be encountered, after three days of constant anxiety and little sleep, in threading our way through a swarm of blockaders, and the accuracy required to hit in the nick of time the mouth of a river only half a mile wide, without lights, and with a coast-line so low that as a rule the first intimation we had of its nearness was the dim white line of the surf.”