Mohican, and Dacotah are mentioned as having been permitted to obtain coal within the prescribed period. The Sacramento is stated to have practised a ruse to evade the regulations. After coaling at Cork between July 28th and August 1st, 1864, she was allowed to receive 25 tons more at Plymouth on the 16th of August, and 30 tons more were sent to her from Dover by the United States Consul, in a vessel which left without clearance for the purpose. There are other cases of evasion of the regulations by United States ships mentioned in the British case, but the foregoing are sufficient, when contrasted with the privileges granted to Confederate ships, to utterly quash the charges, and discredit the complaints of excessive hospitalities' to Confederate cruisers and discourtesies to vessels-of-war of the United States,' which were so often and so petulantly made by Mr. Seward and his Consuls, and appear to have been recklessly repeated in the formal legal argument presented to the Tribunal of Arbitration.

6

It does not appear from the published documents attached to the proceedings at Geneva that the United States sent any ships in pursuit or in search of the Shenandoah. She was permitted to sail round the world, and destroy many American ships in a deliberate manner, and according to a fixed programme, and never saw a United States vessel-of-war. During the two years' cruise of the Alabama she was met by only two United States ships until she voluntarily went out of Cherbourg to engage the Kearsarge. One of the two was the Hatteras, which she sunk, and the other was the San Jacinto, too powerful a ship to engage, and from which she escaped by a ruse.

The Florida was compelled to remain at Brest from August, 1863, until February, 1864; and her presence

there was so well known that the United States ship Kearsarge was sent to watch her. The Kearsarge appeared off, or came into, Brest Roads, September 17th, October 30th, November 27th, December 11th and 27th, 1863, and January 3rd, 1864. At the last-named date the Florida was at anchor in the roadstead, to all appearance ready for sea; but for some reason the Kearsarge disappeared, and when she returned the Florida had sailed. The Florida's cruise after leaving Brest, her 'raid' to within thirty miles of the Capes of the Delaware, her subsequent run through the equatorial 'forks' of the great maritime roadway, and her arrival at Bahia, have been narrated in a previous chapter; but during all of this period of eight months she never saw a United States ship-of-war until she found the Wachusett lying idly at anchor in the last-named port. If the Wachusett had been in the right place, she would probably have met the Florida in the open sea, there would have been a fair fight, and the discreditable occurrence at Bahia would have been avoided.

It does appear extraordinary that, with the large naval force which the United States controlled during the war, a few Confederate ships should have been permitted to cruise through the two great oceans at will, and to destroy so many vessels just where any intelligent naval officer would know where to find them, and where it should have been known that the hostile cruisers would be sent. I have not been able to obtain all the returns of captured ships. The Florida's papers were nearly all lost, and some of the other ships did not send regular reports, and at the sudden termination of the war there were many other things to think of, and a precise record was not made. From the documents now in my possession, or which have been submitted to my inspection

in past years, it appears that the regular Confederate cruisers destroyed one hundred and seventy-five vessels ; and this number does not include the vessels captured and destroyed by Lieutenants-Commanding J. T. Wood and John Wilkinson in their short dashes out of Wilmington with the Tallahassee and Chickamanga.

But this was not the whole of the injury inflicted upon American commerce by the few Confederate cruisers. In the Case of the United States' presented to the Tribunal of Arbitration, some startling figures are given to illustrate the indirect damage. On p. 130 of the above-mentioned document it is stated that while in 1860 two-thirds of the commerce of New York were carried on in American bottoms, in 1863 three-fourths were carried on in foreign bottoms.' On the same page there is an account of the number and tonnage of American vessels which were registered in the United Kingdom and in British North America (namely, transferred to the British flag) to avoid capture, from which I extract the following:-'In 1861, vessels 126, tonnage 71,673; in 1862, vessels 135, tonnage 64,578; in 1863, vessels 348, tonnage 252,579; in 1864, vessels 106, tonnage 92,052.'

I can conscientiously affirm that this destruction of private property, and diversion of legitimate commerce, was painful to those whose duty it was to direct and to inflict it. But the United States have always practised that mode of harassing an enemy; and Mr. Bolles says, in his article in reference to the proposed trial of Admiral Semmes, that they would do so again under like circumstances. It is greatly to be regretted that when the United States wrung the Treaty of Washington from Great Britain in 1871, and brought her Majesty's Government before a great International Court of Arbi

tration, the proposition to exempt private property from destruction at sea in future wars was not discussed and definitely determined. Unfortunately, that treaty and the important conclave of eminent statesmen and jurists at Geneva have settled nothing in respect to international law that has any binding force upon any Power except Great Britain and the United States, and upon them only for the specific purposes of the treaty, because her Majesty's Government not only agreed to be judged by rules manufactured for the occasion, and not applicable to neutral duties as commonly understood, but her Majesty's Ministers weakened, if they did not wholly destroy, their case in advance by imprudent speeches in public, and by indiscreet admissions, as well as by a strange and unstatesmanlike vacillation that gave their adversary in the case an advantage which was manifest to all who were interested in the proceedings and followed them with attention.

The career and fate of the Shenandoah after her surrender to the United States may be of some interest, although the former was not lustrous, and the latter was merely the lot common to many stately craft, whether historic or commonplace. Shortly after the surrender, Captain Freeman was ordered to take the ship to New York. It was winter, and the fierce westerly gales seemed unwilling to permit the transfer of the ex-Confederate craft to her late enemies without a rough protest. Captain Freeman appears to have made an earnest effort to fulfil his instructions. He fought against head winds and seas for some time, but finally returned with the ship to Liverpool, having lost some of the upper spars and the greater portion of the sails.

The Shenandoah was then put up for sale, and was

finally bought for the Sultan of Zanzibar. She was fitted out with some show of luxury as to cabin fittings, and it was rumoured that she was to be used as a yacht, but, whether she proved to be too large and too expensive for the convenience of the Sultan and the resources of the Zanzibar exchequer or not, she was soon set again to the peaceful occupation for which she was originally built, and carried many a cargo of 'ivory, gum, coral, and coal' for his sable majesty, and weathered the blasts of many monsoons, until at last, in 1879, fourteen years after she struck the Confederate flag, the teak planks were torn from her bottom by a rough scrape on a coral reef, and her iron ribs were left to rust and crumble on a melancholy island in the Indian Ocean.*

One of the difficulties attending the enterprise for which the Shenandoah (or Sea King) was bought, arose from the necessity of providing a tender for her, which of course involved a large additional outlay, at a time when other necessities were pressing, and the financial agents were not over-well provided with funds. When it was determined to undertake the enterprise, prompt action was absolutely necessary to insure success, and all that could be done to secure an economical expenditure was to buy a good vessel for a tender that could be used as a blockade-runner, or would be likely to fetch something approximate to the cost afterwards.

These expectations were happily fulfilled by the Laurel. Lieutenant Ramsay carried out his instructions with intelligence and energy. After parting company with the Shenandoah off Madeira, he proceeded to Teneriffe, and landed there Captain Corbett and the

* An interesting leader appeared in the Daily Telegraph (London) on her career and final shipwreck at the time of her loss.