The year 1864 was to bring the Civil War well toward a close. The blockade had become one of extreme rigor; the region west of the Mississippi had been entirely cut off, and the whole South was now reduced to a poverty of arms, equipment, food, clothing, and medical supplies, the want of all of which was gradually reducing its armies to a state of inanition. Before the end of the war every port had been closed, Wilmington, in North Carolina, being the last. Between November, 1861, and March, 1864, eighty-four different steamers were running between Nassau and Confederate ports, of which thirty-seven were captured and twenty-four wrecked or otherwise destroyed.[53] These vessels were built in Great Britain especially for the service, were laden with British cargoes, and used the British Bahamas and Bermudas as ports of call and supply. Nassau bloomed into one of the greatest and most active ports of the world. In addition to the remarkable episode of Red River already mentioned, which resulted in saving Porter’s fleet, the last year of the war was to include some of its most important and striking events: the appearance in April of the powerful ironclad _Albemarle_; her career, and her final destruction by a torpedo through the heroic bravery of Lieutenant Cushing on the night of October 27-28; the fight of the _Kearsarge_ and _Alabama_ on June 19th; the battle of Mobile Bay on August 5th; the appearance of the ironclad _Stonewall_ and the bombardments of Fort Fisher at the end of December and in the beginning of the new year. The destruction of the _Alabama_ on a Sunday morning off Cherbourg brought to an end the career of a ship built in England and manned by an English crew, which for more than two years had sunk or burned our merchantmen. Her captain escaped being taken, as the English yacht _Deerhound_, which had accompanied the _Alabama_ out of the harbor to the point seven miles out where the _Kearsarge_ awaited her, took him aboard before he could be reached by the boats from the _Kearsarge_. That this aid, if it should be necessary, was prearranged, is shown by the statement of Winslow of the _Kearsarge_, that the _Deerhound_ had received aboard Captain Semmes’s valuables the night before. It was a notable victory and went far to set aright the British mind, so susceptible to “success.” Mobile, which so soon followed, was the crown of Farragut’s career, and fixes his place as the greatest of naval commanders. His daring, his consummate decision, his perfect self-reliance in situations such as never before fell to an admiral to face, and his thorough command of such, justify every praise. And in character--simplicity, kindliness, and uprightness, and in every quality which we are apt to assign to the best breeding of the sea--he was among the very first. Of but one other, so far as I have known men, can so much be said--Sampson his successor of thirty-three years after.