officers
and men who manned the cruisers I can, as a nautical man, truly and
honestly give the credit of having most zealously performed their hard
and wearisome duty. It was not their fault that I did not visit New York
at the Government's expense; but the old story that 'blockades, to be
legal, must be efficient,' is a tale for bygone days. So long as
batteries at the entrance of the port blockaded keep ships at a
respectable distance, the blockade will be broken.

A practical suggestion that my experience during the time I was a
witness of the war in America would lead me to make is, that, both for
the purposes of war and of blockade, speed is the most important object
to attain. Towards the end of that contest, blockade-running became
much more difficult, in fact, was very nearly put a stop to, not by the
ports becoming more effectually closed to traffic, but by the sea being
literally covered with very fast vessels, who picked up many
blockade-runners at sea during the daytime, especially when they had
their heavy cargoes of cotton on board. The Americans are also perfectly
alive to the fact that, for purposes of war, speed is all important. An
American officer of rank once remarked to me: 'Give me a fifteen-knot
wooden vessel armed with four heavy guns of long range, and I'll laugh
at your lumbering iron-clads.' Perhaps he had prize-money in view when
he said so; or, what is still more important, he may have felt how
easily such vessels as those he proposed would sweep the seas of foreign
privateers. In these views I can but think he was right and far-seeing.
Time will show.

It may have struck my readers as strange that, in a country with so
large an inland boundary, the necessaries of life and munitions of war
could not have been introduced into the Southern States by their
extensive frontiers: but it is only a just tribute to the wonderful
energy shown by the Northern Americans during the civil war, to state
that the blockade by land was as rigid as that enforced by their fleets;
and almost as much risk was run by persons who broke the land blockade
as by those who evaded the vigilance of the cruisers at sea. The courses
of the large inland rivers were protected by gun-boats, and on account
of the rapids and other impediments, such as snags, with which they were
filled, the fords or passes for boats were few and far between, and thus
easily guarded; besides which, it was always a difficult matter to avoid
th