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The town itself was one of the sleepy little Southern villages, with wide streets, grass-grown and lined with live-oaks. Children, and boys too young to have been drafted into the Southern army, followed the sailors and marines curiously as they strolled up and down the silent streets. The war had robbed the little city of its men; the blockade had robbed it of its little coasting-trade.
The enemy themselves admitted the stringency of their situation. But Nelson had yet to learn how ingenuity and enterprise could find a way of eluding his care. The coasting-trade soon began to take on a large development.
Now all traffic and business was at an end. The great foreign merchants interested in the corn trade had all left, and many of the shops were closed. The harbor was deserted, save that a score or two of brigs employed in the coasting-trade, in the Black Sea lay moored by the wharves with hatches battened down and deserted decks.
Bonaparte thought Vado important, because, on the one hand, essential to uninterrupted coasting-trade with Genoa, and on the other as advancing his water line of communications that by land being impassable for heavy articles, such as siege-guns and carriages to Savona, from which point the mountains could be crossed at their lowest elevation, and by their most practicable passes.
The passengers landed on a flat beach, on which were to be found not only boats from the interior, but a few of those little schooners which are used in the coasting-trade on the Atlantic seaboard. When the two girls entered Ega they were at first much astonished. "What a large town!" said Minha.
Nor did the French government behave much better than the English. It looked upon the United States as an unsettled and weak country, to be robbed with impunity. At last, driven from the high seas, the Americans could rely only on the coasting-trade. "One half the mercantile world was sealed up by the British, and the other half by the French."
Early in the spring of 1863 it became evident to the officers of the Union squadron in the sounds, that the Confederates were making arrangements to drive the Yankee ships from those waters, and to re-open the coasting-trade to the people of North Carolina. The chief source of alarm to the fleet was a heavy iron-clad which was reported to be building on the Roanoke River above Plymouth.
What was a coasting-trade with Spain compared with this boundless career of adventure? Now that the world's commerce, since the discovery of America and the passage around the Cape of Good Hope, had become oceanic and universal, was the nation which took the lead on blue water to go back to the creeping land-locked navigation of the ancient Greeks and Phoenicians?
The river Hokitika washes down with every fresh such quantities of sand, that a bar is continually forming in this roadstead, and though only vessels of the least possible draught are engaged in the coasting-trade, still wrecks are of frequent occurrence.
The wheat and naval stores of the Baltic, the trade of Spain with her colonies in the New World, the wines of France, and the French coasting-trade were, little more than two hundred years ago, transported in Dutch shipping. Much of the carrying-trade of England, even, was then done in Dutch bottoms.
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