228 WHALING 



ward, the Sumter drew still nearer and discovered, to the relief 

 of all hands, that they were approaching a whaler, not a cruiser. 



She was the Eben Dodge, a ''clean ship," only twelve days 

 from New Bedford and bound for the Pacific Ocean. In spite 

 of the heavy seas, the Sumter took on board from her, water, 

 provisions, boots, flannel shirts, pea-jackets, small stores, and 

 the twenty-two men of her crew, set her on fire in the early 

 evening, and left her blazing in the seaway. ''The flames," 

 Semmes writes in his memoirs, "burned red and lurid in the 

 murky atmosphere, like some jack-o'-lantern; now appearing, 

 and now disappearing, as the doomed ship rose upon the top, 

 or descended into the abyss of the waves." 



The war had first seriously depleted the whaling fleets in 

 the autumn of 1861, while Semmes was at sea, when the Navy 

 Department bought a large number of old whaling vessels to 

 be loaded with stone and sunk in the channel leading to the 

 harbours of Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. 

 The scheme commended itself as a promising and economical 

 plan for blockading leading Southern ports — although an ear- 

 lier attempt to close the inlets to Pamlico and Albermarle 

 Sounds had amounted to little— for already Confederate 

 cruisers, threatening the whalers, had driven many vessels to 

 port, and the owners sold them for less than they were worth 

 rather than let them lie idle. 



Stripped of their whaling gear, which was sold at auction, 

 and delivered to the agents of the Government, the vessels 

 gathered in New Bedford harbour. Farmers, tearing down 

 their stone walls and stripping the boulders from their pas- 

 tures, loaded the stone into carts and drays, and driving it to 

 the waterfront, sold it for fifty cents a ton. Gangs of work- 

 men lightened the vessels, bored holes through the bottoms, 

 fitted plugs into the holes, and reloaded the vessels with stone. 



On November 20th, at six o'clock in the morning, the cap- 

 tains and pilots went on board the sixteen vessels that were 

 ready to sail, and with a crew of fourteen men in each vessel, 

 weighed anchor and put to sea. By eight o'clock, every vessel 

 was under way. Not until the next morning, when the cap- 



