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By Root 6973 0

its operations on the island. From his headquarters at the Globe Hotel on St. George, the industrious Walker arranged for 80,000 Enfield rifles, 27,000 Austrian rifles, and 21,000 muskets to be shipped in February alone. He also filled orders for steel, copper, and saltpeter and sent hundreds of cases packed with screwdrivers, cartridges, buckles, stirrups, percussion caps, buttons, and all other daily necessities required by the Confederate armies. Soon the U.S. consul in Bermuda reported that Confederate steamers were coming and going with the regularity of mail ships.1 As he was naturally resented by the locals for his attempts to interfere with this lucrative trade, the consul’s life became a daily round of harassments both petty and great. One morning in March a group of “colored blockade running seamen” took their revenge by loudly singing Confederate songs beneath his window.2

The Globe Hotel was a three-story stone building, painted a pretty shade of pink with black shutters. Built in 1699 as a residence for the governor, it was one of the oldest houses on the island. With each change of ownership the place had become a little more run-down and frayed about the edges, and it was currently a boardinghouse run by a widow and her three spinster sisters. But “it was a Palace to me,” wrote Major Walker’s pregnant wife, Georgiana, who arrived on March 24, 1863, with three young children in tow and what remained of their belongings. (One bag contained the Confederate flag and a pouch filled with Virginia soil. Georgiana intended to give birth with the flag draped symbolically above the bed and the soil placed underneath to ensure that the baby was a true Virginian.) Desperate to join her husband in Bermuda, Georgiana had approached every blockade runner in Wilmington pleading to be taken on as a passenger, until finally the captain of the Cornubia, the leading steamer in the Ordnance Department’s squadron, had taken pity on her. Georgiana became the first woman to run the blockade.

At times, Georgiana could count as many as a dozen Confederate flags in the harbor. Some of the vessels’ captains were Southern, but many were British, usually Royal Naval Reserve officers. One, the Hon. Augustus Charles Hobart-Hampden, a younger son of the sixth Earl of Buckinghamshire, even resigned his commission to dedicate himself to blockade running, and there seemed to be no shortage of thrill seekers from either branch of Her Majesty’s forces. On the steamship from Halifax to Liverpool in November, Matthew Maury and James Morgan had been surprised to learn that among the passengers was a group of English army officers who had used their leave to try blockade running. The Earl of Dunmore, who became friendly with Maury and Morgan, boasted of his capture and confinement in a Northern prison. The earl had “passed through the Federal lines and gone to Richmond and thence to Charleston,” wrote a clearly impressed Morgan.

He had travelled incognito, under his family name of Murray. The boat he took passage on successfully eluded the Federal fleet off Charleston, but an outside cruiser captured her the very next day. The prisoners were of course searched, and around the body of “Mr. Murray,” under his shirt, was found wrapped a Confederate flag—the flag of the C.S.S. Nashville, which had been presented to him by Captain Pegram. Despite his protestations that he was a Britisher traveling for pleasure, he was confined, as “Mr. Murray,” in Fort Lafayette. The British Minister, Lord Lyons, soon heard of his predicament and requested the authorities in Washington to order his release, representing him as being the Earl of Dunmore, a lieutenant in Her Majesty’s Life Guards. But the commandant of Fort Lafayette denied that he had any such prisoner and it required quite a correspondence to persuade him that a man by the name of Murray could at the same time be Lord Dunmore.3

Lord Lyons implored his staff to discourage their friends and acquaintances from visiting the Confederacy. Two months after Edward Malet’s midnight encounter with Lord Hartington,