For many years the summer visitors on Wrightsville Beach have looked
out upon the hurrying swell of the broad Atlantic and have felt the
fascination of the long lines of crested breakers like Neptune's
racers charging and reforming for the never-ending fray; and, when the
unresting tide receded, they have seen the battered hulks of some of
the most beautiful ships that ever shaped a course for Wilmington in
the days of the Southern Confederacy. They represented an epoch that
is unique in our country's history, for, in the modern art of war the
conditions which then prevailed can never occur again.
Some of these wrecks may be visible for a hundred years to come, and,
as nearly every one who knew these vessels and of their last voyage has
passed away, I have thought it might interest some of our people, and
perhaps future generations, to know something of these ships, which I
still remember distinctly and with whose officers I was more or less
familiar. So that I have noted from memory and from official records
of the Four Years' War, the tragedies which involved the destruction of
these fine vessels between Topsail Inlet and Lockwood's Folly. These
will comprise about thirty ships, nearly all of the steamers that were
stranded on our coast during the war while running for the Cape Fear
Bar under a heavy bombardment by the Federal cruisers.
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.