THE CIVIL WAR 229 



tains opened sealed orders, did they know that their rendezvous 

 was Savannah. From the Savannah River, when the first 

 vessel to arrive had lain there a week, they were ordered to Port 

 Royal, where Captain Rodney French of the Garland, whom 

 they had elected Commodore — to their vast amusement he was 

 the last to arrive — joined them on December 11th. 



The sixteen waited at Port Royal for twenty more and on 

 December 17th, the fleet put to sea and stood for Charleston. 

 They placed sixteen vessels in the channel, stripped them of 

 their sails and running gear, cut away the masts and rigging, 

 knocked out the plugs, and let them sink. The remaining 

 vessels the Government took away again, and later sold. 



As a means of blocking the channel, the whalers were of 

 little use. They soon sank in the mud, and the seas broke them 

 up. It was not long before the blockade runners were again 

 entering Charleston; and the Navy Department abandoned its 

 plan to sink another ''stone fleet" in the mouth of Savannah 

 harbour. 



Within two weeks of the day when the stone fleet was sunk 

 in the channel at Charleston Semmes took his first whaler. In 

 April, 1862, with the ensigns of various Northern merchant- 

 men dated and stowed away in a locker as trophies of his months 

 at sea, Semmes left the Sumter crippled and blockaded in the 

 neutral port of Gibraltar, and on August 13th, he sailed from 

 Liverpool with his officers in the British steamer Bahama, 

 bound for Porto Proya, to join a vessel built by the Lairds of 

 Birkenhead, and until then called (she was the two hundred 

 and ninetieth vessel they had built), by the noncommittal 

 numeral 290. She was a ten-knot or eleven-knot vessel, barque- 

 rigged, gracefully modelled, and equipped with steam as well 

 as sail, and with a propeller that her men could detach and 

 hoist up into a well lest it drag when the engines were not used. 

 Sailing on her trial trip with guests on board, she sent back 

 her guests in a small boat and remained at sea, thus escaping 

 legal complications, and the delay that they would have in- 

 volved, had our minister to England succeeded in bringing 

 into court the question of her legal status. 



