On the 27th of April 1861, President Lincoln issued a proclamation in which the following announcement appeared: ‘A competent force will be posted so as to prevent the entrance and exit of vessels from the ports’ of the Southern States. ‘If, therefore, with a view to violate such blockade, any vessel shall attempt to leave any of said ports, she will be duly warned; and if she shall again attempt to enter or leave a blockaded port, she will be captured.’ All Europe was prepared to watch and to deride this attempt to lock up a coast-line of thirty-five hundred miles against the intrusion of traders, whose appetite for gain would be whetted to the keenest by artificially raised prices. Already, indeed, the scheme had been ridiculed as a ‘material impossibility’ by European statesmen, who pointed to the fact that not one of all the blockades established during the preceding seventy-five years had succeeded in excluding trade even where the coast to be watched was comparatively limited. But as a set-off against the long and broken stretch of coast which lay open to the operations of the blockade-runners, there were difficulties in their way which were at the outset of the struggle too lightly esteemed. Almost the whole extent of the seaboard was protected by a treacherous fringe of long low islands, scarcely rising above the surface of the water; the channels between and behind these were winding and intricate; and when these obstacles were passed, there still remained the crucial bar to imperil the entrance to every harbour. The conditions of the impending conflict were new, and sagacious men foresaw that under them the risk of neutral powers being entangled in disputes with the belligerents was immensely increased. The agency of steam was to be employed for the first time to enforce a blockade on a gigantic scale. It was plain that a blockading squadron was no longer liable to be blown off the port it was watching by continued gales; but it was not so easy to say how far this new motive-power would alter the chances of the blockade-runners. The naval strength of the Northern States was at the beginning of the war so puny that the blockade when first instituted was little better than one of those ‘paper blockades’ which the voice of international law had condemned at Paris seven years before; for many months, indeed, the trade of the Confederacy with Europe was but little affected. It was in view of this that the _New York Tribune_ urged Lincoln’s government to economise their sea-force, and close entrance channels by means of sunken hulks. This plan was adopted at Charleston, and carried out under the superintendence of an officer whose aim was ‘to establish a combination of artificial interruptions and irregularities resembling on a small scale those of Hell-gate,’ that rock which so long impeded the navigation to New York harbour, and which was removed only a few months ago.