USS Bermuda (1861) - Confederate Blockade Runner

Confederate Blockade Runner

Bermuda—an iron-hulled screw steamer—was built in 1861 at Stockton-on-Tees, England, by Pearse and Lockwood to take advantage of the extraordinary profits which could be made by running cargoes of war-making materiel through the Union blockade to the munitions-hungry Confederacy. Originally owned by Edwin Haigh, a Liverpool cotton broker, the ship was secretly sold—about the time of her completion—to Messrs. A. S. Henckle and George Alfred Trenholme of Charleston, South Carolina.

While her new owners hoped to realize a profit from operating the steamer, they evinced even more interest in proving the Federal blockade of the South ineffective and therefore non-binding in international law. By proving the Union Navy’s efforts to close Southern ports only a “paper blockade,” they would prompt other investors to follow their example and thus assure the South a steady flow of supplies to sustain its struggle for independence. Bermuda was then chartered to Frasier Trenholme and Co., a British corporation that served the Confederate government as its commercial and financial agent in the British Isles.

Soon after she was launched, probably in late July or early August 1861, Bermuda—Eugene L. Tessier, master—dropped down the Tees River to West Hartlepool where she loaded the first cargo purchased in England by agents of the Confederate War Department. She departed West Hartlepool on 18 August, proceeded south along England’s North Sea coast, transited the Strait of Dover, and steamed the length of the English Channel to Falmouth, Cornwall, where she arrived on the morning of the 22d.

She topped off her coal bunkers there and resumed her westward voyage, leaving above her wake a cloud of false rumors intended to cloak her destination and the true nature of her mission. Some said that she was a supply ship taking provisions and munitions to the Royal Navy; others that she was carrying a general cargo to Cuba. Still others identified her as a merchantman bound for one of the British colonies. While these cover stories did not mislead Federal agents in the British Isles, they did succeed in preventing Bermuda’s being held in port for violating the United Kingdom’s Foreign Enlistment Act.

After crossing the Atlantic Ocean under British colors, Bermuda took advantage of a severe storm that had forced the blockading Union frigate Savannah out to sea and slipped into Savannah, Georgia, where she delivered a million-dollar cargo of war material. She then filled her holds with some 2,000 bales of cotton that she hoped to deliver in England to support Confederate credit abroad. The steamer departed Savannah on the night of 1 November 1861 and slipped through the Union blockade before dawn the next morning. After pausing at Bermuda and at Le Havre, France, en route, she reached Liverpool, England, on 23 January 1862.

Bermuda, and vessels like her, had been “fitted out in English ports, laden with arms, munitions, and contraband of war, clearing with British papers and sailing under the English flag…destined for…the insurrectionary regions of our country with supplies for the rebels,” Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had written on 1 December 1861, an “abuse must be corrected and this traffic stopped.” Since Bermuda’s maiden voyage, the Union Navy had acquired many ships and tightened the blockade to implement Welles’ directives.

It had done so so effectively that only very fast, shallow draft vessels stood much chance of slipping through. Given Bermuda’s comparatively slow speed and almost 17-foot draft, her owners opted to decide that rather than risk capture by attempting another run to a Confederate port, they would discharge her cargo at Bermuda for reloading into smaller and speedier ships for the final leg of its journey.

Under Charles W. Westendorff, a native of Charleston, Bermuda put to sea again on or near 18 February 1862 and set course for Bermuda where she arrived sometime before 24 March. British authorities, however, refused to permit her to unload the gunpowder that filled her holds. Protracted efforts having failed to persuade these officials to permit the ship to land her ordnance cargo, Bermuda stood out for Nassau, Bahamas, on 22 April where a cargo of cotton lay awaiting her for the voyage back to Liverpool.