The "Bold
Rascal"
Denbigh’s owners now turned their attention to
Galveston. At the beginning of the war Galveston had been a small
but growing Gulf port, handling increasingly large volumes of cotton annually. But the
Union blockade of Galveston, which began with the arrival of U.S.S. South Carolina
on July 2, 1861, abruptly changed Galveston’s prospects. With hopes of resuming a
normal trade gone, and anticipating a Federal invasion at any time, a large segment of the
population left the island for places inland. Union forces succeeded in taking possession
of the city in the fall of 1862, only to be driven out again on New Year’s Day, 1863,
but that Confederate victory did little to change the overall strategic situation; the
blockade continued, and Galveston was too far removed from the center of the main conflict
to be of much use as a port for blockade-running.
The Battle of Mobile Bay in August 1864 changed that
situation almost overnight. With Mobile no longer accessible, Galveston was now the only
remaining Confederate port of significance on the Gulf of Mexico. Only a dozen steam
blockade-runners had come into Galveston during the first three years of the war; after
August 1864, another runner entered the port almost every week.
Denbigh made a total of six successful
round voyages between Havana and Galveston. As at Mobile, Denbigh managed time
and again to slip past the Federal blockading fleet at Galveston, even though the latter
at times consisted of ten, twelve, or more vessels. And as at Mobile, there was at least
one close call. On the evening of April 19, 1865 – ten days after Lee’s
surrender at Appomattox and five after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln – Denbigh
ran aground on a shoal while trying to pass through the blockading squadron with a load of
cotton for Havana. Her crew managed to get her off the bar by heaving overside 200 bales
of cotton, most of which was picked up by ships from the blockading fleet. Denbigh
returned to the protected waters of Galveston harbor, and successfully ran the blockade
for Havana nine days later.
An 1864 map of Galveston shows Bird Key (white arrow, upper right), where Denbigh
ran aground on the night of May 23-24, 1865. The Denbigh Project team
believes that the blockade runner was attempting to run through the swash channel behind
Bird Key (blue arrow) to evade the Federal blockading fleet, a maneuver she'd often used
at Mobile. Image from National Archives.
On the night of May 23-24, 1865, while trying to enter the
harbor at Galveston, Denbigh ran hard aground on Bird Key, a sand shoal just off
the Bolivar Peninsula shore, to the north and east of Galveston. Bird Key was a hazard to
local navigation, but between it and the Bolivar shore ran another narrow but relatively
deep swash channel which was well-suited to a blockade-runner’s purpose.
 At daybreak a lookout aboard the Federal flagship Fort Jackson
(left) spotted the stranded blockade-runner, and Captain Benjamin F. Sands ordered the
gunboats Cornubia and Princess Royal to open fire. Simultaneously, Sands
ordered boats from the blockaders Seminole and Kennebec to board and destroy
Denbigh. That vessel’s crew, seeing that they had been spotted, took to their
own boats and successfully reached the Bolivar shore. The two shelling gunboats between
them fired forty rounds at Denbigh, although it is not recorded how many shots hit
the stranded vessel. The boat’s crew from Seminole boarded the blockade-runner
and, after seizing the ship’s papers, set fire to her. The only casualty of the
operation was a seaman from Seminole, who was killed instantly when his own firearm
accidentally discharged while he was leaving the wreck. The entire episode was over by 7
a.m. |
The same morning that Denbigh went aground on Bird
Key, the Laird-built blockade-runner Lark managed to slip past the Federal fleet
and into Galveston harbor. At the wharf she was swarmed by civilians and soldiers alike,
all desperate to seize anything of value. Even after Lark’s master had the
vessel warped away from the wharf and out into the anchorage, people still tried to
clamber aboard from small boats and improvised craft. Once the ship had been stripped of
virtually everything removable, Lark’s master stopped briefly at another wharf
to pick up Denbigh’s crew, just arrived from the Bolivar Peninsula, and then
slipped back out to sea, becoming the last blockade runner to clear a Confederate port.
Denbigh’s destruction, along with the
rescue of her crew by the blockade-runner Lark, both literally and figuratively
closed the final chapter in the story of blockade running during the Civil War. The best
epitaph for Denbigh might well be that offered by the well-known blockade-running
master William Watson, who wrote:
I may safely say that one of the most
successful, and certainly one of the most profitable, steamers that sailed out of Havana
to the Confederate States was a somewhat old, and by no means a fast, steamer, named the Denbigh.
This vessel ran for a considerable time between Havana and Mobile; but when the latter
port was captured by the Federals she ran to Galveston, to and from which port she made
such regular trips that she was called the packet. She was small in size, and not high
above water, and painted in such a way as not to be readily seen at a distance. She was
light on coal, made but little smoke, and depended more upon strategy than speed. She
carried large cargoes of cotton, and it was generally allowed that the little Denbigh
was a more profitable boat than any of the larger and swifter cracks.
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