Meantime the Davis had captured the Mary Goodell, from New York to Buenos Ayres; but she was allowed to go after the prisoners were put on board, and five of her crew had shipped in the Davis. On the same day (July 9th) the Mary E. Thompson, of Searsport, was captured and sent in, after which the Davis went to the West Indies.
In all, nearly a dozen merchantmen were captured by the energetic captain, Louis M. Coxetter, of the Davis. He then returned, and while trying to enter St. Augustine, Florida, grounded, and the vessel was lost. Not all of his prizes ever reached home, and it was from the recaptured vessels that the men convicted of piracy were taken. It is said that the prizes sent in, however, netted over $200,000 in gold for the crew. Coxetter himself, like most of his class, became a blockade-runner after the blockade, and England’s refusal to permit the sale of Confederate prizes in her ports made privateering unprofitable—that is, say, after January 1, 1862.
Between July 19 and August 27, 1861, the privateer Dixie sent in three prizes. The Freely, another Charleston privateer, was also a successful boat. So was the York. The revenue cutter Aiken, which was converted into the privateer Petrel, at Charleston, was about the most unlucky of the fleet. She went chasing the frigate St. Lawrence soon after getting safely to sea, thinking the big man-o’-war was a merchantman. Certainly no men worse fitted for their task than the Petrel’s crew were ever sent to sea, for even when within short range they failed to recognize the warship. They fired three guns—the first two across the bows of the St. Lawrence to heave her to, and the last one at her. Then the St. Lawrence opened her ports and fired three guns at the privateer. An eight-inch shell and a thirty-two-pound solid shot struck her below the water-line, the shell bursting while right in the planks. The hole made was so large that the Petrel rolled to the swell and sank instantly, leaving her crew afloat in the water. Four men were drowned, and the rest were picked up by the St. Lawrence.
There were a number of other privateers from Charleston, but they neither accomplished nor suffered anything worth especial mention. In addition, there was a fleet of small schooners that had their headquarters in the Pamlico Sound. It is worth the reader’s time to take a look at the map of the enclosed waters along the coast south of the Chesapeake Bay; it is worth any traveller’s time to visit the region. A series of long, narrow islands, built of the débris of New England rocks, lie along there, enclosing the waters of Currituck, Albemarle, and Pamlico sounds. They are but narrow, and, for the most part, but barren stretches of sand. Here and there a shoal inlet cuts across this sand-bar—an inlet that is shifted to and fro, and deepened and shoaled by the wind-driven water of the sea, but always kept open somewhere by the outflow of the waters from the slope of land east of the Alleghany ridge. There are a few inlets that are never closed wholly, no matter how the set of the tide piles the sand into them, and of these the most important are known as Hatteras and Ocracoke inlets.
Destruction of the Privateer Petrel by the St. Lawrence.
From an engraving by Hinshelwood of the painting by Manzoni.
The Hatteras Inlet, which lies thirteen miles southwest of Cape Hatteras, is the most important. Here the water over the bar is, at high tide, usually fourteen feet deep; within is a safe anchorage for any ship that can pass in. But a mile inside the bar lies another, where the water is ordinarily but seven feet deep. Once across that, plenty of deep water is found, both north and south, and away inland to the ports whence came, in those days, the bounties of nature called naval stores. Hatteras is of small importance in these days, since railroads have been stretched along the coast, but the time was when not a small fleet of coasters used it regularly.
It was from among these vessels and their crews that the “Hatteras pirates” came in the first four or five months of the Civil War. They were, of course, lawfully commissioned private cruisers, but the records of their deeds have been lost, save, as it is known, that one bark, seven brigs, and eight schooners had been carried in there as prizes previous to August 28, 1861, and condemned and sold. The Transit, of New London; the Wm. S. Robins, and the J. W. Hewes were lying at Newbern alone, on the first of July, awaiting adjudication.
Then, too, it speedily became a haunt of blockade-runners seeking cotton as well as naval stores, and to dispose of manufactured goods from England.