The shore is as flat as a pancake—a belt of white sand, covered with drift-logs and timber, and with a pine forest; not a home or human habitation of any sort to be seen for forty miles, from Fort Morgan to the entrance of the harbor of Pensacola; cheerless, miserable, full of swamps, the haunts of alligators, cranes, snakes, and pelicans; with lagoons, such as the Perdida, swelling into inland seas; deep buried in pine woods, and known only to wild creatures, and to the old filibusters—swarming with mosquitos. As the Diana rushed along within a quarter of a mile of this grim shore, great fish flew off from the shallows, and once a shining gleam flashed along the waters, and winged its way alongside the little craft—a monster shark, which ploughed through the sea pari passu for some hundred yards leeward at the craft, and distinctly visible in the wonderful phosphorescence around it, and then dashed away with a trail of light seaward, on some errand of voracity, with tremendous force and vigor. The wretched Spaniards who came to this ill-named Florida, must often have cursed their stars. How rejoiced were they when the government of the United States relieved them from their dominion! Once during the night some lights were seen on shore, as if from a camp-fire. The skipper proposed to load an old iron carronade and blaze away at them, and one of the party actually got out his revolver to fire, but I objected very strongly to these valorous proceedings, and suggesting that they might be friends who were there, and that, friends or foes, they were sure to return our fire, succeeded in calming the martial ardor on board the Diana. The fires were very probably made by some of the horsemen lately sent out by General Bragg to patrol the coast, but the skipper said that in all his life-long experience he had never seen a human creature or a light on that shore before. The wind was so favorable, and the Diana so fast, that she would have run into the midst of the United States squadron off Fort Pickens had she pursued her course. Therefore, when she was within about ten miles of the station she hove to, and lay off and on for about two hours. Before dawn the sails were filled, and off she went once more, bowling along merrily, till with the first blush of day there came in sight Fort M’Rae, Fort Pickens, and the masts of the squadron, just rising above the blended horizon of low shore and sea. The former, which is on the western shore of the mainland, is in the hands of the Confederate troops. The latter is just opposite to it, on the extremity of the sand-bank, called Santa Rosa Island, which, for forty-five miles runs in a belt parallel to the shore of Florida, at a distance varying from one and a quarter to four miles. To make smooth water of it, the schooner made several tacks shoreward. In the second of these tacks the subtle entrance of Perdida Creek is pointed out, which, after several serpentine and re-entering undulations of channel, one of which is only separated from the sea for a mile or more by a thin wall of sand-bank, widens to meet the discharge of a tolerably spacious inland lake. The Perdida is the dividing line between the states of Alabama and Florida.
The flagstaff of Fort M’Rae soon became visible, and in fainter outline beyond it that of Fort Pickens, and the hulls of the fleet, in which one can make out three war-steamers, a frigate, and a sloop-of-war, and then the sharpset canvas of a schooner, the police craft of this beat, bearing down upon us. The skipper, with some uneasiness, announces the small schooner that is sailing in the wind’s eye as the “Oriental,” and confesses to having already been challenged and warned off by her sentinel master. We promised him immunity for the past and safety for the future, and, easing off the main sheet, he lays the Diana on her course for the fleet.
Fort M’Rae, one of the obsolete school of fastnesses, rounds up on our left. Beyond it, on the shore, is Barrancas, a square-faced work, half a mile further up the channel, and more immediately facing Fort Pickens. A thick wood crowns the low shore, which trends away to the eastward, but amid the sand the glass can trace the outlines of the batteries. Pretty-looking detached houses line the beach; some loftier edifices gather close up to the shelter of a tall chimney which is vomiting out clouds of smoke, and a few masts and spars checker the white fronts of the large buildings and sheds, which, with a big shears, indicate the position of the navy-yard of Warrington, commonly called that of Pensacola, although the place of that name lies several miles higher up the creek. Fort M’Rae seems to have sunk at the foundations; the crowns of many of the casemates are cracked, and the water-face is poor looking. Fort Pickens, on the contrary, is a solid, substantial-looking work, and reminds one something of Fort Paul at Sebastopol, as seen from the sea, except that it has only one tier of casemates, and is not so high.
As the Oriental approaches, the Diana throws her foresail aback, and the pretty little craft, with a full-sized United States ensign flying, and the muzzle of a brass howitzer peeping over her forecastle, ranges up luff, and taking an easy sweep lies to alongside us. A boat is lowered from her and is soon alongside, steered by an officer; her crew are armed to the teeth with pistols and cutlasses. “Ah, I think I have seen you before. What schooner is this?” “The Diana, from Mobile.” The officer steps on deck, and announces himself as Mr. Brown, master in the United States navy, in charge of the boarding vessel Oriental. The crew secure their boat and step up after him. The skipper, looking very sulky, hands his papers to the officer. “Now, sir, make sail, and lie to under the quarter of that steamer, the guardship Powhatan.”
