Chasing After Blockade Runners in The Dark of Night
At 03:00 on the morning of 4 October, while patrolling east of Mount Light, the tug observed a steamer heading for New Inlet and gave chase. Although she fired two shots at the stranger, that blockade runner managed to cross Berberry's bow and escaped into New Inlet. At 21:45 on the following evening, a lookout in the tug sighted a long, low, two stack steamer standing out to sea from New Inlet. Later that night, Griffith reported that the blockade runner "...stood for us within 400 yards; then kept off to the southward." Berberry immediately attempted to cut off the steamer by getting between her and the bar. Meanwhile, she opened fire on the stranger and sent up "...rockets in the direction in which she was steering." Despite the fact that fellow blockaders Niphon and Daylight joined the chase, the runner's speed enabled her to steam out of sight of her pursuers; and she apparently made her way safely to the open sea.
Read more about this topic: USS Berberry (1864)
Famous quotes containing the words chasing, runners, dark and/or night:
“We like the chase better than the quarry.... And those who philosophize on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase, which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“And Guidobaldo, when he made
That grammar school of courtesies
Where wit and beauty learned their trade
Upon Urbino’s windy hill,
Had sent no runners to and fro
That he might learn the shepherds’ will.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long- wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The night is of the color
Of a woman’s arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)