On the morning of the 8th of May we came in sight of a long, low line of sand banks, dotted with curious hillocks, between which the black muzzles of heavy guns could be made out, and fringed with a perfect naval _chevaux-de-frise_ of wrecked blockade runners, whose broken hulls and protruding machinery gave an ill-omened look to the whole coast. As we were closely studying the bleak aspect of this entrance to the great smuggling _entrepôt_ of the Southern Confederacy, the glasses began to reveal an unexpected activity along the line of the guns, which our signal shot for a pilot by no means diminished. Our ship drew too much water to cross the bar, excepting at high tide, and we were, consequently, compelled to go over in the Captain’s gig to the pilot boat—a proceeding that the rough sea made very difficult and even dangerous. Leaving those who could not venture the transhipment, to roll wearily among the breakers till evening, we headed straight through the narrow and difficult channel for Fort Fisher, and learned that we had been mistaken for the Rebel pirate “Stonewall,” and that the guns had been shotted ready to open fire the moment we should show signs of a disposition to run in.[5] Ah! that weary day at Fort Fisher! To see a fort is naturally supposed to be not the most formidable of undertakings; but to see Fort Fisher means a ride of miles over the bleakest of sand bars; means the climbing of great heaps of sand, under the hottest of suns; means a scrambling over irregular chasms and precipices of sand, where the explosions have destroyed at once every semblance of fortification and every foot of solid earth—means all this, prolonged for hours, under the penalty of the consciousness that otherwise you would be pretending to see Fort Fisher, when you were doing nothing of the sort. We began by climbing Battery Buchanan, near the landing, and inside the main line of works. Trenches, embrasures, casemate and barbette guns, bomb-proofs, gabions, riflemen’s pits, all in sand that no rifle projectiles could breach, and bombardment could only render stronger, seemed to assure absolute impregnability to this work alone, except against regular siege operations. Yet it was but protection for one flank of the long line before which Weitzel turned back, and which no soldiers but ours would ever have stormed. To this battery (so called, although a perfect and very strong fort in itself) the Rebels made their last retreat, after that long, hand-to-hand fight through the sea front of the fort, which stretched far into the night, and seemed doubtful to the last. But Battery Buchanan, though impregnable, as a flank to the sea line, is itself commanded by the last work of that sea line; and so when the Mound Battery fell into our hands, its guns had only to be turned, and Buchanan fell almost without a struggle.