Many millions were lost with the destruction of these blockade runners, and possibly valuable metal might be recovered now, in the present high prices for all war supplies. The average cost of one of the blockade runners was $150,000 in gold. They were mostly built of thick iron, which does not corrode like steel in salt water.
The cargoes comprised perishable and imperishable goods, and they were often as valuable as the vessels which carried them. When these ships were stranded so high upon the beach that neither Federals nor Confederates could salve them, the guns from both sides were used to destroy them, so that neither could profit by a rescue. The bombshells set some of the ships on fire, but none were totally destroyed, because the breakers extinguished the fires when the superstructure was burned away, so it is very probable that some of them still contain cargoes of value.
For more than fifty years these melancholy tokens of distress have settled in the shifting sands. "Together," said Mr. George Davis, Attorney-General of the Confederacy, "they stand for warning and for woe; and together they catch the long majestic roll of the Atlantic as it sweeps through a thousand miles of grandeur and power from the Arctic toward the Gulf. It is the playground of billows and tempests, the kingdom of silence and awe, disturbed by no sound save the seagull's shriek and the breakers' roar."
It might be interesting to add later an account of the ships that were captured at sea, numbering over a hundred during the four years of the Cape Fear blockade, and to attempt, at the request of my friend, Professor deRoulhac Hamilton, of the University of North Carolina, a short history of this remarkable traffic (through the beleaguered city of Wilmington) which almost wholly sustained the Confederate States commissariat during the last two years of the war.
The "Fannie and Jennie."
The Fannie and Jennie was a side-wheel Confederate steamer of note, engaged in running the blockade for about a year during the Four Years' War. She was of good speed, fourteen knots, and was commanded, it is said, by Captain Coxetter, of Charleston. During the night of February 9, 1864, she made the land to the northward of Wrightsville Beach, but her pilot, Burriss, was not sure of his position, so he anchored the ship and made a landing in the surf to ascertain his bearings. It having been the intention of the captain to make the land about two miles north of Fort Fisher, he then proceeded down the beach in the darkness. Unhappily, however, she stood too close in shore, and grounded repeatedly, and at about midnight stranded on a shoal a mile or two to the southward of where Lumina now stands. At daylight she was discovered by the Federal cruiser Florida, commanded by Capt. Peirce Crosby, who made me a prisoner of war a few months later. Captain Crosby, desiring to save the Fannie and Jennie and realize big prize money, ran a hawser from his ship to the stranded vessel, intending to pull her off into deep water, when a Confederate flying battery of Whitworth guns of long range, from Fort Fisher, opened fire from Masonboro Beach, and with great precision cut off one of the Florida's paddle-wheel arms, broke a second one, and cut a rim of the wheel in two; also, one of the Confederate shells exploded on board the Florida and came near destroying her. The Florida returned the fire, which so alarmed the captain and crew of the Fannie and Jennie that some of them attempted to reach the beach in boats. In this attempt Captain Coxetter and his purser were drowned in the breakers, the others gaining the shore; the rest of the crew, twenty-five in number, who remained on board were made prisoners by the Federals. Captain Coxetter had in his keeping a very valuable gold jewelled sword, which was to be delivered to Gen. R.E. Lee as an expression of the admiration of many prominent English sympathizers. It is still on board this wreck, which lies near a line of breakers to the south of Lumina. The Fannie and Jennie was loaded with a valuable cargo, five days out from Nassau bound to Wilmington, when she was stranded.
The "Emily of London."
During the month of January, 1864, while my ship was in St. George, Bermuda, loading for Wilmington, I met frequently an attractive young Virginian named Selden, of the Confederate Signal Service, who had been detailed as signal officer on the fine new steamer Emily of London; and I became most favorably impressed with this courteous Christian gentleman and with the superior qualities of his beautiful vessel. All of her appointments were first-class, and her equipment was superior to that of any other blockade runner of the fleet. As she lies now in sight of my cottage on Wrightsville Beach, visible at every turn of the tide, I often wonder what became of Selden, for I never learned his fate after the stranding and loss of his fine ship a mile or so above the wreck of the Fannie and Jennie, on the same night, February 9, 1864.
The only particulars of the stranding of the Emily are embodied in the official report of her discovery on the beach by Captain Crosby, of the Federal cruiser Florida, who found her ashore between Masonboro Inlet and Wrightsville Beach after her captain and crew had abandoned her. She was then set on fire by bombshells from the cruiser Florida, a loud explosion on board of the wrecked vessel indicating that her cargo was probably partly composed of explosives for the Confederacy.