CHAPTER LIX.

MOBILE.

ABOVE the forts the merchant fleet lies at anchor, twentyfive miles from Mobile, the shallowness of the bay preventing at all times vessels drawing more than ten feet of water from going up to the city. The extensive gulf coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, presents not a single first-class harbor. The first you meet with is that of Pensacola.

Steamers were plying between the ships and the city, receiving and delivering cargoes. We met or passed them as we kept on our course. Blueish lines of forests enclosed the Bay. Four miles below the city we came in sight of the Rebel defences. On our right were the bastion and extensive fortifications of Spanish Fort, commanding Minetta Bay and several miles of the coast of Mobile Bay. This work, originally built by De Soto more than three centuries ago, was finally invested by our fleet and land forces on the day of the fall of Richmond. It surrendered on the ninth of April, and on the eleventh Mobile was evacuated. The water approaches to this fort, and to the other defences of the city, were strewn with torpedoes, by which four or five vessels of our fleet were blown up.

We passed a line of obstructions, consisting of piles and sunken wrecks thrown across the channel; and Mobile, a smoking, sunlit city, lay before us on the low shore. By the direct channel it was less than three miles distant; but, in order to reach it, we were compelled to ascend Spanish River to the Mobile River, and descend that stream, a circuit of over twenty miles. It was four o'clock when we reached the wharf.

Mobile is a level, shady town, regularly laid out, and built on a dry, sandy plain. It is the principal city of Ala

THE TERRIBLE EXPLOSION AT MOBILE. 421

bama, and the second city in importance in the Gulf States; its commerce ranking next to that of New Orleans. For several years before the war its annual exports of cotton were between six and seven hundred thousand bales. It endured a four years' blockade, falling into Federal hands only at the latter end of the war.

But its great catastrophe did not occur until some time after the termination of hostilities. It would seem as if the genius of Destruction was determined to strike a final blow at the city. The explosion of the lately captured Confederate ammunition was one of the most terrible disasters of the kind ever known. It was stored in a large three-story warehouse one street back from the river. The last of Dick Taylor's shells were going in, when, it is supposed, one of them accidentally ignited. Twenty brick blocks, and portions of other blocks, were instantly blown to atoms. Four or five hundred persons were killed, it was never known how many. A black volcanic cloud of smoke and fragments went up into the sky: "It was big as a mountain," said one. It was succeeded by a fearful conflagration sweeping over the field of ruins. Ten thousand bales of cotton were burned. The loss of property was so immense that nobody ventured to estimate it.

In the vicinity of the explosion, citizens were thrown off their feet, chimneys knocked down, and windows and doors demolished. Lights of glass were broken all over the city, a mile or more from the scene of the explosion.

"I was lifted from the ground, and my hat thrown off," said one. "Then I looked up, and there were great black blocks of something in the air, high as I could see, and shells exploding."

Said another: "I was riding out a mile and a half from the city. I heard a sound, and at the same time my head and shoulders were thrown forward on my horse's neck, as if I had dodged. That's the first time I've dodged a cannon,' I said, 'and that's after the war is over.' I looked around, and saw the strangest cloud going up slowly over the city. Then I knew it was the shock that had thrown me down."

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The town had neither the means nor the material to rebuild: "We made no bricks during the war." I found the scene of the disaster a vast field of ruins. Where had stood the warehouse in which the ammunition was stored, there was a pit twenty feet deep, half filled with water, and surrounded by fragments of iron and bricks, and unexploded shells. A large brick block, containing a cotton-press, which stood between the magazine and the river, had entirely disappeared. "The bricks were all blown into the water, and we never saw them any more."

Business was brisk.

"There are more goods on Dauphin Street to-day," an old merchant told me, “than I have ever before seen in the whole of Mobile." And the captain of the Mobile steamer, who took me up the Alabama to Selma, said: "There was never such a trade on this river before. Nobody ever expected such a freight on this boat: her guards are all under water." Her upward-bound lading consisted mostly of supplies for plantations and provincial stores, - barrels of Western flour and whiskey that had come down the Mississippi, and boxes of fine liquors, soap, starch, and case goods, from the North Atlantic ports. Her downward freight was chiefly cotton.