Steel ship-building was then in its infancy, and the _Banshee_ was the first of a fleet that was soon to become famous. There were several similar steamers already in hand, and although no one could tell how they would behave when exposed to the great seas of the Atlantic, the best results were anticipated from the strength and lightness of their materials. They were expected to develop a buoyancy beyond everything that had yet been seen, and American naval officers awaited their arrival on the scene of activity with an interest as great as ours. The _Banshee_ was ready for sea early in 1863, and I had the satisfaction of finding myself steaming down the Mersey in the _first_ steel vessel that ever crossed the Atlantic. Like most first attempts, however, she was far from a success, and by the time we reached Queenstown she had betrayed serious defects. To begin with, the speed she developed was extremely disappointing. With the idea of protecting her boilers from shot, they had been constructed so low that they had not sufficient steam space, and, worse than this, the plates of which she was built, being only an 1/8 and 3/16 of an inch thick, she proved so weak that her decks leaked like a sieve. It was found absolutely necessary to put into Queenstown and make such alterations as were possible. Thus three more weeks were lost, and when at last we were able to put out again it was only to be driven back off the Fastnet by a south-westerly gale, which swept the _Banshee_ clean from stem to stern of everything on deck, filled her fore stoke-hole, and compelled us to return for fresh repairs. Considering how frail the vessel was, the wonder is, not that the _Banshee_ was driven back, but that she ever got across the Atlantic at all. Still her next start was successful, and reaching Madeira without adventure, excepting a close shave from being run down in the Bay of Biscay by a French barque, she began her real career as a blockade-runner. For even here danger began. At this time a great deal of bad blood was caused by the way in which the Northerners in their efforts to enforce a blockade were extending the doctrine of the operations permissible to belligerents. But there is no doubt now that they were perfectly right. True, the proposition that a belligerent might seize a neutral ship for attempted breach of blockade thousands of miles away from the blockaded coast was one that would have been condemned by the old school of International lawyers as nothing less than monstrous, and by none more energetically than the great publicists who have so richly adorned the American bench.