268 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
and sailing vessels, built for speed, were constantly arriving and 
departing. King Cotton was enthroned at Nassau 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 were 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 upon 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 
$238,000). The Royal 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 elaborately and expensively finished in 
the early part of our late war, at a total cost of over $100,000, 
and the Nassau people were in consequence enabled to sumptu- 
ously entertain their Southern friends—the daring and dashing 
wearers of the gray. Gov. Rawson states in his official 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 which 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. 
