In Europe, both military critics and Chambers of Commerce protested against this barbarous method of making good a blockade; but the stone-laden whale-ships sunk at Charleston did no permanent damage to the port, for before the war closed, the hulks broke up, and the harbour was filled with floating timber. But it was quickly felt that only an adequate fleet could render the blockade effective, and in response to the ceaseless activity of the dockyards, the northern war-ships multiplied with marvellous rapidity. The blockade grew strict. Gradually, the pressure of diminished imports began to tell on the resources of the Southern States; iron, liquors, machinery, articles of domestic use, medicinal drugs and appliances of all kinds became scarce. In Richmond, a yard of ordinary calico which was formerly sold for twelve and a half cents, brought thirty dollars; a pair of French gloves was worth one hundred and fifty dollars; and the price of salt had risen to a dollar a pound. The export trade, too, was being slowly strangled; immense stores of cotton and tobacco lay waiting shipment at every port. A bale of cotton worth forty dollars at Charleston would have brought two hundred at New York; and some idea of the price it might have yielded at Liverpool may be obtained from a consideration of the fact that half a million of English cotton-workers were subsisting only upon charity. But the war sent trade into new channels. Nassau, the capital of New Providence, one of the Bahamas group, became one huge depôt for the goods which sought a market in the forbidden ports. Articles of household economy and of field equipment lay piled in heterogeneous masses on her wharfs, the cotton which had escaped the grasp of the Federals lay in her warehouses for reshipment to Europe; her coal-stores overflowed with the mineral which was to feed the greedy furnaces of the blockade-runners lying at anchor in the bay, and the patois of every seafaring people in Europe could be daily heard upon her quays. Hardly less numerous and varied were the groups of sailors, merchants, adventurers, and spies, who discussed the fortunes of the war upon the white-glancing terraces of Hamilton in the Bermudas.