The work of strengthening the blockade was carried on with great energy. By building and purchasing every available steam vessel in the country which could carry a gun, there were by December, 1864, 559 steam vessels in the service, carrying 3,760 guns and about 51,000 men. Fortunately there had been enough freedom from prejudice to accept the plans of Ericsson for building the _Monitor_, which appeared in the very nick of time, to save our wooden fleet from total destruction in Hampton Roads by the _Virginia_, so much better known under her original name of the _Merrimac_, which had been one of the frigates so ignominiously sunk at Norfolk on the surrender of that yard, raised, and with immense energy converted by the Confederates into a formidable ironclad. The story of the _Monitor’s_ battle, on March 9, 1862, under Worden; his almost fatal wounding; and the continuance of the fight to victory by Dana Greene, her young first lieutenant, a mere boy, is among the stories which will last forever.[50] Hatteras inlet had been taken and occupied on August 28, 1861; Port Royal on November 7th. There was one man at least, David D. Porter, yet only a lieutenant at the age of forty-nine, who, when blockading, July, 1861, the passes of the river in the _Powhatan_, saw the importance and feasibility of occupying the Mississippi. Porter, north again in November, brought the subject before the Navy Department, and urged as commander of the expedition his adopted brother, Farragut, senior to Porter in age by thirteen years, and far his superior in rank. Farragut had left Norfolk declaring, it is reported, at a meeting of Southern naval officers, some of whom were bound to him by his marriage to a Norfolk wife: “Gentlemen, I would see every man of you damned before I would raise my arm against the flag.”[51] The expression is not exactly in consonance with Farragut’s calm and restrained nature, but it fits so well with his later one from the shrouds of the _Hartford_ in Mobile Bay, that it may be taken as true. In any case, Farragut left Norfolk on April 18th, with his wife and son, Loyall. He found Baltimore, on his arrival there in the Bay Line steamer, in possession of the mob which had attacked the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment passing through that morning, April 19th. He went to Hastings-on-the-Hudson and awaited orders.