S68 ISLES OF SUMMER. 



and sailing vessels, built for speed, were constantly arriving and 

 departing. King Cotton was enthroned at Kassau and upon 

 Hog Island. The cotton famine districts of England, and the 

 destitute armies of the South, alike looked to Nassau for mate- 

 rial assistance. Brave, daring and dashing men in gray were the 

 lions of the day, and were courted and feted by the high digni- 

 taries of Church and State in this miniature seat of royal and 

 sacerdotal pomp and power. Fortunes Avere rapidly made, and 

 the Bahama treasury overflowed with gold, which came in rich 

 streams from its custom house. All the Bahama negroes who 

 had anything to sell were made happy. The crumbs from the 

 Confederate tables that dropped uj^on Capt. Sampson and his 

 fellow boatmen, are vividly remembered to this day, and it is 

 very amusing to hear Sampson, in his graphic way, while his 

 yacht is bounding over the billows, describe the golden but now 

 departed days of Nassau during the war. The Bahama govern- 

 ment was soon enabled to wipe out its debt of £47,786 (over 

 S238,000). The Eoyal Victoria Hotel, for the erection of which 

 the Bahama legislature made an appropriation in the year 1859 

 of only £6,000, that valetudinarians might be suitably accommo- 

 dated in Nassau, was elaboi-ately and expensively finished in 

 the early part of our late war, at a total cost of over 8100,000, 

 and the Nassau people were in consequence enabled to sumptu- 

 ously entertain their Southern friends — the daring and dashing 

 wearers of the gray. Gov. Eawson states in his olEEcial report 

 accompanying the Blue Book of the Colony for the year 1864, 

 that the hotel cost " up to the close of 1864, £19,804." As the 

 appropriation for the hotel in 1859, was only £6,000 it is proba- 

 ble that the tide of wealth Avhich in consequence of our war, 

 filled to overflowing the coffers of the colonial treasury, led to 

 the erection of a more elaborate and expensive building, that the 

 Confederates and blockade runners might be suitably entertained. 