Mr. Brown was exceedingly courteous when he heard who the party were. The Mobilians, however, looked as black as thunder; nor were they at all better pleased when they heard the skipper ask if he did not know there was a strict blockade of the port. The Powhatan is a paddle steamer of 2,200 tuns and ten guns, and is known to our service as the flag-ship of Commodore Tatnall, in Chinese waters, when that gallant veteran gave us timely and kindly proof of the truth of his well-known expression, “Blood is thicker than water.” Upon her spar-deck there is a stout, healthy-looking crew, which seems quite able to attend to her armament of ten heavy ten-inch Dahlgren columbiads, and the formidable eleven-inches of the same family on the forecastle. Her commander, Captain Porter, though only a lieutenant commanding, has seen an age of active service, both in the navy and in the merchant steam marine service, to which he was detailed for six or seven years after the discovery of California. The party were ushered into the cabin, and Captain Porter received them with perfect courtesy, heard our names and object, and then entered into general conversation, in which the Mobilians, thawed by his sailorly frankness, gradually joined, as well as they could. Over and over again I must acknowledge the exceeding politeness and civility with which your correspondent has been received by the authorities on both sides in this unhappy war.
Though but little beyond the age of forty, Captain Porter has been long enough in the navy to have imbibed some of those prejudices which by the profane are stigmatized as fogyisms. Until the day previous he had, he told me, felt disposed to condemn rifled cannon of a small calibre as “gimcracks,” but had been rapidly converted to the “Armstrong faith” by the following experiment. He was making target practice with his heavy gun at a distance of some 2,600 yards. At any thing like a moderate elevation the experiment was unsatisfactory, and while his gunners were essaying to harmonize cause and effect, the charge and the elevation, he bethought him of a little rifled brass plaything which Captain Dahlgren had sent on board a day or two before his departure. To his astonishment the ball, after careering until he thought “it would never stop going,” struck the water 1,000 yards beyond the target, and established a reputation he had never believed possible for a howitzer of six-pound calibre carrying a twelve-pound bolt. He observed that the ancient walls of Fort M’Rae would not resist this new missile for half an hour.
If it comes to fighting you will hear more of the Powhatan and Captain Porter. He has been repeatedly in the harbor and along the enemy’s works at night in his boat, and knows their position thoroughly, and he showed me on his chart the various spots marked off whence he can sweep their works and do them immense mischief. “The Powhatan is old, and if she sinks I can’t help it.” She is all ready for action; boarding nettings triced up, field-pieces and howitzers prepared against night boarding, and the whole of her bows padded internally, with dead wood and sails, so as to prevent her main deck being raked as she stands stern on toward the forts. Her crew are as fine a set of men as I have seen of late days on board a man-of-war. They are healthy, well fed, regularly paid, and can be relied on to do their duty to a man. As far as I could judge, the impression of the officers was, that General Bragg would not be rash enough to expose himself to the heavy chastisement which, in their belief, awaits him if he is rash enough to open fire upon Fort Pickens. As Captain Porter is not the senior officer of the fleet, he signaled to the flag-ship, and was desired to send us on board.
One more prize has been made this morning—a little schooner with a crew of Italians and laden with vegetables. This master, a Roman of Civita Vecchia, pretends to be in great trouble, in order to squeeze a good price out of the captain for his “tutti fruti e cosi diversi.” The officers assured me that all the statements made by the coasting skippers when they return to port from the squadron, are lies from beginning to end.
A ten-oared barge carried the party to the United States frigate Sabine, on board of which Flag-Captain Adams hoists his pennant. On our way we had a fair view of the Brooklyn, whose armament of 22 heavy guns is said to be the most formidable battery in the American navy. Her anti-type, the Sabine, an old-fashioned fifty-gun frigate, as rare an object upon modern seas as an old post-coach is upon modern roads, is reached at last. As one treads her decks, the eyes, accustomed for so many weeks to the outlandish uniforms of brave but undisciplined Southern volunteers, feel en pays de connaissance, when they rest upon the solid mass of 300 or 400 quid-rolling, sunburnt, and resolute-looking blue-shirted tars, to whom a three years’ cruise has imparted a family aspect which makes them almost as hard to distinguish apart as so many Chinamen.
A believer in the serpent-symbol might feel almost tempted to regard the log of the Sabine as comprising the Alpha and the Omega of, at least, the last half-century of the American republic. Her keel was laid shortly after our last war with Brother Jonathan, and so long as the temple of Janus remained closed—her size having rendered her unfit to participate in what is called the Mexican war—she remained in the ship-house of the navy-yard which had witnessed her baptism. In the year 1858 she was summoned from her retirement to officiate as flag-ship of the “Paraguay expedition,” and, after having conveyed the American commissioner to Montevideo, whence he proceeded with a flotilla of steamers and sloops-of-war up to Corrientes, and thence in the temporary flag-ship, the steamer Fulton, to Assumpcion, she brought him back to New York in May, 1859, and was then dispatched to complete her cruise as part of the home squadron in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. During the concluding months of her cruise the political complications of the North and South burst into the present rupture, and the day before our visit one of her lieutenants, a North Carolinian, had left her to espouse, as nearly all the Southern officers of both army and navy have done, the cause of his native state. Captain Adams is in a still more painful predicament. During his eventful voyage, which commenced with a six days’ experience in the terrible Bermuda cyclone of November, 1858, he had been a stranger to the bitter sectional animosities engendered by the last election; and had recently joined the blockade of this port, where he finds a son enlisted in the ranks of the C. S. A., and learns that two others form part of the Virginia division of Mr. Jefferson Davis’s forces. Born in Pennsylvania, he married in Louisiana, where he has a plantation and the remainder of his family, and he smiles grimly as one of our companions brings him the playful message from his daughter, who has been elected vivandiere of a New Orleans regiment, “that she trusts he may be starved while blockading the South, and that she intends to push on to Washington and get a lock of Old Abe’s hair”—a Sioux lady would have said his scalp.