The last of the expeditions of the navy in the Civil War, and the greatest in the number and force of the ships and men, was that sent to capture Fort Fisher, guarding the entrance to Cape Fear River, on which Wilmington, North Carolina, stands. The preparations for this expedition began in the fall of 1864, and one cannot help wondering that no determined effort was made to capture the port early in the war, for, because of its situation and the peculiar nature of the entrances to the mouth of the river, it was the favorite resort of the blockade-runners, and therefore the chief source from which the Confederates drew their foreign supplies. “From it Lee’s army in front of Richmond was kept supplied, and the great Confederate commander had plainly informed Colonel Lamb, the officer in charge of Fort Fisher, that the Confederates must fall back from before Richmond, through inability to procure food, if the port was lost.” [Illustration: The Entrance to Cape Fear River, Showing Fort Fisher. _From “The Navy in the Civil War.”_] Fort Fisher was planned early in the war, and no fort built by the Confederates received greater care. A look at the chart will show that a long arm of land comes down from the north between the river and the sea--an arm that at last is split like the claw of a lobster into two fingers. One, very fat, and extending in toward the channel of the river, is called Federal Point, and the other, very slender, continues the coast line to what is called New Inlet. A shoal body of water called the basin lies between the two fingers. Fort Fisher was erected right where the two fingers split apart--right on the wrist. Beginning a few yards back from the beach and north of the split of the fingers, the Confederates erected a mound of sand eighty feet high. On this they mounted an eight-inch (150-pounder) rifle and a ten-inch medium-length (columbiad) shell gun. From this mound a series of connected batteries or earthworks, of the most approved form, extended away to the north for about 1,400 yards. In this stretch were mounted seventeen great guns, including rifles from four and a half inches up to seven inches, with a number of ten-inch smooth-bore shell guns. In height and thickness these batteries were all that could be wished in that day, and there were immense traverses (big mounds of sand) between the guns to protect the gun crews from an enfilading fire and from shells bursting on either side of them. At the north end of the north-and-south line so far described, the wall of the fort turned at a right angle toward the west. This part of the wall extending to the west was about 500 yards long, and it crossed the arm of dry land to the swamps of the river. Looking from the north, the whole fort was a very good L. The east-and-west arm mounted twenty-one great guns, and these were, for the most part, placed to defend the garrison from a land attack. [Illustration: