Wilmington is thirty-four miles from the sea, and the river for that distance is a calm, broad estuary.  At this time the resources of Rebel engineering were exhausted in defense against its passage by a hostile fleet, and undoubtedly the best work of the kind in the Southern Confederacy was done upon it.  At its mouth were Forts Fisher and Caswell, the strongest sea coast forts in the Confederacy.  Fort Caswell was an old United States fort, much enlarged and strengthened.  Fort Fisher was a new work, begun immediately after the beginning of the war, and labored at incessantly until captured.  Behind these every one of the thirty-four miles to Wilmington was covered with the fire of the best guns the English arsenals could produce, mounted on forts built at every advantageous spot.  Lines of piles running out into the water, forced incoming vessels to wind back and forth across the stream under the point-blank range of massive Armstrong rifles.  As if this were not sufficient, the channel was thickly studded with torpedoes that would explode at the touch of the keel of a passing vessel.  These abundant precautions, and the telegram from General Lee, found in Fort Fisher, stating that unless that stronghold and Fort Caswell were held he could not hold Richmond, give some idea of the importance of the place to the Rebels.

We passed groups of hundreds of sailors fishing for torpedos, and saw many of these dangerous monsters, which they had hauled up out of the water.  We caught up with the “Thorn,” when about half way to the sea, passed her, to our great delight, and soon left a gap between us of nearly half-a-mile.  We ran through an opening in the piling, holding up close to the left side, and she apparently followed our course exactly.  Suddenly there was a dull roar; a column of water, bearing with it fragments of timbers, planking and human bodies, rose up through one side of the vessel, and, as it fell, she lurched forward and sank.  She had struck a torpedo.  I never learned the number lost, but it must have been very great.

Some little time after this happened we approached Fort Anderson, the most powerful of the works between Wilmington and the forts at the mouth of the sea.  It was built on the ruins of the little Town of Brunswick, destroyed by Cornwallis during the Revolutionary War.  We saw a monitor lying near it, and sought good positions to view this specimen of the redoubtable ironclads of which we had heard and read so much.  It looked precisely as it did in pictures, as black, as grim, and as uncompromising as the impregnable floating fortress which had brought the “Merrimac” to terms.

But as we approached closely we noticed a limpness about the smoke stack that seemed very inconsistent with the customary rigidity of cylindrical iron.  Then the escape pipe seemed scarcely able to maintain itself upright.  A few minutes later we discovered that our terrible Cyclops of the sea was a flimsy humbug, a theatrical imitation, made by stretching blackened canvas over a wooden frame.