Notwithstanding the increasing effectiveness of the blockade and the serious reverses which followed Chancellorsville to Appomattox, a buoyant optimism as to the ultimate triumph of the Southern cause prevailed among the blockade runners; and it was not until the failure of Wilkinson in the Chameleon, and Maffitt in the Owl, to enter Charleston, which was captured after the fall of Wilmington, that hope gave place to despair, for then, to quote Captain Wilkinson, "As we turned away from the land, our hearts sank within us, while the conviction forced itself upon us that the cause for which so much blood had been shed, so many miseries bravely endured, and so many sacrifices cheerfully made, was about to perish at last."
James Sprunt.
Wilmington, N.C., January 1, 1920.
MARINE WANDERERS.
Years before the beginning of the Great War I took passage from New York for Liverpool in one of the most beautiful examples of marine architecture of that era. When we were about a thousand miles from Queenstown, our port of call, we sighted a vessel in distress, dismasted and water-logged, crowded as we thought with passengers. Our course was changed to carry us nearer the vessel, when we perceived that what we thought were human beings on deck were the bare ribs of a barque from St. John's, New Brunswick, loaded with timber, and that the dynamic force of the sea had broken away the vessel's bulwarks, leaving the frame standing, which resembled a crowd of men. A derelict abandoned upon the wide ocean, staggering like a drunken man on the heaving bosom of the sea, a menace to every vessel upon the great highway of commerce, this mass of unwieldy timber was a greater danger in the darkness than any other peril of the ocean.
To my surprise and indignation our captain turned away from the wreck without attempting its destruction by dynamite as he was in duty bound to compass. We were one of the famous flyers of that day and could not afford, he said, to reduce our record of speed by any delay.
Three months after this incident I was returning homeward on the same steamer, and when we were at least 2,000 miles from Queenstown I sighted, through a powerful binocular, a wreck ahead, and as we approached nearer I said to the first officer, "That is the derelict we passed three months ago." He laughed at the idea of such a thing. "Why," said he, "she is thousands of miles away in another current if she is still afloat." But my observation was correct. We ran close to the same vessel that we had seen three months before. What destruction of life and property she had wrought meantime, no one could tell, and we again disgraced the service by leaving her untouched.
The meaning of a derelict in law is a thing voluntarily abandoned or willfully cast away by its proper owner; especially a ship abandoned at sea.