Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[456] of the little town of Beaufort the richest proprietors of Carolina, who delighted in spending a few months among the orange groves and amid all the splendors of an almost tropical vegetation. In a military point of view, the bay of Port Royal, the entrance of which is narrowed by Hilton Head, is one of the finest ports in America, and the group of islands of St. Helena, sufficiently large to furnish supplies of every kind, yet easy to defend and surrounded by navigable arms of the sea, made an excellent depot for the navy. These advantages had not been unobserved by the navigator Jean Ribaut, of Dieppe, who, in 1562, had brought there a party of Norman Protestants, and had built a fort on one of the islands; the French names of Beaufort and Port Royal perpetuate the remembrance of those hardy pioneers, whom the sad religious wars of the sixteenth century had driven far from a country too little concerned to nourish her children at home.

Fine weather had favored the departure of the fleet, but it was not to escape the storm which, in consequence of its periodical return in the beginning of November, sailors call the death-blast. The bad weather overtook Dupont south-east of Cape Hatteras on the night of the 1st and 2d of November. When day dawned, cloudy and dim, on that immense sea, the waves of which the hurricane covered with foam, the squadron was entirely scattered and in a perilous situation. The ships of war braved the storm with impunity; but this was not the case with the military transports, overburdened with troops, some of which were better suited to navigate rivers than the high sea. Many of them sustained considerable damage and incurred great danger; four were obliged to seek shelter in Chesapeake Bay; several only saved themselves by throwing their cargoes overboard; two were wrecked on the enemy's coast and their crews made prisoners; and two others sank in open sea: the men they had on board were nearly all saved, thanks to the courage of the sailors belonging to the other vessels, who went to their assistance in spite of the storm. When the sea became calm, the captains of the scattered vessels, opening the sealed orders which had been forwarded to them, found Hilton Head designated as the place of rendezvous, and on the 4th of November a large number of them were already in sight of that point.

Dupont arrived in the course of the morning with twenty-five