Excerpt from Soldiers and Sailors Historical Society of Rhode Island; Personal Narratives of Events in the War of the Rebellion: First Cruise of the Montauk The echoes of the first guns that threatened destruction to the union of the American States, and sealed the harbor of Charleston into the hands of a prospective Confederate South, had scarcely died away when men's minds began to conceive and their hands to form new engines for offense and defense to be used upon the sea. Fragments of reports reached us, now and then, from the feverish and excited South, concerning the work of prepara tion going on there, - that armed and mailed craft were building that would sweep the seas; that vessels-of-war late the nation's guard were stripped of rigging and spars, braced and strength ened, Clad with an armor of iron rails, and thus invulnerable, were almost ready to enter a contest that should help win the South an independence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.