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 twenty two 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 three hundred or four hundred 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 shiphouse of the Navy Yard which had witnessed her baptism. In the year 1858 she was summoned from her retirement to officiate as flagship 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 flagship, 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 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 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 from part of the Virginia divisions 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 vivandière 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.
The veteran sailor’s sad story demands deep sympathy. I, however, cannot help enjoying at least the variety of hearing a little of the altera pars. It is now nearly six weeks since I entered “Dixie’s Land,” during which period I must confess I have had a sufficiency of the music and drums, the cavaliering and the roystering of the Southern gallants. As an impartial observer. I may say I find less bitterness and denunciation, but quite as dogged a resolution upon the Roundhead side. Some experience, or at least observation of the gunpowder argument, has taught us that attack is always a more grateful office than defence, and, if we are to judge of the sturdy resolution of the inmates of Fort Pickens by the looks of the officers and crews of the fleet, Fort Pickens will fall no easy prize, if at all.
After some conversation with Captain Adams, and the ready hospitality of his cabin, he said finally he would take on himself to permit me and the party to land at the Navy Yard and to visit the enemy’s quarters, relying on my character as a neutral and a subject of Great Britain that no improper advantage would be taken of the permission. In giving that leave he was, he said, well aware that he was laying himself open to attack, but he acted on his own judgment and responsibility. We must, however, hoist a flag of truce, as he had been informed by General Bragg that he considered the intimation he had received from the fleet of the blockade of the port was a declaration of war, and that he would fire on any vessel from the fleet which approached his command. I bade good-by to Captain Adams with sincere regret, and if—but I may not utter the wish here. Our barge was waiting to take us to the Oriental, in which we sailed pleasantly away down to the Powhatan to inform Captain Porter I had received permission to go on shore. Another officer was in his cabin when I entered—Captain Poore, of the Brooklyn—and he seemed a little surprised when he heard that Captain Adams had given leave to all to go on shore. “What, all these editors of Southern newspapers who are with you, Sir?” I assured him they were nothing of the kind, and after a few kind words I made my adieu, and went on board the Diana with my companions.
Hoisting one of our two table-cloths to the masthead as a flag of truce, we dropped slowly with the tide through the channel that runs parallel to one face of Fort Pickens. The wind favored us but little, and the falling breeze enabled all on board to inspect deliberately the seemingly artistic preparations for the threatened attack which frowns and bristles from three miles of forts and batteries arrayed around the slight indenture opposite. Heavy sand-bag traverses protect the corners of the parapet, and seem solid enough to defy the heavy batteries ensconced in earthworks around the Lighthouse, which to an outside glance seems the most formidable point of an attack, directed as it is against the weaker flank of the fort at its most vulnerable angle.
A few soldiers and officers upon the rampart appeared to be inhaling the freshening breeze which arose to waft the schooner across the channel, and enable her to coast the mainshore, so that all could take note of the necklace of bastions, earthworks, and columbiads with which General Bragg hopes to throttle his adversary. We passed by Barrancas, the nearest point of attack (a mile and a quarter), the Commander-in-Chief’s head-quarters, the barracks, and the hospital successively, and as the vessel approached the landing-pier of the Navy Yard one could hear the bustle of the military and the hammers of the artificers, and descry the crimson and blue trappings of Zouaves, recalling Crimean reminiscences. A train of heavy tumbrils, drawn by three or four pairs of mules, was the first indication of a transport system in the army of the Confederate States, and the high-bred chargers mounted by the escorts of these ammunition wagons corroborated the accounts of the wealth and breeding of its volunteer cavalry. The Diana now skirted the Navy Yard, the neat dwellings of which, and the profusion of orange and fig groves in which they are embosomed, have an aspect of tropical shade and repose, much at variance with the stern preparations before us. Our skipper let go his anchor at a respectful distance from the quay, evincing a regard for martial law that contrasted strangely with the impatience of control elsewhere manifested throughout this land, and almost inspiring the belief that no other rule can ever restore the lost bump of veneration to American craniology.
While the master of the Diana was skulling his leaky punt ashore to convey my letters of introduction to the Commander-in-chief, I had leisure to survey the long, narrow, low sand belt of the island opposite, which loses itself in the distance, and disappears in the ocean forty-seven miles from Fort Pickens. It is so nearly level with the sea that I could make out the main-yards of the Sabine and the Brooklyn, anchored outside the island within range of the Navy Yard, which is destined to receive immediate attention whenever the attack shall begin. Pursuing my reflections upon the morale of the upper and nether millstones between which the Diana is moored, I am sadly puzzled by the anomalous ethics or metaphysics of this singular war, the preparations for which vary so essentially—it were sin to say ludicrously—from all ancient and modern belligerent usages. Here we have an important fortress, threatened with siege for the last sixty days, suffering the assailants of the flag it defends to amass battery upon battery, and string the whole coast of low hills opposite with every variety of apparatus for its own devastation, without throwing a timely shell to prevent their establishment.
War has been virtually declared, since letters of marque and a corresponding blockade admit of no other interpretation, and yet but last week two Mobile steamers, laden with £50,000 worth of provisions for the beleaguering camp, were stopped by the blockading fleet, and, though not permitted to enter this harbor, were allowed to return to Mobile untouched, the commander thinking it quite punishment enough for the Rebels to thus compel them to return to Mobile, and carry up the Alabama River to Montgomery this mass of eatables, which would have to be dispatched thence by rail to this place! Such practical jokes lend a tinge of innocence to the premonitories of this strife which will hardly survive the first bloodshed.
The skipper returned from shore with an orderly, who brought the needful permission to haul the Diana alongside the wharf, where I landed, and was conducted by an aide of the Quartermaster-General through the shady streets of this graceful little village, which covers an inclosure of three hundred acres, and, with the adjoining forts, cost the United States over £6,000,000 sterling, which may have something to do with the President’s determination to hold a property under so heavy an hypothecation. Irish landlords, with encumbered estates, have no such simple mode of obtaining an acquittal.