Many millions were lost with the destruction of these blockade runners, and possibly valuable metal might be recovered now, in the present high prices for all war supplies. The average cost of one of the blockade runners was $150,000 in gold. They were mostly built of thick iron, which does not corrode like steel in salt water. The cargoes comprised perishable and imperishable goods, and they were often as valuable as the vessels which carried them. When these ships were stranded so high upon the beach that neither Federals nor Confederates could salve them, the guns from both sides were used to destroy them, so that neither could profit by a rescue. The bombshells set some of the ships on fire, but none were totally destroyed, because the breakers extinguished the fires when the superstructure was burned away, so it is very probable that some of them still contain cargoes of value. For more than fifty years these melancholy tokens of distress have settled in the shifting sands. "Together," said Mr. George Davis, Attorney-General of the Confederacy, "they stand for warning and for woe; and together they catch the long majestic roll of the Atlantic as it sweeps through a thousand miles of grandeur and power from the Arctic toward the Gulf. It is the playground of billows and tempests, the kingdom of silence and awe, disturbed by no sound save the seagull's shriek and the breakers' roar." It might be interesting to add later an account of the ships that were captured at sea, numbering over a hundred during the four years of the Cape Fear blockade, and to attempt, at the request of my friend, Professor deRoulhac Hamilton, of the University of North Carolina, a short history of this remarkable traffic (through the beleaguered city of Wilmington) which almost wholly sustained the Confederate States commissariat during the last two years of the war. The "Fannie and Jennie."